A family update amidst the chaos

LILY

• Adorable as ever. I'm enjoying her everyday-use of words like probably, actually, and maybe. Also, she talks with so much facial expression that you just have to smile.
• She has gotten so tall and so strong recently. Today she surprised herself (and me) when she opened the refrigerator door on her own.
• She tells everyone that she is moving to St. Louis. When asked by one of the teachers where St. Louis is, she answered "far, far away". She also loves to tell everyone about her new purple room. She seems to kind of understand what is going on, although she tells us that her teacher is going to hide in her bed and come with us. She also doesn't quite understand that Aunt Ingrid and Irie are not coming with us.
• Lily went to her first movie last weekend. Carl wanted to take her to see Horton Hears a Who before he started his last rotation (a little daughter and daddy bonding time). She did really well. Carl had mentioned before the movie that it was about a purple elephant. She had to correct him several times during the movie by exclaiming, "It's a gray elephant, daddy!" She then enjoyed turning around and looking at all the people behind her, who she no doubt thought would much rather watch her than a silly old movie. About a half hour into the experience, she simply told Carl that she was ready to leave. And that was that. Her report to me was that "it was dark, and there was a gray elephant."
• Lo and behold, Lily has taken to watching a tv program: Mickey's Clubhouse. It is the new pacifier for us. It will calm her down, distract her, etc. anytime we need it. Woo-hoo! She will also sometimes watch Clifford in the morning, which affords me an extra few minutes to get myself ready for work. We are lucky, though, that tv is not always required for distraction. Lily is very good at keeping busy, usually with either reading or playing with dolls. When Carl and I played tennis on Sunday, we took her to the courts, and she played with the balls, their containers, and the leaves for almost an hour! Rock on!
• Lily likes to wear several pairs of pajama bottoms all together at night. She also is becoming more opinionated about what she wears during the day, but her idea of "matching" is not entirely accurate.

CARL

• We think that Carl has missed his calling as an actuary. He has an uncanny ability to think of every possible thing that could go wrong with the sale of our current house and the purchase of our next house.
• He started his LAST rotation as a med student this week. This is a three-week rotation and so far it is not too bad, considering that it is one of his more intense sub-i's this year.
• It is hard to believe that 7 years has now come down to a few weeks. Graduation is May 16th!

ME

• My last "official" day of work is this Friday. I will sub for the director a few days in the upcoming weeks since the person lined up to take my position probably won't start there for another few weeks. I can't really say any more about that. Too sad.
• I will spend the next few weeks tackling the monumental task of packing our entire house. One word...daunting. We are having movers come to take everything out of the house, move it and bring it into our next house, but we have to do all the packing/unpacking. I think that it is like most things: it will be much less scary once we actually start.
• I'm trying to make a mental list of all the places I want to visit before we leave. Hopefully we'll get to at least a few of them before we go.

HOUSE(S) UPDATE

• If we could get a service person to come to our house for a simple repair and not cause a major repair to be done, it would wonderful. By far, this has been the cause of the most stress in all of this.
• There seems to be many "Oh, by the way..." s. The latest is that our house in St. Louis is on a flood plain and is required to have flood insurance, which has been quoted to be anywhere between $1000-$4000 per year - a pretty wide range. Carl informed me tonight that it may not be true that we are on a flood plain at all, our real estate agent is in contact with FEMA, and a surveyor must come out to determine the house's exact elevation. At this point, we just go with the flow, so to speak.
• A word of advice to everyone out there: choose a house you really like and NEVER move.
• We actually expected to a buy a house that we would only be in for the next 5 or so years, but we really like the house that we are set to buy in St. Louis, so we hope that this will be a more long-term property for us.
• We're excited for moving day when all this work is behind us (...and then the work of unpacking begins)!