We get by with a little help from our friends

I would be exceedingly remiss if I mentioned the move without telling you all how thankful we are for our friends and their help with it.

Many people went out of their way to ask if we needed help or offer to do whatever we needed.

Friends brought us boxes from their offices, a professor who just moved to town - and didn't even know us - gave us some of their recently empty boxes, and our friend Liza even checked at Trader Joe's to see when they were getting a shipment so that we could get their boxes before they crushed them. Just imagine how proud I was to pack my things in TJ's boxes!

Liza and Jennifer came over one Sunday afternoon and took Cora to the park so that I could get some packing accomplished. I didn't ask them to - they offered.

And, as always (and they can attest that I do mean "always"), Andy and Jen were the superstars of our move. Without them, we wouldn't have left town until this Monday at noon! Andy again (as in again...again...again) negotiated our small doorways and pokey halls with our large couch. He lifted and carried and brought bungees and straps and strategized how to keep everything from flying out of the back of the truck on the way to the storage place. Hmmm, perhaps we should have consulted him about the placement of that trash can...

And Jen was awesome. She came over several times and either helped me pack or did the packing herself while I was immobile during a feeding or had to hold Cora to keep her from fussing. She figured out how to pack oddly shaped items like my gigantic serving tray or the blender. She wrapped and wrapped and taped and taped so that my dishes and glassware will still be in one piece when I retrieve them from storage in 10 months! I'd be feeding and just pointing at stuff while she did all the work. And she would happily do my bidding, then reemerge every so often to repeat the refrain, "What else?"

They also let us stay with them the night before we left, since our bed was stored across town. We showed up late, even though they had work the next day, and they had breakfast waiting on us when we woke.

I hope all of you have an Andy and Jen. I suspect not, since I'm not sure there are too many people out there like them, but I hope you can find them wherever they are.

We are so grateful for all our friends who recognized that this was a more complicated process now that we have an infant and stepped in to help whenever and however they could. We couldn't have done it without them - and I don't mean that rhetorically!

P.S. - Andy, I forgot to mention on the other post: I only got through one and a half Van Morrison songs (Brown Eyed Girl was on the radio, so we started with that one, and then I made it halfway through These are the Days, but was a little rusty on the lyrics). You'll have to teach her the rest!