Liesl woke up this morning and immediately expressed concern over the owl that she believed was hurt last night when we were at Joe and Britt’s house celebrating an early Thanksgiving dinner with the family. I’m very surprised that she remembered that from last night and was so concerned about it first thing this morning.
Originally the plan had been that we would get up and get on the road pretty early this morning but there were some new things that Dominica and Francesca wanted to do before leaving town so the plan was changed to driving up in the early afternoon. So for breakfast Emily and I walked over to Donuts, Tacos and Kolaches and got another massive order of food. The owner of the shop remembered me from yesterday and was very excited to see us. We must be one of his largest customers ordering ridiculously large quantities of pastries and breakfast tacos.
In the mid afternoon we packed up and headed up from Houston to Dallas. Emily, Liesl, Oreo and I drove up in the BMW while everyone else rode north in Francesca’s Toyota. We are a rather large caravan. The Grice family is staying with us for the week since they are all off from school. It is unfortunate that they are able to stay with us the week before we get the new house rather than the week after we move into it. It would have been awesome to have them there to help with the move and the unpacking but they need to be back to Houston before we even close on the house. Had we known how the finances were going to play out, we could have closed a full week earlier too – but there was really no way to know that ahead of time and it would have been too risky to try to do that.
My car needed to get fueled up so we stopped north of Houston and got gas and grabbed some McDonalds to eat since we were in a gas station that had a McDonalds in it and it is no more expensive to get McDonalds food than it is to eat the gas station fare.
While a few hours south of Dallas Liesl suddenly got really upset and we thought that she needed to get out of the car for a while. So we got out and we stood at the gate to a ranch for a while so that she could stretch and walk around. I walked Oreo too, while we were there, just to be safe. It was a real pain letting anyone walk as the place was just fire ants everywhere.
Liesl really enjoyed standing at the gate of the ranch because there were cows, horses and a Sardinian donkey all in the pasture and the horse and donkey thought that they would make their way over to us to say hello. Liesl pointed out that there was a gate. Then she noticed that there was a lock on the gate and said “gate… keys” over and over again trying to convince us to find some keys and to unlock the gate so that she could go in and visit with the animals. The should started to say “gate, keys, abre” which she learned from Dora. You see, on Dora, gates speak Spanish and to get them to open, you unlock them with keys and say “abre.” Boy is she growing up!
There was some confusion over what the other car was doing for dinner so, thinking that they were stopping to get a real dinner, we stopped at Dairy Queen to grab small blizzards to eat on our drive. I thought that Liesl would want some but after a tiny taste of mine she decided that she was not interested.
We got home and it turns out that the other car did not go get food and the whole thing was miscommunications. Some day I will get Dominica to understand to use email rather than calling me because I just cannot hear anything, ever, over the phone. She wasn’t the driver so emailing me would have been easy and there is little room for misunderstanding. This is why I tell people at work to always use email, not the phone, both because you need clarity but also because you need a trackable record of the information.
So for dinner for everyone else, Emily and I walked over to Five Guys Burgers and Fries and got take out for everyone.
It is going to be a tight squeeze in this little apartment this week. Three adults, two tweens, two toddlers, one baby and Oreo in a two bed, two bath, twelve hundred square foot apartment is tough. Very tough. We are really wishing that we had the new house already. At least this highlights just how important it is for us to have the extra space there. The extra bedroom and the extra living space (the den) plus the atrium and the back yard should make a ton of difference. Plus eventually, if all goes well, I’ll have my office in the garage and that will allow the bedroom to not be my office during the day which is going to be a problem here this week since that basically eliminated our bedroom from being used as a bedroom.
Nine days to go until we are in the new house. Just nine days to go.