Crawling to the Starting Line

I wish I were six years old. On Wednesday the school bus dropped Dusty off in front of his new home for the first time. He walked into a house with boxes stacked up to the ceiling, no refrigerator or kitchen counter, no sink in the bathroom and furniture stacked on top of each other. He took one look at the scene and said, ” I have just one thing to say, Mom……THIS IS AWESOME!!! Definitely gave me a little boost. Our move was a combination of hell on earth and amazing. The day before our move one of the guys working for us plugged in the fridge that came with the house. It was probably 30 years old, or so. A couple hours later Tony was chatting with a different contractor casually mentioning that he hoped our appliances would last us a few years. The guy who had plugged in the fridge a few hours before chimed in, “Yeah, that freezer sure is hot.” Tony went to check it out and sure enough it was too hot to touch. Had Tony walked out for the night without casually speculating about our appliances there is a pretty good chance that our house would have burned down. So, the good new is that the house is still standing and the bad news is that we had to buy a new fridge yesterday. Needless to say we went out for dinner on Wednesday. We went to out local diner, Large Marge’s. Dusty wanted to sit by himself at the counter while Tony and I shared a booth. Dusty loves to chat up strangers. He told the owners, ” We just moved into our new house today. It’s really colourful and pretty inside. Outside, not so much. It kind of looks like a haunted house.” The kid summed it up in a couple of sentences.

Now for the amazing part. One of the things you learn when moving is who your friends are. The last time we moved, about sixteen months ago, our friends Aimee and Julien spent the whole day helping us get into our new place, so I was pretty amazed when Aimee, who just had her third baby a few weeks ago told us that Julien offered to help us out again. My friend Danette, who designs these incredible bags made from recycled sail cloth showed up bright and early with her boyfriend, Rick and the two of them spent the whole day lugging boxes. Topping off the talent was my friend, Katja, designer of these adorable purses made from bathing caps and mother to the famous Lilly that gets mentioned on my blog quite a bit.

Moving day was not without a few glitches. The weight of the washing machine leaning into the weight of Tony was enough to put a pretty impressive hole in the wall. The only moving truck available was the biggest size and Tony took a little chunk off the gutter of our former house. Two things on our fix it list. We discovered that when we flushed the toilet we got a geyser the size of old faithful come out of our kitchen sink. I’ll spare you more description. The plumber has since fixed this, but it was a little touch and go there for a while.

So now I have been spending half my days trying to unpack boxes and the other half at our old place cleaning. It’s still not cleaned out yet. Dusty being off school for four days doesn’t really make it easier.

Oh, I forgot to mention… We have had the most amazing welcome back in our old neighbourhood. The door has been open and kids have been walking in and out, Dusty loves to cross the street to visit our neighbour and his surrogate grandmother, Margaret. Our block is one of the few plateaus in Lunenburg, so Dusty has been enjoying riding his bike in circles in front of our house. Today he placed his bike down right behind the car and unfortunately Tony did not know it was there and ran over the shiny red XR14 Zellers special. Needless to say, Dusty did not take it like a man. He took it like a six year old boy. I guess being six is not always a bed of roses. Saturday plan- Buy new bike. Pray they still make the xr14.