“Is it tomorrow today?” the boy asked me when he burrowed into our bed Sunday morning. When told that yes, it was tomorrow, he cheered. He’d been looking forward to the housewarming party for a week.

Our house has been thoroughly blessed by friends, laughter, children playing, good food, and not one but three rainbows created by the on-again off-again sun and rain. There were about forty people here, and I don’t know if I got to talk to all of them. We gave everyone free rein to wander through the house, and the general feedback was that it looked like we’d been living here for ages. That’s just what we do: we move and we set up immediately, otherwise we’d go insane. There were still some small boxes here and there on lower shelves and in the corner of my office, and we didn’t get the photo collage frames up in the hallway, but in general things were done, and we were happy. The boy’s best friend from preschool was here and he was in absolute heaven playing with her, as well as all the other assorted children. The play structure was a huge hit. His preschool educator and her family attended as well, and we enjoyed seeing them talk with our parents. We got to see people we hadn’t seen in person in a while, and it was splendid. I was deeply grateful for the food everyone brought, because everyone ate and ate and ate! Sign of a good party, I suppose: everyone mingles and chats and eats and enjoys. It felt wonderful to be able to show the house off to everyone who has supported us through the househunting, the sale, and the move.

[Notes to self: We can have forty people over for a party so long as the weather allows half of them outside. The kitchen is fine for one or two people, but with the entrance to the backyard being one of the kitchen walls, it gets clogged up very easily. (Not setting the kitchen table up as one of the food stations may help with this.) The house provides good flow for movement and various places to gather and chat. Thumbs up for the space as a good one for entertaining.]

The only real drawback to the day was the upstairs bathroom sink clogging up. It started getting slow as the party progressed, and it wasn’t draining at all by the end. HRH went at it with a coat hanger, some Draino, and the plunger after everyone was gone, and all’s well again. We suspect the angle of the faucet, which sends the stream of water right into the drain and creates bubbles, and the lack of cross-piece to trap detritus are the culprits: the bubbles get forced into the drainpipe and the air creates a blockage for dirt being washed down.

My parents arrived in town on Saturday afternoon and they came over for dinner. Things got a bit tangled up schedule-wise because HRH went out Saturday morning to bring plants back from the old duplex and plant them here, and he ended up digging an entire new garden in front for them. While he was digging them up in LaSalle I wiped myself out scrubbing the bathroom and the kitchen, two things that needed doing but I misjudged my energy reserves badly, and so once he was back I couldn’t take the car and the boy out to do the groceries on my own. The garden ended up taking much longer than anticipated, and then HRH had to brace the play structure, and by then my parents were in the area, so the groceries got rescheduled for Sunday morning. The boy requested pancakes for dinner, so I ended up feeding everyone pancakes, sausages and bacon, fried potatoes, and scrambled eggs, which was fun although not overly formal and nothing like the original plan.

On Monday we left HRH at home to do absolutely nothing. My parents took the boy and I on a lovely drive through the Eastern Townships to Farnham, where my mother grew up. The weather was gorgeous, sunny and clear with a good breeze. We stopped at the old station and let the boy climb all over the decommissioned diesel and caboose there, then stopped by the railyards to see a couple of different engines, and had lunch at Chez Roger, the patate frite place that is a traditional stop for everyone in my mother’s family. I remember Chez Roger as a tiny building with a window through which things were served. It’s now a huge place with seating, and it was mobbed. The boy threw himself all over the great play structure in the playground beside it, and taught himself how to slide down the fireman’s pole in the centre of one of the climbing bits while we waited for my parents to bring lunch out. He chased a seagull, explored the rock and iron goose sculpture nearby, and then my mum took him to walk on the old train tracks across the end of the park that led to the train bridge across the rapids of the Yamaska river, the other end of which connects to the street my mum grew up on. The tracks went right along her backyard. The boy reputed got a bit nervous when they went into the trees, because he said, “Mama can’t see me any more” (thumbs up, kid, for remembering you’re not supposed to wander away out of our line of sight, but if you’re with Nana it’s okay) and again when Mum started leading him onto the bridge to see the water ( “But a train might come,” he worried, at which Mum reassured him that she would never take him onto a train bridge if there were trains that might be using it). I remember I was too scared to cross it as a kid, even though I knew my mother had done it when she was a child herself (and this when it was in regular use, too).

