So my parents are taking us in for a month. In my mind we are a normal, dull family. We are so dull and normal they will barely notice we are here. They will start to wish we would come upstairs and interact with them rather than wishing we would go downstairs and leave them alone. But, in the 3 days we have lived here we have had one crazy thing after another happen and I am starting to think maybe crazy adventure is actually our normal.
Day 1: Our house does not close and it looks like our entire sale is going to be canceled. We enter the house feeling despondent and unsure what our future holds. We do not unpack any boxes but do make a big mess. We drink. I still go out with neighbors. I get home late. We go to bed.
End of day 1
Day 2: We still have to work. John and I leave in the morning and Grandma and Isabelle spend the day together. I have a full, busy work day. I do find out our buyer was approved for a loan to buy our house without selling her house and we will now close in 2 weeks. Hurray! I end up working until after 8pm. I send a quick message to my mom around 5:30 during a brief lull in my meeting saying I will be late but I assume John will be home any moment. As I start heading home I call John to discover that he too is just heading home. He arrives a few minutes before me. I walk in the door to parents who are still in a good mood but wondering what they just got themselves into. My sister laughs and says, "suckers!" when she hears we have left Isabelle with them so late and they have no idea where we are. After a quick dinner I use what little energy I still have to hop on my mom's bike for quick ride with Isabelle as I had promised in the morning. About a mile into our ride through a nature path I am totally unfamiliar with the tire goes flat. Not just flat but off the rim flat. AND the brake locks up. (I swear I am not making this up) I send Isabelle back to try to get help. In the mean time I drag the bike forward. Unfortunately Isabelle was the one telling me where to go. Now alone I take a wrong turn and end up in a totally different neighborhood and realize have no idea where I am or how to get back. How will anyone find me? I see a nice woman bringing her trash to the curb and do the only thing I can do, I ask if I can use her phone to call for help. She is really nice, welcomes me to Chanhassen, her husband brings me a bottle of water and ultimately she ends up offering to just put my bike in the back of the car and drive me home. I arrive home and everyone is sitting watching TV as if my crisis were of no concern to them. They barely look up when I walk in the door. I don't think Isabelle properly conveyed the situation.
End of day 2
Day 3: Despite getting home after 8pm I somehow have the nerve to tell my parents I need to be at work by 8:30 the next morning but will be home after lunch. I promise pedicures for the girls in celebration of the fact that we are back on track to sell the house and do not need to move back in and find a new buyer. I have a good day at work, a good lunch meeting about women's ministry at church (they want me to chair women's ministry and I really want to! But I resist. Sort of...) I return from the meeting, sit at the pool with mom while Isabelle swims and then we go get our pedicures. Life is starting to seem normal. We get back to the house and I start unpacking and getting organized while my mom makes dinner. After dinner I had scheduled a 7pm showing of a possible house and think we could hit Target for a couple things while we are out. We decide to take Isabelle with and head out. The house is lovely and definitely something worth considering although we don't love it as much as the house we put an offer on earlier this week. We are about 2 blocks from the showing when suddenly John realizes our cars temperature is in the red. We are overheating! He pulls over so quick you would think it was about to blow up! Maybe it was. Good thing John was driving, I would have driven until it did! Tomorrow I have an appointment to get the car fixed. It is leaking something quite significantly, I was thinking coolant but had no sense of what that meant. A few things that have been happening lately are starting to make sense. Prior to moving in my parents have commented on the spots on their driveway when I would visit so I thought I would get it fixed if we are going to live here. One less thing to worry about. Since making the appointment 3 days earlier I have also started to realize the brakes are going bad. Anyway, we have friends who live a block away and so we drive there and John hoses the engine down enough to get us to a nearby car shop where we buy some coolant and we hang out at the neighboring Goodwill for about half hour while waiting for the engine to cool down a bit. It turns out when you are homeless you truly don't need anything no matter how cheap it is. Back in the car we start heading home but the needle is getting precariously close to the red zone. Since my mechanics shop is closer than my parents we decide to drop the car off tonight night instead of in the morning. I call Jake to come rescue the 3 of us from the side of the road. Although one might think we deferred maintenance too far we decided we timed it perfectly. Brought it the night before it would have blown up. Nailed it! Finally we arrive home at 9pm.
End of day 3
So, here is the thing. As we were arriving home from yet another day of crazy I realized something. It didn't feel crazy to me. It felt normal. Sitting on a curb in the middle of an industrial park watching Isabelle play hopscotch on a board John drew with a white rock he found was a totally normal, natural way for us to spend an evening. Walking in the door it felt like just a typical Thursday at the Hardacker house.
Its not that we don't spend our fair share of evenings sitting in front of the TV and/or computer just hanging out doing nothing productive, we do, I promise, but somehow when we do get up from the couch, something exciting always happens.
Perfectly normal.
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