What a weekend.

Thursday, we closed on the new house. Which I believe I mentioned. What I did not mention was we also got an offer on our old house that day. It was not a good offer, thus my failure to mention it. But, we had no other offers, we were moving in two days, so rather than just reject it, S and I decided to see how much the potential buyers wanted to dance.

Friday I spent most of the day helping two of my sisters-in-law fill a Uhaul with items they had either been storing at our house or were claiming from our donation list before we moved. That was a nice, five-hour process.

Our potential buyers countered our counter. They were still way too low, but were still showing interest. We sent another counter back.

C got back from camp as I was wrapping Uhaul duty. She caught a ride with a friend, which made my day much easier. She looked tired but said she had a great time during her week down there.

After S got home, we came over to the new house with a couple loads of stuff. Another sister-in-law and her husband brought us pizza for dinner. My brother-in-law and I were trying to figure out why the hot water heater didn’t seem to be pumping out hot water(fn) when I heard a yell from upstairs that C was getting sick. I ran up and she was doubled over in pain in the bathroom, saying her stomach really hurt. The kid has always had a sensitive gut so it wasn’t a surprise that after a week of camp food, woofing down some pizza might set it off. So we went back home for our last night there.

Saturday was moving day! The movers showed up at about 8:30 and started loading. They did an awesome job. We were out of our house by 11:30 – it should be noted because we were still showing our house Wednesday and Thursday, we had done almost no packing, so a lot of small stuff stayed for us to get later – and after a lunch break they were unloading at the new house around 12:30. Amazingly they were completely done by 3:00. We had been scheduled for an eight-hour move and, subtracting their lunch time, they knocked it out in just over five.

As the movers were wrapping we got the latest counter offer. The interested party had come up some more, but were just short of the number we had decided we would not drop below. We talked it over with our agent who suggested this was as high as they would go based on his conversations with their agent. We had a painter scheduled to come in to do a bunch of rooms on Monday, hoping that would help generate interest. We did the math and realized by taking the final offer and skipping the painting, it would be about a wash. So we accepted. We sold the house! Well, inspection pending, of course. Which is a whole other set of stresses to keep me awake for a couple weeks.

All day Saturday C was in terrible pain. She said both her stomach and back hurt. She spent much of the day hiding from the movers, curled up under a blanket with a heating pad on her back, looking miserable. By the afternoon, S was on the phone with one of her partners asking for advice. Their best guess was that C might have a kidney stone, but they also weren’t 100% convinced that was the case. The partner called in a prescription for some super Tylenol and we tried that, but it didn’t seem to help very much. Shortly after dinner, C ran outside and threw up in the front yard. Welcome to the neighborhood!

Earlier, after the movers had left, we made a trip back to the old house to load up both cars with boxes. C was in pain on one couch, crying and moaning. Then L got super emotional and was crying about leaving. I found M hiding in a corner looking down so I couldn’t see her tears. We’ve put these girls through a lot over the past six weeks. It was no surprise that they all needed a moment.

Sunday we tried to get some stuff done around here. But we kept discovering that things we needed were still at the old house. S was trying to get C back to normal. L had a birthday party. We really didn’t get much done. But we did set a new family milestone: we had our first kid ER visit!

C was still in tremendous pain so when I took L to her party, S took C to the ER. They gave her an IV with fluids and pain killers(fn) and scheduled her for a CT scan. Four hours later I hadn’t heard anything so I started running through all the worst scenarios and texted S. She said they had been waiting for scan results for almost two hours. Moments later she texted back that the results came back clean; no kidney stones or signs of other things that might be causing C’s pain. The IV with the morphine much have done the trick, as it did with S when she got food poisoning two years ago, because C seemed back to normal when the got home. Knock on wood that she remains in good health and this was just her sensitive system getting knocked for a loop by camp, the heat, and the stresses of moving.

(Update: I had to spend most of the night in bed with C because she was doubled-over in pain again. This morning she feels better, still some discomfort but way less pain than she’s had since Friday.)

Somehow that was the first time in almost 14 years of parenthood we’ve had to take one of our kids to the ER. I know some of you are shaking your fists in our direction as I mention that. We’ve been very lucky.

We still don’t have cable or internet access because Comcast can’t get a crew to come find the line that is right across the street and tie us into it. I’ve asked for updates six times now, and each time they act like there’s no reason it shouldn’t have been done yet and promise to get it moving. The joys of living in a single cable provider area! I was kind of happy to be done with AT&T/Uverse after over a decade with them. But now I’d happily stick with them if they could get service to our house.

Oh, and later today we close on the lake house.

Good grief we’ve packed a lot in, haven’t we?

We are happy to be in the new home, and roughly two-thirds of the way through this crazy process. We won’t close on the old house until mid-August, so there will be several weeks of going back-and-forth to get stuff, mow the yard, check on things, etc. Luckily the yard here is still a work in process so I don’t have a ton of mowing to do. Have I mentioned that we have an acre of land now, and I’m going to have to figure out how much I want to mow weekly, and how much I want to pay someone to come mow for us every 3–4 weeks? I was walking around outside today and said, to myself, “Holy shit this is a big yard.” I had lobbied for a riding mower but S pointed out how long it would take me to mow our yard even on a riding mower. First world problems, man…