Then we drove out to the graveyard to check on my own Nana and Granddad’s grave. This was the boy’s first time in a cemetery, and as I expected it was just a big playground for him. He ran through the grass, read headstones, looked at the horses on the other side of the fence, and only asked once (and cheerfully) about the bodies in the ground that were no longer needed because the spirits were in the Summerland. Kirkwood is such a lovely little graveyard, so very peaceful and bright, full of the Scottish immigrants who came over in the twentieth century and settled in Farnham. It always feels slightly odd that I enjoy my visits there so much.

We drove home along the old highway, through Sainte-Brigide and Saint-Jean, as the sky grew darker and we passed through the odd light sprinkle of rain. We’d hoped to pass a roadside stand selling apples, but alas, none were to be found. The boy fell asleep on the way home. It was a wonderful, wonderful day out with my parents, with no timetable, just the general idea to wander about as we liked and to explore the old places we knew. When we got home we discovered that HRH had mostly rested, but had decided to trim the wild cedar hedge out front while we were gone, one of the tasks that got dropped off the must-do list before the housewarming.

We had a light supper of shrimp en brochette, with a warm potato salad en vinaigrette and raw veggies with dip. The boy had built a wooden plane with my father earlier in the day, and had coaxed HRH into honouring the promise that they could build his Lego Millennium Falcon “after the housewarming”. He almost made it to the end, too, but was yawning and becoming clumsier as bedtime arrived, so we told him he had to finish it the next day. There were a few tears, but he was tired enough that it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. We said goodbye to my parents until our trip down at Thanksgiving, and waved to them as they pulled away.

It was a wonderful weekend. We’re blessed indeed by such wonderful friends and family. It was a lovely way to formally launch our life here.

On Friday around two o’clock we signed the final papers and became official owners of a real live house. It was mildly surreal: after running around for four weeks having meetings, calling various institutions and services to send things to different people and so forth, actually sitting down in the conference room with the notary and having her read through the contract and point out various disbursements before we signed, then sitting with the sellers and signing a much shorter contract was so quiet and less stressful than we’d expected. In fact, we had fun with the sellers while waiting for the notary to call them in, and again after we’d rejoined them and signed everything. The notary almost had to kick us out. The only bad news was the amount of the welcome tax, which is going to be more than a year’s worth of property tax. I sincerely hope they let us break it into multiple payments.

We had intended to go scoop the boy up from school early and let him take down the sold sign that was still in front of the house, but the selling agent said that it was actually her responsibility (and property) and she just hadn’t had the time. She was already there unscrewing it when we arrived, sans boy. This was our first look at it completely empty.

It is kind of like a dollhouse. It’s quite small, but well proportioned. There’s a lot of work ahead in the patching of large holes left by the screws they used to hang pictures, evening out the paint lines on the walls in order to have a smooth surface to paint, and the painting itself, especially because there needs to be one of those huge buckets of primer purchased in order to cover the dark brown, purple, gray, raspberry, and neon green with cobalt blue rooms. (Yeah. So not us.) HRH is over there today doing the spackling and plastering, then mowing and trimming the jungle the previous owners left for us. Then this week is solid painting. I am having minor existential crisis about the colours for the kitchen and living room, as the space is pretty much flows from one to the other. It’s either a green-tinged tan for the kitchen and a mid-green for the living room, or the mid-green for the kitchen and a darker sage green for the living room. The latter was my first choice and still the forerunner in my mind, because I am concerned that with a tan in the kitchen it will all be sort of a big neutral block, since the cupboards are all beige as well and they make up the majority of the kitchen. Also, the darker green is called Mermaid’s Eyes, and really, how can I pass that up?

