Road trip

It's funny how time works. It's been three weeks since my last post. In some ways I can't believe it hasn't even been a month- so much has happened! In other ways, I can't believe almost a whole month has passed! My last post feels like just yesterday! I guess we have been working so hard and have been exhausted for so long but things are moving so fast it's hard to keep up with. I'm at the point that I barely know what day of the week it is anymore (don't even bother to ask me the date).

But we're doing well. We've been slowly settling into our new home and our new routines and enjoying ourselves at the same time meeting neighbors and seeing old friends. We're probably about 70% unpacked (though I'm probably being generous based on the amount of work I feel like I've done); I thought we'd be farther along, but, life.

I'd like to share some pictures and updates from the last couple of weeks, but I think I'll break them up into a couple of posts, both for my sake and yours.

My last post left off with Jason and I staying in Georgia for a week to get some work done on the house while my parents took our moving truck and the boys up to Chicago. I shared about our incident with our neighbors. Well, I ended up having to buy new flowers as the returned flowers did not survive. Jason and I tried to enjoy our "kidless" time, but we found our to-do list rather overwhelming. It seemed that for every item we crossed off, two more filled its place. We did enjoy one evening out at this fancy restaurant...

Kidding. Though it was right beside Melting Pot where we ate, and I just thought it was too funny.

Dark lighting= bad photo, but that cheese was GOOD!

We celebrated our last night in Georgia with an appropriate meal- fried chicken, biscuits, and macaroni and cheese.

We finally finished up the house and hit the road early Friday morning for a long 12-hour drive to Chicago. Here are some last pictures I took for our listing:

For anyone that would know- look at the paint!

And one last selfie "usie" in front of our house.

Though we initially thought we'd break up the drive over two days, with pets in tow we decided it was easier to push through and do it all at once rather than trying to find a pet-friendly hotel. Here are our road trip buddies for our 13-hour drive:

I have to tell a story about Rico. First off, you should know that he does not travel well. He howls the entire time he is in a car. This included a 2-hour drive when we moved from Hartwell, Georgia to Atlanta. At that point we already knew he was bad in the car, but we thought he would settle down at some point in the 2-hour drive. He did not. In fact, it became a game. I would see how high I could count between meows; I'm pretty sure I never got higher than 10 in the whole 2-hour drive. So... for a 13-hour drive we knew we needed a little help, so we called our vet who gave us a prescription for a light sedative to make the trip easier on all of us. 

Well... in the chaos of trying to get everything packed up and out the door on our last day, I grabbed the sedatives and quickly gave one pill to Rico. Jason caught me mid-act and asked if I'd broken the pill in half. Ummm... no. Was I supposed to? I quickly let go of Rico's mouth hoping that, as usual, he had managed to sneakily avoid swallowing the pill. Of course I wasn't so lucky this time. Thankfully Rico's a big cat, and at first we thought that maybe the whole pill hadn't even done anything anyway as he howled and panted, but after a while it became evident that it had when his eyes started pointing in opposite directions. It really did make the ride easier as once he finally fell asleep, he did not wake up until we were almost done. But the pill was supposed to only last 6 hours. Not 13. And at the very end of the ride the effects finally started wearing off, which seemed to leave Rico in a worse state than before. At one point we heard Lucy growl (she hadn't done this the entire ride). Assuming she was just tired of driving, I said, "yes, Lucy, I know. We're ready to be done, too" and gave her a pat only to find that Rico was latched onto her back- teeth and claws! I had to rip Rico off, only to have him do it another 4 or 5 times. We finally had to pull off the road with only 30 minutes to go just to get him into his carrier. Poor Lucy. And poor Rico. What an adventure. (As an aside- we kept a harness and leash on Rico the entire time. We thought the ride might be easier if he wasn't in a carrier, but we didn't want to risk an escape-kitty at any pit-stops. We kept the leash tied to a chair in the back, which gave him some room to get comfy, but kept him relatively safe.)  

We did finally arrive at my parent's house safe and sound late that Friday night, tired and exhausted. But we weren't awarded much rest as the boys were apparently eager to see us and woke far too early Saturday morning.

Tired as we were, it was great to be reunited at last, ready to begin our next big adventure.

Next stop: Settling into our new home