Moving Days

For our big move, Erin and Chris flew out from Boston to help us, and we were fortunate to have tons of other help as well to load up and clean our old townhome. Sean's brothers Michael and Jamie came out and helped fill the truck, and both Sean's and my mother assisted us with the not-so-fun task of cleaning everything. 

The next day, on May 31st, bright and early at 6 am, Sean and I, along with Brigita, climbed up into the huge moving truck. Chris and Jamie drove Sean's car, and Katrina (our friend from church) and Erin (they were also college roommates) drove my car. With our most valuable breakables in the cars and everything else we owned in the 25-foot Budget truck, we headed out on I-94 to our new home. 

We arrived around 4 pm, after stopping for lunch at the Texas Roadhouse in Rockford where the servers line dance to country music every once in a while, and unloaded the truck into our condo in Chicago. After everything was in, Sean and his friend Joe, who graduated with him and happened to match into the same program as Sean (he drove over to help us unload), took the moving truck back while the rest of us tried to talk ourselves into taking cold showers (Sean and I failed the mission with setting up gas at the new place with everything else going on). After multiple small screams from behind the bathroom door, everyone was showered, tired, and ready to go. We all walked down to the "happening" Clark Street and decided on Italian food for dinner. After a delicious fare and some wonderful conversation, we all dragged our feet back home, made beds for everyone, and crashed for the night. 

Family and Friends

Before moving to Chicago, Sean and I wanted to make sure that we spent time with family and friends who mean a lot to us. We know that we aren't going to be gone forever, but we are even now not exactly sure when we will be able to make it back to Minnesota. A few weeks ago Sean received his general schedule for the first year of his residency!! As exciting as our thoughts and plans surrounding this wonderful revelation are, we found out that we will be unable to return to the Motherland (as Erin and Chris call it) for any holidays this year. This insight made us all the more determined to see our loved ones before we left. Here are some pictures of the whirlwind of visiting that we squeezed in during the last few weeks in Minnesota. 

We went "up north" to my parents' cabin over the weekend of Mother's Day to relax a little bit and hang out with my grandparents on my dad's side. My mom, dad, Sean and I played card games and chatted on Saturday night (even Brigita got in on the action), and we stuffed ourselves with brunch at my uncle's house the next day. My grandparents were able to come out and have brunch as well, and we brought my grandma a guilt-ridden cheesecake from The Cheesecake Factory as her Mother's Day gift. 

The next week Sean's old friends Randy and Geneva came over for a night of grilling. Geneva is currently pregnant with their second child, and their son Ronan gave us laughs as we talked the night away. I served watermelon with the meal, and he loved it!! He kept going into the fridge to get more. Then he fell in love with Brigita's lair and would continually go in and out of her cage throughout the night. She really did not know what to think of him and tried to be wherever he wasn't for most of the evening. Sean and I had a thoroughly enjoyable time watching the interaction between the two year-old child and the three month-old puppy. The next day, Randy and Sean played with the pipe band at a Scottish fair. Neither of them had played with their former band in quite a long time, so the time together was all the more special. 

The following two weeks were a flutter of activities as, in the midst of intermittent packing, Sean bade farewell to his good friend Andy (who was also an usher in our wedding) from medical school, I had brunch at the Wayzata Pancake House with my mom (a long-time ritual of ours) and spent time with my good friends Erika and Allison, and Sean and I went to stay with Sean's grandpa and his wife. 

Sean's grandpa has lived in a small town for most of his life, and as this life usually demonstrates, everyone knows everything about everyone. Random people were congratulating Sean about graduating from medical school and asking him questions about our lives and future plans. It was pretty neat. We attended a Memorial Day ceremony while we were there, a tradition of Sean's family to attend, and visited the graveyard where Sean's relatives are buried for quite a few generations back. 

On our last full day in MN, my mom and much of Sean's family helped us load up all of our things, clean our townhouse, and get ready for the grand departure on May 31st. After we finished a long day of packing and cleaning, we all went to dinner and then to see the new Indiana Jones movie.

Jobless

I hope I am not going to be really bad at keeping up with this blogging thing already and that not posting in a while IS really just attributed to being really, really busy. Since I last wrote Sean has graduated from medical school, Brigita has gained more than half of her weight, and I am finished with my job. My last day was yesterday, and, as much as I complain, it really was a bittersweet departure. I would have been there for six years as of the end of this month! 


Yes, I have worked in multiple areas, in different positions, and on numerous floors, but I still have a bond with many of the staff and am really rather sad to be moving on, despite how exciting the change is going to be. I don't have another job lined up at the moment, so I am just trusting God that something that I can handle will be available and tolerable. I am probably going to try to work for an agency that sends nurses all around the Chicago area. I will be allowed to pick my hours, make time to care for Brigita (since Sean is going to have crazy hours), and make quite a bit more money than I would in a "real" job. I am a little scared about it, though, because this means that I will just have to jump right in to working at a facility without any sort of orientation or direction as to how to function at the hospitals where I will have to go. I feel that this is the direction that I should be taking at the moment, so I am sure that it will be fine. 


I am very excited to start this new chapter in our life, but the outlook is very scary at the same time. I always just remember what a wise nurse once told me - "nursing is nursing wherever you go...the documentation of it is the only thing that changes."