Thanks to working for the university, Matt got both Thursday and Friday off for the Fourth of July! He and his friend took advantage of the day off to make sausage: 12.5 pounds each of bratwurst and smoked polish sausage! They were in the kitchen for a good six hours, and the house smelled wonderful.
Also Thursday, we signed the lease for our new place and got the keys and garage door opener from our new landlord. We have a garage! This winter is going to be so much less unpleasant.
Early Friday morning, two of Matt's coworkers came with us to our new house to help Matt bring in the large, heavy, solid wooden desk that he bought at the thrift store Wednesday night. The desk he's had since we got married is a big L-shaped particle board beast with a strange shelving configuration; the footprint is so big that it takes up far more than its' share of a room, and we're glad to be able to put it up for sale on Craigslist and use the more compact 6'x4' rectangular desk instead. It is very heavy, though, and it took the men more than an hour and a half to get it in the front door!
Because we were working on the desk so long, by the time we got back to our old/current apartment Little Bear was clamoring for a nap. I was supposed to have baked brownies before he fell asleep so they could have all the time in the world to cool, but instead wound up rushing to bake them after nap, cool them while I made the two frostings, then assemble them as requested by my brother while Matt ran around finishing the packing and Little Bear hung on my knees whining and I worried about being late to the airport to meet my sister. It's a good thing that our other sister was still in town and planning on going to the airport as well, because we didn't hit the road until the time the plane was supposed to be landing.
After filling gas tanks and grabbing the last few things we'd been asked to pick up (ice, ice cream, beer), the three of us girls got in my family's suburban with Little Bear—Matt got to have the nice quiet Jeep to himself—and we started off on our roughly four-hour trip south to my parents' cabin. We switched drivers in Delta, 90 miles south of Fairbanks, because Little Bear was all done with not being able to interact with Mama, but overall he was really good on the drive. He was quiet, kind of uncertain and intimidated, on the boat ride down the lake, but was very happy to see Grandma waiting on the dock when we got to the cabin!
That night everyone stayed up really late: I think they shot fireworks off around 10, and sat out on the deck watching the lake and talking after that. It's hard to go to bed when it's still sunny and beautiful out at 11 pm! Matt and I had planned to sleep in a tent since all of the beds in the cabin were spoken for, but as soon as we stuck Little Bear in the tent, it became clear that he hadn't agreed. "Oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no!" he exclaimed, a worried wrinkle between his eyebrows as he shook his head back and forth. "Tent? Oh no, oh no!"
We gave the tent a good try, but when he woke up crying for the second time at 2:30 am, we gave in and hauled our sleeping pads and blankets into the cabin and camped out under the table, where Little Bear slept soundly for the rest of the night.
We really enjoyed being at the cabin with the rest of my family, and hopefully next time we'll be able to stay longer—we weren't there even a full 24 hours, but we needed to time our drive home Saturday so that Little Bear could nap in the car and wake up early enough that he'd sleep well at home. We stopped a few times to get out and stretch our legs after Little Bear woke up, and got home, had the car unloaded and everything unpacked and put away, and were in bed by 8:30!
Sunday we got up painfully early to go to the 7:30 Mass with the rest of my family; I'm not sure if Little Bear was so well-behaved because we wound up in the third row from the front or because he was still sleepy, but Matt and I were sure tired... back to the 9 or 9:30 Mass for us next weekend! After brunch with my family Little Bear got a good nap, and Matt did an impressive job of packing far more into the Jeep than I thought it could hold. We made supper for our landlords who are moving out of state tomorrow, and after cleaning up took the loaded Jeep to the new house to put boxes in the garage. (We have a garage! So excited.) while there we discovered that something is wrong with the thermostat; even though it's turned all the way off, the bedroom baseboards were on and the thermostat in the master bedroom is registering 90 degrees. We don't want to be paying for heating fuel already! Matt called and left the landlord a message, and we went home.
It sounds like we might be fortunate enough to have gotten another great landlord in this new place, though; when we woke up this morning, Matt noticed that he'd gotten a text from the new landlord at 12:59 am saying that he was going to head over and try to fix the thermostat problem, and he'd call in the morning to let us know what had been wrong.
So it was a great, full, crazy busy weekend! And the "crazy busy" part spills over into this week: furniture-moving day is set for either Saturday or Sunday, whichever winds up working for my dad and brother, so I have to get everything else boxed and bagged before then and ferry as much over as I can. Plus, this afternoon Little Bear has his 2-year-old well-child checkup and vaccines. And the buyer of our current place was supposed to do a final walkthrough at 2:30 this afternoon before signing on the sale, but this morning she up and changed the time to noon. So she'll be showing up any minute now and cutting Little Bear's nap short... We're going to have a very unhappy boy this evening. Hopefully taking him to Grandma's house right after the doctor's office will help a little bit!
And I will post photos from the weekend, I promise; they're all on Matt's phone or my siblings' cameras right now, since I left my phone in the car at the boat launch while we were at the cabin. Hopefully I'll be able to get some soon.
Hurray for a garage!!!
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