Movin' On Up to The West Side

The west side of Lake Michigan, that is!

Well, after talking about moving to Chicago for what seemed like YEARS and was in reality ONLY 6 months, we have finally arrived! We arrived about a week ago but it's taken me this long to feel like I can spend a little "me" time blogging.



We left Broken Arrow, OK on a rainy day and arrived here to sub-zero temps, a not-so-nice shock to our thin-blooded Quinton! The three of us drove the 12+ hours from Tulsa to Chicago over the course of two days. Some highlights of the road trip were going inside the St. Louis arch and taking the egg-ride to the top...boy, what a view! Quinton really enjoyed looking at the cars from that high up! They looked like his Matchbox cars from that high.

Another highlight was finding the famed OscarMeyer weinermobile parked at our hotel in St. Louis! A freak blizzard hit downtown St. Louis just as I took this picture from the hotel room window. I had hoped to snap a family shot next to the weinermobile but the weather was crazy and by the time it had left, so had the weinermobile.

Monday, February 18th, our first night in Chicago, we stayed on the Magnificent Mile aka Michigan Avenue, at the Marriott. Our view was nothing short of amazing! We had this floor to ceiling window above downtown and Quinton loved it! Unfortunately, the introductory temperature outside was 9 degrees, with a wind chill factor of 11 degrees below zero! Sheesh! Every time we went outside, Quinton insisted on being carried and he would bury his face in his coat!

Tuesday, we headed north west around Lake Michigan to the house where we are staying temporarily. Some lovely friends of our from when we lived here before have their house on the market. We have the privilege of house-sitting while it's on the market but when it sells, we'll be looking for some inexpensive cardboard boxes to call home! Kidding, but real estate is crazy compared to living in Tulsa! By the way, we sold our place in Tulsa! We were so sad to leave our little house but hope the new owners enjoy it and the neighborhood as much as we did!

Wednesday, the moving truck showed up and unloaded. I swear I wouldn't have been too sad if the contents of the truck had been lost...I'm a little tired of moving the same stuff over and over. Plus, we're not sure how long we'll be in this house, so we put about 90% of our stuff in storage. Heck, we don't even know how long we'll be in Chicago! It could be 18 months or 5 years, we just never know.

Since Wednesday, we have REALLY enjoyed visiting our old haunts on the North Shore. Walker Brothers, Boris' Cafe in Winnetka and Old Orchard. We have been able to visit with some great friends as well, Erin and Jeff, Erin and Geoff (two different couples), Ryan and Camie, Ben and Sarah and Rebekah and Keenan. It is so great to reconnect with our friends. Quinton has thoroughly enjoyed making new friends but still asks for "Jack's House"...the little boy three houses down in Tulsa and when I tell him we're going to a new friend's house, he's say, "Sarah's House", another friend in Tulsa. One good thing is that he now refers to our current abode as "Cookie's House" so he knows we're not just on a vacation and that he really lives here.

Well, I don't want to bore you too much so I'd better go and get some cleaning done.

If you're ever in Chicago, give us a call, we'd love visitors!

Open House = Empty House

Well, I don't really have a clue what Diaper Diaries Day # it is because I had to take down my calendar that I used for counting...we had an open house on Sunday and the calendar wasn't right for "staging" purposes. We actually neded up putting away a lot of our stuff and taking down pictures to stage the house just right. We are really hoping to sell the house soon!

I have to say that Matt worked like a dog on Saturday to prep for the open house. I had a two-page legal pad-length laundry list of "honey-dos" for both of us to do. Matt scrubbed, spackled, vacuumed and anything else I could think of to make the place look tip top! It all paid off on Sunday when our realtor told us that our house looked like it had been professionally staged! The hardest part of it? KEEPING it looking like this! I had a realtor call tonight, 15 minutes before Quinton and I were meeting friends for dinner, and the race was on to have the house spic and span again!

If any of you have ever had your house on the market, you know exactly what I am talking about when I say it's a MAD DASH to spruce up the house. Now, add in the antics of an appropriately active two-year old and it's a scary recipe! I was SO close to being done and still making it to dinner on time when I hear the clink, clink, clink of coins. Unfortunately for me, Quinton was not dropping the coins into his beloved piggy bank, but the air intake slots to our rather expensive vacuum! Ugh! Vacuuming was all I had left to do, too! In the midst of shaking the vacuum rather violently to get the coins out, Matt calls from Ft. Lauderdale to check in. I accidentally hung up on Matt when I was shaking the heavy vacuum over my head and dropped the phone. Miracle of all miracles, I was able to shake all 16 coins out of the vacuum without having to perform major surgery. I was only a few minutes late for dinner, where Quinton and his partner-in-crime Jack wreaked HAVOC on our meal. Of course it was ME, not Quinton or Jack, who ended spilling my drink all over the table (thank you, Tonya, for saving my digital camera)...but it had to be someone, right?

Dinner tonight was with my two neighbor friends whose husbands are out of town, too. On Tuesday nights that our collective husbands are out of town, we like to go out to dinner with the kids to have one night where we don't have serve PB&J for the kids and Lean Cuisines for ourselves! So there we are, 3 adults whose sanity is questionable for taking a total of 5 kids (three 2 year olds, a 4 year old and a 7 year old) out to dinner at a respectable establishment. I know I ended up throwing in a little extra tip for the fact that the server was going to have to wash the mini-blind pulls behind our booth because Quinton and Jack were spitting them out of their mouths. Ewwwwww, right!?!

All in all, a normal night for us three mommies!

Matt and I are excited as our move approaches but we are also pretty sad. We lived here about as long as we did in Phoenix and this move seems so much harder. We put down a lot more roots here in Tulsa, admittedly, but it's also the people we have had the opportunity to know. Our neighbors, friends from church and Matt's colleagues have been huge blessings in our lives these past 20 months! Just like in Salt Lake, Phoenix and Chicago, previously, we are thankful for everyone's friendship.

Onward and upward, right?!