Highlights of our First Week in Chicagoland!

We made it! Here we are landing in Chicago on Monday:

No wonder everyone always says that moving is so stressful. All things considered, this has gone pretty smoothly, although it has kept me from blogging sooner.

Top Ten Highlights of our First Week:

10) Strep Throat - Luke tested positive on his early 6-month checkup the day before the movers came. I wasn't feeling too awful well myself. Enter Daddy to the rescue! Mike decided to fly in Saturday morning to help with the move, allowing us to fly to Chicago together on Monday. Boy, was that what we should have done from the beginning. My "big girl" approach to trying to handle everything AND take care of an extremely active 5.5 month old wouldn't have boded well to keeping my sanity this week.

9) Babies - Elijah Copps Rosenfeld was born on June 27th to Linda and Kevin, our good friends who live in South Hill, Virginia. Mark Henry Porter was born on June 30th to John and Jill. Unfortunately, we didn't get to meet Mark yet, but he's a terrific excuse for a visit!

8) Illinois Drivers - Can I just tell you how freshing it is to sit at a light at a busy intersection and not see 1 SINGLE PERSON on a cell phone?? I swear, it happened. And, people don't really seem to speed much around here either. Might need to slow down myself.

7) A High Temp of 73 - Amazing! Our first weekend was spent without A/C. A very pleasant break from the triple digits we'd been having in Richmond.

6) Poor Planning - Mike and I are just really anal planners, so I generally have to calibrate my expectations. However, I didn't quite expect what we'd show up to on our "final" walkthrough before the closing on Tuesday. Let's just say that the previous owners were not even close to being moved out. Very nice people, but I honestly think that they figured they could get by with moving out late in the day so that their movers could go straight to their new house. Our closing was at 1 PM, and their movers had not even showed up yet. In the end, we decided to close, but held back some funds in escrow until we were satisfied that there was not any damage since our walkthrough. Well, the money is still being held because there is a rather large area of drywall needing to be repaired that was conveniently behind their entertainment center.

5) Chicago-Style Deep Dish - We tried our inaugural deep dish pizza tonight. Very, very, very yummy. I can get used to this (although, my diet starts Monday, so it will be a while). Hopefully, we can entice some of you to visit us by dangling some.

4) Not One, But Two - That's right, two visits from Comcast to get us set up with phone, internet and basic TV. It seems as though the previous owners' disconnect order was executed after our installation order. Ooops. I love Comcast. I couldn't make this stuff up.

3) Preparing for Solids - Luke took an inaugural spin in his high chair. Rice cereal starts tomorrow!

2) Chipmunks - Sydney had managed to find terrific entertainment at the apartment watching the chipmunks dart around outside. Right after I took this picture, I realized that these chipmunks weren't as nice as Chip and Dale. One darted right at her! It was hilarious to see her freak out momentarily forgetting that there was glass in between them.

1) 316 items and 20,000 pounds- That's what our stuff totaled, although there was a slight miscalculation. Saturday afternoon, our terrific movers Ron and Sean called for backup because they didn't think that all of that would fit on the 53' trailer AND allow room for my car to go on. So, they drove another truck out to pick up the car. Luckily, we were still all out by late Sunday night. I know, you must be thinking about the use of "terrific" and "movers" in the same sentence. I really could not have been more impressed; they took excellent care of our things and were very nice guys.

Speaking of, that's 20,000 pounds of things we have yet to unpack! We've managed to get the kitchen done, but everything else is still in progress. My goal is to have the basement done by Christmas. :-) To sum it all up, the house is good, Luke is good, Mike and I are good, but exhausted. Looking forward to settling in more each day. We miss everyone!