Almost Ready To Go

So, things are working out for this move. We have a couple more days and we will be off. Today is Father’s Day and the boys each colored a card for Michael (plus Kolby had a picture of a cow that he had painted in preschool and asked me to save for Father’s Day and Eli had another Father’s Day card he made in his church class last week). And I got Michael a collection of CDs by John Bytheway, one of our favorite speakers – in my family we grew up listening to John Bytheway talks on tape whenever we’d have long road trips, so that will be a fun thing to have for our family (and it should be especially nice for our upcoming drive, plus we haven’t even heard some of the talks so that will be fun to hear new ones).

In an hour or so we are going down to Lehi to have a dinner with Mel and Christian. Annette will be there, and so will Jay and Liz, some old friends from when Michael and I met at BYU. The boys are excited to see their cousins, Jaden and Kyler, again. That reminds me of something funny: When Eli says certain words it can be hard to understand him sometimes because when there is an ‘S’ in the word he sometimes pronounces it funny, and in other words without an ‘S’ he sometimes inserts an ‘S’ sound for some reason, like words that start with a ‘J’ or an ‘F.’ (I remember Kolby had this same problem when he was around 3 and 4 years old and I took him to a speech evaluation at Children’s Hospital in Milwaukee, and they ran a hearing test and then had him repeat a bunch of phrases and answer a lot of questions, but when he finished they said his speech was totally normal for his age and we should just have him focus on pronouncing ‘S’ words, and he grew out of it, so I’m sure Eli will grow out of it too.) But anyways, a few weeks ago we were with some friends, and we all of a sudden heard him talking about Satan, and I started to tell him that that wasn’t a good thing to talk about when we are playing, but then I realized that he was actually saying the name of his cousin, Jaden, not Satan. (Everyone laughed, and I have to admit that I’m rather glad my 4 year old wasn’t pretending he was talking to the devil.)

Anyways, tomorrow is going to be a busy day. I’ve gotten all of the major cleaning jobs and fix-it jobs done around the house to get everything back into good order (except I still need to screw the handles back on the dresser in Eli’s room that fell off a few months ago). We still need to get phone and internet set up in our new house, but we’ve gotten all of the other utilities set up. And I have all of the breakable things wrapped up and packed so they’re ready to go in Michael’s car. I just need to pack everything else – all the clothes and other odds and ends that we will have in the van on the drive out there. We got the call today from U-haul telling us where we need to go to pick up the tow dolly tomorrow to tow our car (they don’t call to tell you them pick-up location until the day before), and they said we needed to drive to Layton (about 40 minutes from here). Michael complained and got rather frustrated that they hadn’t arranged to have one at one of the numerous other U-haul locations nearer to us since we had made the reservation over a month ago, but the girl on the other line just said there wasn’t anything she could do about it. I called back later, asking if they could possibly have someone drive the tow dolly down to one of the locations here in the valley, and she said that wasn’t possible, but I talked to her for a little while and she ended up upgrading us for free from the tow dolly (that you drive the front wheels of the car up on and then the back wheels go on the road while it is towed) to their automobile tower (I’m assuming that is the one that you drive the whole car up onto – so it doesn’t wear on the car’s back tires the whole way there). And we are picking it up here in Salt Lake, so that will be a lot better.

So, I’ll get that picked up tomorrow. And then tomorrow evening we are getting together with Grandma Bradshaw for dinner one last time. After that we are going to stop by the Owens’ house to let the kids say goodbye. Then Michael is supposed to get off work sometime around lunch time on Tuesday (as long as they don’t try to pressure him into staying longer to cover for the resident whose wife is due to have a baby today if she goes into labor – but I’m really hoping they could find someone else to cover for him that isn’t going to be driving across the country with 5 kids crammed into the back of a minivan). So, we are planning to head out Tuesday afternoon and then drive as far as we can each day, stopping to find a motel and sleep when needed. We are supposed to arrive at the house on Friday, in time to sign for the moving truck that afternoon. Wish us luck!