20May2009: Day 359: Goodbye Gillingham

Arghh why is it your body gets no sleep in anticipation or stress of things? We were up past 2am last night making sure that everything we needed to be shipped was ready to be shipped. We had to make sure that the suitcases weren’t over 50 lbs and if they were, we needed to pick out more things to be shipped. Then, when we finally went to bed, all I could think about was what things still needed to be done before the shippers came and what cleaning was left to do. At 3:30am I looked at the clock and was like, okay body and mind, time to sleep!

Up about 7am and all the things in my mind had to come to fruition. We were able to “ship” Makenna off to Hannah’s for the morning which was a good thing. The shipper’s came about 9:30am and for the next two hours, packed our things into 30 boxes. Then we had about a half hour to finish cleaning the upstairs and moving furniture back where it was when we first got here.

Makenna enjoyed playing at the park for around two hours with Hannah and her sister and mom. She came in ravenous for lunch and was quite upset she did have her “mushroom-ham noodles.” I felt bad. That ended up being a comment I made all day today, “I feel bad.”

I at least took her to play group one last time so she could go on the bounce house and see Hannah and Bethany for the last time, with the hopes that they will meet again in the not to distant future. They gave Makenna a book called, “You Are Special” and a card to us both thanking us for coming which I thought was really nice.

We came home and she got a nap, of which I was jealous, but I wanted those shoes that I talked about so I went off shopping while Chris took a short nap then continued to get things straightened out and cleaned up around the house. No luck in finding the shoes though. I went to about ten different stores, and only one store had them and I didn’t like the colors available. I soothed my “buying” by getting my new niece Natalie a cute outfit to bring back.

When Makenna got up from her nap, she was already crying for Hannah and to go to the park. Here’s where the guilt really started to set in. I know she won’t remember Hannah after a little while but I feel like these were two souls who knew each other in the premortal existence and to now part them again breaks my heart. We at least took her to the park to ease some of the guilt.

We had a hard time dragging her away from here and when we finally started to leave, she said, “We’ll come back another time, tomorrow.” How do you explain to a young child that she won’t be coming back to this park, most likely ever again? We eased our guilt again by taking her for Chinese and ice cream.

Well, since the house was mostly cleaned and echoing as a matter of fact, I took some pictures of the rest of the house for our memories. I kind of wish now I had taken pictures of our first dinky apartment when we got here as that place was definitely a place to remember (said very sarcastically). I guess I couldn’t get out of there fast enough and didn’t want any memories at the time. At least I’ll have these.

First is the kitchen:

Then the Dining Room:

Stairs going up:

Upstairs "Purple" bathroom:

The "Guest Bedroom" - see what you missed! You could've slept in these bright colors:

Makenna's Room:

And yes, I know the picture is lop-sided - Makenna loves looking at the picture of the "beach" in her room and plays with it

Finally, the Master bedroom. This obviously has the remnants of our "stuff" to be packed so it looks a bit messy: