The Salvateenies: Movin' Out (and In)

It was a process...that is still in process...but we're here!

On Thursday, three movers came just after 9:00am and started boxing up everything we own that was not nailed down. They worked practically non-stop (they did break for lunch...thank goodness!) until almost 5:00pm, leaving us with a very few necessities and an apartment full of boxes. The babies really seemed to love watching the men move throughout the house...especially when they stretched out tape, making a screeching noise. My mom came over to help distract the babies during the pack and they were all tired out by the work going on around them.

Friday, I took the day off work to do all the sort of last minute things we had left. The cable guy was coming to set up the tvs and internet, the AT&T guy who hadn't come the night before was scheduled to arrive at some point in the morning, and our fridge - originally scheduled for a Monday delivery - was finally going to arrive. First, the phone guy. I ran over to the house to meet him, only to discover that he only had one of our two orders. Luckily, we were able to get it all worked out with the company over the phone and he set to work installing jacks and hooking them up. By scheduling the work while the ceiling is still opened up downstairs we were able to install a jack there without any unsightly wires running around.

With the phone work underway, I headed back to the apartment to do a little more work. At 12:30, as the babies were having a meltdown, I got a call that the refrigerator would not fit through the kitchen door. AAARGH! While we have a wide enough front door, the door from there into the kitchen is only 27 inches wide. This, apparently, means we cannot get any sort of cool refrigerator. I was beyond frustrated at the time, and am beyond bummed now. But, somehow we will persevere.

And then I sat around grading papers at a card table in the new house waiting for the cable guy, who arrived just to tell me that there was a problem with the line not being attached to the pole, a problem that could not be rectified without a bucket truck. And so we were re-scheduled for a Sunday visit.

And then Saturday it was the big day. The babies got bundled off to their grandparents' house, where Grandpa was waiting for them. The movers arrived at 9:00 and down came all the boxes and furniture.

With one truck all filled up, we caravaned the 15 blocks to the new house and they unloaded everything. I had to make some split-second decisions about which rooms I wanted furniture and boxes to go into. Hopefully, I made the right choice! We stayed here through lunch time while the movers went back for the piano.

On Saturday night we unpacked the bathroom and made up the cribs and our bed and by then it was nearly 9pm and time to collect the babies from Grandma and Grandpa, where they had been on display and visited by a number of their fans. Grandpa worked hard watching the babies, and Daniel decided he should help out holding a bottle himself for a while:

Sunday morning it was back to the Grandparents' for the babies so that we could focus on unpacking. The task was daunting, the kitchen was stuffed to the gills, as was the living room, and, well, pretty much every other room.

Time to call in the reinforcements! Nearly a dozen of our friends showed up and set about filling our book cases, cabinets, and drawers. When I told someone at work Monday morning that we'd had an unpacking party, she assumed that meant we'd invited folks over for pizza and beer while they worked. Not our friends - they brought US food! Bagels & cream cheese, finger sandwiches, potato chips, cookies, coffee, and home made cake. Our kitchen is entirely put away, as is all of our china, and at the end of it all we had thirty-five or more flattened boxes and six tall boxes filled with recycled paper.

We've been slowly unpacking another box or two every day, but it's amazing just how exhausting it really is. Yesterday, I drove home from work and realized muscle memory had taken me to the old apartment.

But no amount of exhaustion will keep us from posting those Week 20 pictures with Myrtle!