Notes on Thursday

1. In the middle of packing and cleaning and good-bying, our smoke detector started chirping at us. In the middle of the night. Waking up our baby. Needless to say, Dave took it down and took the batteries out before his irate wife could ask him twice. But this morning, our landlord came for a walk-through, to give us a sense of what he'd need to take out of the security deposit for repairs, etc. So Dave made a quick trip to Kroger in the morning for double A batteries (how did we run out of those? We should have just raided one of the numerous collection of battery-operated toys we have. Although now that I think about it, they're all packed...). Now I'm sure I could come up with a poem, an essay, or just a good testimony meeting anecdote about smoke detectors and stressful situations in life and the little things that we never think about checking on until it's too late, but for today, I just wanted to share one of the unexpected results of this early morning repair job. Dave was fiddling with it on the bed (spoiler alert: we never did get the thing fixed, and our landlord couldn't figure it out either...), with Polly right next to him, observing his every move. I'm in the kitchen, washing dishes and trying to straighten up the house for Bob's visit. All of the sudden, from the bedroom, I hear Polly's clear little voice, "Dog-gone-it!" Followed quickly by, "Dang it!" That's as close as Dave gets to swearing, and Polly delighted in learning some new words from him. That new vocabulary has made its way into her playing this afternoon, too :).

2. I feel like we're in an eternal waiting room. We're never going to be finished packing. We're never going to be finished signing and faxing paperwork. We're never going to have a full night's sleep (well, I'd given up on that one long ago). We're going to be stuck in this transitory existence, my children getting more and more needy and clingy and weepy, forever and ever. I know this isn't true, of course. Next week it'll actually be worse, since Dave will be gone with the car in Baltimore for the better part of six days. And the week after that, it'll be more of the same. But eventually, we will finish packing the house and the truck and the car, we'll finish packing the children, we'll give the keys to Bob, we'll say a prayer, and we'll drive out of Morgantown. And we'll drive to a new home. And I may even miss this intense time of our lives, when I had an excuse for not fixing dinner.