We had time to kill between dropping the boy off at school on Friday morning and our notary appointment, so we did some recon regarding our laundry set and the loveseat for the living room. We think we’ve settled on the laundry system, and now we’re just waiting on a reply from the commercial salesguy at The Brick, with whom our real estate agent’s company has a deal regarding preferred pricing. Time’s getting tight, though, so I’ll send him another e-mail today, and if I haven’t heard from him by Tuesday I’ll switch to the guy located at the branch near our new house instead. I’m getting frustrated regarding a loveseat, too. The living room is tiny, and all the loveseats we’re seeing are surprisingly large. We wanted something light-looking, too, and apparently that sort of style is Not In at the moment; everything is overstuffed. Also, what is with all the leather and microsuede in the furniture options? Why can’t I have simple upholstery? We thought perhaps a futon might work, as the frames for those tend to be light-looking, but even they are too long for the space. We went to four different furniture stores that morning alone, and I’m at my wits’ end. In the final one I saw a chaise lounge I liked, and we realised that one of those would be less visually weighty, as well as comfortable and would allow for two people to sit if necessary. So suddenly that’s an option. (It has just occurred to me that the one I saw and liked is the colour of wheat, and would go beautifully with the Mermaid’s Eyes paint. And I’d already noted that it has the additional bonus of being the precisely right height if I wanted to sit on the end to play the cello or spin.)

We checked out the Dix-30 shopping complex before the notary appointment as well, because I needed to pick up a gift for the sellers at the SAQ and a book at Indigo. The Indigo is pretty, relaxing, and polished, although smaller than I am used to. Their children’s sections are very nice, though.

I am out of commission this weekend. I’d been having increasing difficulty with my left hip and lower back, and near the middle of the week I thought it was getting better. Then on Thursday I moved the wrong way and the right hip did something weird, so I couldn’t move at all without a lot of pain and problems. I dug out the muscle relaxants for an initial strike, used Tylenol after that, and the heating pad a lot. I’ve been really, really careful over the past two days, but that specific pain on top of the general fibro achiness and exhaustion aren’t doing my temper or stamina any favours. I’m glad we’re about 75% packed.

This week I pack the last of the household while HRH works over at the new house. We have to figure out an alternate route to the new place for moving day, because the bridge is going to be down to one lane from its usual three and traffic is going to be a nightmare as a result. Our usual alternate route across the Mercier bridge and around the seaway isn’t an option because the mileage will kill us when added to the truck rental, so it looks like it may have to the the Jacques-Cartier bridge, as the Victoria bridge has a height and weight restriction and is cars-only.

HRH fit twenty-one book boxes in the car this morning. He’s very pleased. If he can take twenty boxes of that size over each trip, that puts a significant dent in the amount that have to be moved on the actual moving day. (Significant being one hundred boxes. You can’t knock that.)

In non-house news, we managed a brief visit with Ceri, Ada, and Scott in the hospital and were completely enchanted by tiny Ada Emily. They stopped by on their way home from a hospital appointment yesterday to pick up the baby equipment we had put aside for them, and the boy got to meet Ada, who slept through the whole visit. He sat a bit behind me on the chesterfield while I held her and just looked at her with a little smile on his face. He wouldn’t touch her, though; I think we may have gotten him to barely touch a finger, but I can’t remember if he actually made contact with it or not. He did whisper to me at one point, “She just said hi.” “Did she say anything else?” I asked, aware that the baby had been fully silent in her boneless state of babysleep. “No, just hi,” he said.

We had the local grandparents booked for babysitting last night, as the original plan had been to go out with Ceri and Scott to celebrate the beginning of Ceri’s maternity leave and our signing for the house, and they urged us to go out anyway. So we went to see Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, which had been part of that original plan, and we loved it. The only thing missing was having Ceri and Scott along with us to make it the best possible experience, but I am plotting to see if we can make that happen somehow.

So here we are in the home stretch. I’m really hoping my body holds together long enough to accomplish the last of what I need to do this week. Tylenol is my friend, as is the heating pad and the occasional Robaxacet. We can do it.