Moving to Kansas, Part I: GETTING READY

I posted earlier about our trip to Kansas to buy a house, followed by a flurry of other trips and business. When that was all over, and we landed back in Seattle, we realized something: it's time to GET READY.

We had a bunch of logistical stuff to do, like find and hire a moving company, decide to drive or fly and then arrange it, close on the house (which we did in Seattle), etc., etc. Then, we both had a bunch of work-related stuff to do - for me, that was organizing all my strains and stocks and files to be shipped to Kansas, transferring my grants and writing a few new ones and hiring a post-doc, not to mention all the normal stuff I had to do related to the job I still had in Seattle.

But what was really, really tough was saying goodbye to all our friends.

It started with a surprise visit from our most favorite neighbor L who gave us the sweetest note and bottle of wine. The note made me cry. Then our beloved baby group threw us a totally unexpected SURPRISE party - we unknowingly walked in on the whole group wearing matching t-shirts and bearing gifts and giving out hugs and passing around margaritas. It was possibly the first time we had ever ALL been together without kids. I cried and cried and cried. Then we had goodbye parties with other friends, each of our work groups, another neighbor party, more baby group parties, even people we didn't even know at the daycare were inviting us over. It was incredible. And a very welcome distraction from the stress of moving. Although, a little bit busy. In the end it got too busy and we had to cancel on one of the things we had planned. But we had a nice good-bye with most everybody and hopefully soaked up enough social interactions to last us until we could make some new friends in Kansas.

Our baby group surprise party - all 16 of us!

Layla's last day of daycare and my last day of work was Halloween. That was also the day the movers came to take our stuff. It was perfect timing - although Layla knew what was happening, she was too excited about Halloween to get down about it (or maybe, she's just happy like that - she's been a good sport overall). She cheerfully said good-bye to everyone at school, had a blast trick-or-treating in her WordGirl (superhero) outfit, and then we went to a friend's to spend a few days until we flew out to Hawaii.