It feels like two weeks – not two days – have passed since I took this photo on Saturday morning while in town getting bagels and donuts for my parents (who came up to help me finalize everything for the housesitter and get to the airport). I thought that I’d be all wistful about leaving – and when it came to taking one last look at the nursery, thinking about how the next time I step foot in there it will be to show our daughter her new room, I was – but mostly I was just completely freaked out about whether or not I’d forgotten something essential.
Because really, I kind of feel like I should get a medal for packing two months’ worth of stuff into that one suitcase.
All that remains in our refrigerator: one bottle of white wine and one box of chocolates, both of which I am very excited to reunite with approximately 30 seconds after our return home in September.
(Kendrick thinks I look manic here. Let’s call it “I have just spent the past eighteen hours traveling with a small child, and my unslept body now thinks that it is Wake-Up Time.”)
To welcome me to our new place and apologize for the fact that I am eight months’ pregnant and just spent the past day doing the equivalent of dragging a reluctant elephant down the hallway in The Shining (a.k.a. Terminal 4 at JFK), Kendrick gave me Oreos and milk.
Which was nice of him. And also smart of him. Oreos make things better.
By the time we got home Indy was passed out, obviously (since it was around 2A.M. “his” time), so we basically just rolled him into his bedroom. The one problem with this: since, there was no way he was not going to wake up and freak the f out (“WHERE AM I AND WHERE IS MY LIFE AND WHAT IS THAT POINTY CEMENTY STUFF ON THE CEILING?”), Kendrick slept in the bed with him. As a backup, I set up a basket full of his toys from home to be the first thing he’d see when he woke up.
It seemed to work, because what I woke up to were cries of “LOOK, MY CAR!,” followed by bed-jumping, and ball-kicking, and an acclimation process so rapid that it made my head spin. It appears there is no life upheaval so profound that it cannot be solved by Oreos and toy fire trucks.
It was so nice of our new town to host the best Sunday morning Farmer’s Market ever in an effort to make me fall in love (it worked). I bought ten thousand peaches, because the mango fixation has been supplanted, and holy god are the peaches here good.
(We also went home with a balloon-animal stegosaurus that was quite a hit.)
First dinner: potato salad with scallions, salmon baked in foil, and honey corn. I didn’t mean to cook, but I went to Whole Foods and it is so awesome (I had forgotten) that I had to.
There is a Whole Foods. And a Trader Joe’s. RIGHT THERE NEXT TO US. Forget the pool, the yard, the sun, blah blah blah – I have Sonoma Chicken Salad sitting in my refrigerator, and I will eat it tomorrow. And then I will eat ten thousand peaches. Life is good.
