The Seversons

1st ingredient: Teething baby.  You may remember in the previous post we had a picture of a vacant-faced baby in front of a Christmas tree.  He is usually so smiley that we were disappointed that every one of our Christmas Eve pictures turned out with that blankly open mouth, like a zombie in an old movie.  Wasn’t travel fatigue as we suspected.  Was his first tooth, which finally appeared the day we got home.  (Also contributed to the rough last few hours of the drive home.)

I can’t complain too much, even though we were totally unprepared for this development.  Tooth #2 appears to be well on its way, we’re hoping it finally pokes its way through tomorrow-ish.  While Graham has been extra cranky, he has also been extra sleepy, which means he’s not awake as often and thus there is less cranky time to deal with.

2nd ingredient: Jessica has delusions of domestic grandeur.  I swear I am actually sending out holiday packages.  That they are late is only partly my fault.  It was unavoidable in the end, because one of the required elements, ordered online at the beginning of December, took about a million years to arrive and didn’t get to the apartment until after we left.  I’d left a thoughtful note for the UPS man, knowing we’d miss him by mere hours and asking him to leave it at the office.

Unfortunately, some other mail delivery person beat him to it and left another package at the front office, and removed the note as instructed.  So we came home to find the big box sitting on our doorstep, as it had been for over two weeks.  Luckily we were not robbed.

But I did not get a chance to start on the packages until yesterday because of the…

3rd ingredient: Total and complete car insanity.  Apparently if you drove a car recently and came near a car one of us was driving, you were helpless but to ram yourself into our bumper.  We think there may have been some kind of magnetic force involved.

Eric got rear-ended in October by a rather large truck owned by a large company that is a subsidiary of an extremely large corporation.  Despite the fact that these things are probably run-of-the-mill for a massive company with an insane number of trucks (you probably saw one within the last few days) getting it taken care of took a lot of trouble.  We didn’t get everything worked out until early December.  By then it was too late to take the car in to be fixed since we were leaving in only a few days.

And then I got rear-ended while doing a little Christmas shopping.  We both came out unscathed–though my neck has been a little sore–and Eric’s car is sporting a seriously ugly rear.  Mine came out looking okay, given how fast the car behind me was going.  But looks are deceiving.  We found out right before Christmas that the car was totaled.  I am still grieving.  Rest in peace, little Scion.

All of this left us in a quandary, we’d been planning to sell my car this summer before we moved for residency.  But we couldn’t go with only one car when Eric finished his rotations for the last few months.  (Strapping the baby into his car seat at 5 a.m. is so not how we roll.)

As if this wasn’t difficult enough, once we got back in town, returned the rental we’d driven to Texas in, and got back to our normal lives, the transmission in Eric’s car started to go.  So now we can’t get the bumper repaired until we figure out what’s wrong with it and whether it’s worth fixing.

And that’s how, within about three weeks, we went from two cars to zero cars.  And that’s how we ended up in a car dealership on New Year’s Eve.  When you walk into a car dealer on New Year’s Eve, they all give you a look like, “Yeah, we know why you’re here.  You know about our yearly quotas and you’re trying to make a deal.”  One of them said to me, “You coincidentally want to buy a car today.”  I responded, “Actually, I coincidentally just had my car totaled.”

But we are not the type to overlook a bargain, and so we walked away with a new car instead of the used one we’d thought about.  I am still freaking out just a little, having never bought a new car before, but we feel pretty comfortable with the decision.  Our new Matrix is bigger than my old Scion by a lot–I can fit the stroller and groceries in the trunk instead of just one or the other.  So that will be the car we move with wherever we move to.

4th ingredient: We’re actually only here for a brief respite until we take yet another pre-residency trip.  (We are keeping the residency specifics to a minimum until Match Day, when you will all be the first to know where we are headed.)  We will leave little Grammer with his grandparents for a few days while we head out for our first no-baby trip.  We leave quite soon, probably before Eric’s car gets its bumper fixed.

So, that explains why I am sitting here late at night with cookies in the oven instead of sleeping.  Making cookies with an awake, teething baby was not a good option.  Especially since going to the grocery store with a screaming baby didn’t seem terribly appealing.

And that, folks, is how you make crazy.