Our furniture arrived yesterday! It was supposed to have arrived Friday, so we would have the long weekend to unpack and put stuff away, but then I received the following email on Thursday:
“G-Inter Transports informs below that the truck with your HHE broke down on its way to Brasilia.”
It broke down?! Elise and I were both picturing the truck, curls of steam coiling from the hood, leaning on the red clay shoulder in the middle of nowhere, Brazil with armed bandits on horseback carrying Sam’s children’s books and Pete’s stuffed animals off into the jungle. Needless to say no one was pleased. But arrive (chegou) it did, finally (finalmente).
Before we left DC, Elise and I conferred over the packer's inventory from when they packed us out of Fla. We had to put a check mark next to boxes or pieces of furniture we wanted pulled from our storage unit in Maryland. It might sound as exciting as the finale of an episode of Wheel of Fortune where Pat Sajak takes you on a tour of a Hollywood studio spruced up with backdrops made to look like Hawaii, a Winnebago and a brand new car, but it was more like the most expensive guessing game either one of us had ever played. The inventory was basically a rapidly-fading carbon copy of a truck driver’s illegible scrawl, so we ended up somehow pulling and shipping all our glass table tops without the corresponding tables the tops are supposed to go on. Of course, the last thing you want hanging around a house with a tottering one-year old are giant slabs of glass.
Fortunately, I believe that to be the extent of our (my) miscalculations. Elise baked banana bread and made coffee for the movers in the morning and chocolate chip cookies for them in the afternoon. I stood checking numbers off of an inventory sheet as the movers brought in boxes, which was the best test yet of how well I could understand my Portuguese numbers between 1 and 300.
I screwed together both Pete and Sam’s beds as Elise gave baths. Pete is stuck at a 5:00 a.m. wake-up call for a sip of milk. It is mostly my fault for continuing to indulge him, but, in this, I have sought the path of least resistance, and it still seems easier to just give him his sip of milk, knowing he will roll over and go back to sleep for an hour (or a half-hour, as was the case this morning), rather than suffer through the alternative which is “sleep-training”, a fancy way of describing listening to him scream his head off for an hour. Pete has been sleeping in the pack-n-pay for the past 3 months which is probably about as comfortable as sleeping on the floor or a bed of nails, and I was secretly hoping that he would sleep right through 5:00 a.m. in his comfy new bed. No such luck.
At ten, Elise was still putting shoes away, but I was fading, so I took a shower and crawled into the fluffy embrace of our cloud-like bed. Our bedroom is again the nest, the place of such repose and tranquility it could float miles above the Earth that Elise worked so hard to build in Florida. Which is a good thing, considering the amount of things requiring our attention and an allen wrench.
No comments:
Post a Comment