We arrived late yesterday in Norwalk and stayed in the Econolodge. Liesl and Luciana probably think that we are back to life like it was like when we were backpacking around Europe last year – just life in one hotel after another. They see the hotel as home again, already, and are perfectly comfortable there. Now that they have iPads and WiFi, being in a hotel provides nearly as much as being at home does. Some room to run around would be ideal, but toys are not the things that they were long ago and they are pretty well able to entertain themselves without anything bulky. It is so tempting to leave all of the old toys behind in Texas and consolidate to a much more compact life. But we know it is best for them to have them all. The house will be full again soon enough.
I left the family in the hotel and went into the office this morning. A chill and wet morning. It was pretty early, only about two hours later, that I stopped back at the hotel to drop the Acadia and keys back off to Dominica. I had the Spark again and was mobile without the Acadia. She needed the car early so that she could get up to Peekskill around noon to inspect the house and see about moving in. Our renters were done with the house at noon and were ready for us to return. Keys were arranged and everything. We are so fortunate that everything worked out and we only needed two nights in a hotel. In reality, we only needed one but two was more comfortable.
It was really more like one thirty when Dominica and the girls got to the house. This had to be a bit weird for them. Luciana has never been to the area at all before so this all means nothing, really, to her although this is her very first time “moving.” She was born in the Carrollton house and has always lived there. Liesl has lived three different places and conceptually understands moving and knows that this is the house that she lived in until she was one and has been very excited to go back there. For Dominica, this was our second house. Four years later stepping back into a house that, for all intents and purposes, has not changed one bit in four years. Same stains on the carpet, same paint on the walls and, if you can believe it, the same piece of stuffed animal stuffing that Oreo dropped by the front door four years prior. Four years, the same white fuzz sitting in the mulch by the front door. How has the wind and rain and people never removed that? It looks like he just dropped it this morning. Still white and clean. Still exactly where it fell from his mouth after a session of chewing on one of his many stuffed animals just days before we moved out of Peekskill to begin our Texas adventure in the winter of 2009.
After work I drove over there to see the house myself. We are not staying there tonight, but I am very anxious to see it again. Four years without seeing your own house is a lot. It is not like a house that we purchased to be a rental, this is a house that we bought to live in thinking that we were going to raise our children there. And now we are.
Tonight was my first chance to test both my knowledge of the route back from Norwalk to Peekskill but also to time it to see how bad the drive will be. I left right about six o’clock and the drive did not go too badly. I timed it, in late rush hour, at sixty four minutes! Far better than we had anticipated. We had been very fearful that the drive would take two hours or close to it. Huge relief.
The girls were having fun in the house. They think that the wide open space is a lot of fun. Liesl is enthralled with this being her old house. She thinks that that is really neat.
The lights are out in the girls’ room. Need to deal with that before they can really use it. We have our queen bed still in our bedroom. Basement still has Dominica’s “new” desk that we bought towards the end of living in Newark and an old office chair that seems to work fine and the Ikea shelves that we installed down there (we meaning dad.) Other than that, no furniture at all. The kitchen is just as we left it, not even a microwave. That’s going to be tough. There is power and water but no Internet. Ugh. I hate dealing with that stuff.
We hung out for a few hours but there was very little to do. Packed up the girls and we drove separately back to Norwalk. Dominica did not like that drive. Very curvy, very dark, lots of traffic and very hard to figure out where you are.
Got back to the hotel and called it a night. Luciana was wanting to “go home to the hotel” because she was trying to poop and couldn’t and wanted someplace comfortable. She is still suffering, even after a month, from having issues “going.” That has been such a horrible struggle.
Tonight is our last hotel night. Whoo hoo! We are going to be out of contact for the most part for the next while. No Internet at the house and our phones effectively don’t even work there. So no calls either.