The Big Move

It's been one crazy move.

On the morning we planned on heading out of Ohio, several things went wrong. We thought just Fred could be at the final inspection for the house, so I stayed at the hotel packing up the last stuff into our 2nd vehicle. Turns out I needed to sign papers, too, so I went nuts loading the last stuff as fast as I could so I could get there in time. Then as we rearranged some items in the cars, I accidentally left the headlights on and it killed the van's battery. The latch on the hood broke, so I couldn't open it to jump the battery. Fred drove to a store and bought a device that jumps a car by connecting them by the cigarette lighting outlet thingy- it worked!

I took the girls to grab lunch for everyone at Sonic. A few minutes after receiving our food, I reached for the cup of Ocean water from the cup holder in the car, but it was empty. Turns out there had been a lego in the cup holder which punctured the cup, causing it to drain the entire large cup. Joy.

We finally got on the road after 3 in the afternoon. We loved visiting with my aunt and cousins, the Hopkins, one last time when we picked up our kitties from them in Cincinnati. We pulled into the Motel 6 in Nashville, TN after 10pm, and collapsed into the lumpy, hard beds.

It was only 4 more hours to Maxwell AFB, so we did some site-seeing. We visited the Nashville temple...

and then toured the recreation of the Parthenon- SO cool! We also enjoyed lunch at Jack-in-the-Box, which was a real treat since there aren't any in Ohio.

(just off the Parthenon there was this jet... on loan from Wright-Patterson AFB Ohio!)

We arrived at Maxwell AFB at 10pm Wednesday, the day after leaving Ohio.

(with a rocket ship JUST inside the Alabama state line)

They lost our reservation for staying on base, so we got redirected to a hotel 20 minutes away... it gets complicated when you have kitties.

The movers called the following morning saying they were here and ready to unload- we hadn't expected them until the 10th. Within an hour of signing the lease papers and getting the key, the movers were rapidly filling our house with boxes. I had counted on having time to see the house, so that I could be confident about telling them where to put what. Oh well.

Then we discovered that the garage was FULL of garbage- we think it's stuff from the renovating. We're the first tenants to live in the house since they spent 2 years renovating it. But this meant everything that was supposed to go into the garage is now sitting on the back porch.

Things were going smoothly until the moment we decided to call it a night and head back to the hotel for one more night. A shrill scream came from upstairs. At first I thought Charla was just being dramatic, but the screaming got more and more hysterical. When we got to her, she was standing at the top of the stairs, her left hand maimed and bleeding- a LOT. Leora had accidentally closed Charla's fingers into a door, by the hinges. It caused the skin on her 2 middle fingers to detach from the nail bed up to her first knuckles.

Fred took her to the ER. They think she might have a hairline fracture on her middle finger, but it was hard to tell. They were able to reattach the skin to one finger, but they said she'll lose the nail on the other. Luckily, she had screamed so much, she wore herself out to the point that she slept through most of the procedures- no stitches, just tape. They told us to follow up with her doctor in a day or two, and just pump her with Motrin in the meantime. She still hasn't woken up this morning- poor thing.

So today we check out of the hotel by noon. Fred is meeting with his new commander to process in. Then we get to fearlessly wield our box cutters and hopefully make some sense of the chaos that is right now our new home. Because of the our experience with Charla's finger, we got to meet our neighbor across the street when we asked for directions to the hospital. She was SO nice! She brought over several tarps to cover our things in the backyard in case of rain. She even offered to lend us her teenage daughters to watch my other 3 kids so I could go to the hospital with Fred last night. What a blessing.

Well, time to go eat breakfast at the hotel's impressive continental breakfast... it'll probably be the nicest breakfast we get for a while :P