One week to go!

Now there is only one week to go until we move out!  I'm beginning to see a light at the end of the tunnel, but there is still a lot of packing to do.  Esther LOVED her gymnastics class this week, and I think we will invest in sending her again next week.  It just makes it so much less stressful to pack when I have chunks of uninterrupted time to do it in.  And I'm glad that she's having fun!  She was a little disappointed to learn that tomorrow is Saturday and there won't be any gymnastics class.  But I'm sure she'll have fun with Daddy.  Last week they went scooting in a park and played in the river there for a long time; tomorrow is going to be too hot for outdoor activity to be comfortable, but they will find something to do that is fun and that doesn't involve being in the house.  I went with Tim to pick Esther up today, and her teacher was commenting at how well she does on the parallel bars, and how she can almost do it by herself.  I'm not exactly sure what "it" is that she can almost do by herself, but I know she has a lot of upper body strength.  She can almost do a pull-up already, which is something I don't think I've been able to do my entire life!  Or maybe I did it once, sort of.  I remember trying, but I was pretty pathetic!

Unfortunately, although our move-out date is fixed, it looks like it will be a while before we can move IN.  Mortgage paperwork is starting to feel like adoption paperwork: there's always something that takes longer than you project, or just plain goes wrong!  Not being local, we've been mailing stuff back and forth with our lender.  So first UPS didn't have our apartment number, which cost us a couple of days receiving the papers we needed to sign.  We finally got them on Monday, signed everything that night, and returned it by express mail on Tuesday morning.  Our lender (or someone in his office) received the paperwork Thursday morning, and this morning he contacted us to say that he didn't see the personal check that he needed to pay for the appraisal.  Tim remembered that the clerk at the post office had switched the papers into a new envelope when he mailed them on Tuesday, and sure enough, we found the check still sitting in the old envelope along with his receipt.  So we conferred over the phone, and ended the conversation with Tim thinking I had agreed to go to the post office with Esther and mail it this afternoon, and me thinking that he didn't want me to.  It will get mailed tomorrow morning.  Sigh.  So the appraisal won't even be ordered until next week.  We had already figured we wouldn't make our target closing date of August 2nd, but as Tim put it, this latest development pretty much put the nails in the coffin.  The moving company can store our stuff for up to a month at no cost, and we have had multiple offers of places to stay in the meantime, so we're not in dire straits, but it would be nice to know when we will get to actually start living in our new hometown!