Much better, wrist and knee-wise! So that’s good. Knee still gets me whenever I forget and kneel or squat, but we can work around that. And by "we" I mean me and the small village of people who have assembled to help me through this last push. Push! The pushing! I think that’s where we are! Four days of pushing ahead! I think I want an epidural.

(When Alice reads this she will be saying "Those are words I never thought I’d hear Lissa say." Ha! I am all about running a metaphor into the ground, baby!)

So: yesterday. Got a call from a realtor Friday night. She wanted to show the house yesterday morning between ten and twelve. I left her a message asking her to just call when they were heading into the neighborhood because there was no way I could vacate the unpacked premises for a two-hour chunk of time. Never heard back from her. We tidied up as best we could and my mom took all the kids to the playground. Lisa came over with her vacuum because mine is kaput. (Nice timing, Eureka.)

House readyish for showing, we turned to the dreaded Loom Room closet. The Loom Room is so named because it’s where we stuck my table loom when we moved in. I have done no weaving here and for months at a stretch the loom itself moved to the girls’ room (named the Blue Room because of the lovely coat of paint Lisa’s husband Dave gave it as a housewarming gift to us the week before we moved in—how awesome is that?)‚ where it (the loom, if you lost track during my long parenthetical) served as a combination playhouse/pirate ship when the mood struck. It sits upon a little stand, see, just the right size for draping with silks and hiding under. It’s hard to beat a playhouse with cool levers to move up and down and a beater bar you can bang really hard.

But good golly, how I digress. Anyway, the point is Lisa and I packed up the craft closet. During which time I learned a couple of things about myself, which were: 1) I am not the sort of person who should stock up at sales (case in point, the twelve boxes of crayons I bought for a quarter each at Staples two Back-to-Schools ago, ditto the fifteen packages of loose-leaf notebook paper); and 2) I really really love Waldorf-type crafts. Various people had mentioned to me the FlyLady rule of thumb regarding Stuff, which is that you should only keep those things which make you really happy. And every time I happened upon a ball of wool, a tuft of doll hair, or a box of that gorgeous translucent colored beeswax, my heart went pitty pat. So I kept that stuff. But I passed most of the loose leaf on to Lisa.

By noon I was pretty much clued into the fact that the realtor wasn’t coming. (Because that’s how sharp my deductive powers are.) Later in the day I discovered she had left a message at ten thirty, which I probably missed during the vacuuming. They are coming TODAY instead. "Between ten and twelve." Ha!

More darling friends (including Hank’s mom, Holly, and our longtime online pal, Sue) showed up after lunch to fetch the other loom, the one that lived in the basement, and to be at my general beck and call. Which was fabulous. Plus I got to meet Hank! Who is an absolute charmer! And who dazzled me with the boatloads of English he has mastered in an extremely short time.

So the rest of the day was work work work pack pack (nurse baby) pack sort sort sort (nurse baby/eat slice of pizza) pack sort pack (eat a brownie and then one more) call Scott with questions every 45 minutes (keep this? toss that?) exclaim over old picture at top of box but do not look at the rest or else blog commenters might scold you for slacking off but oh look how cute she was!

Everyone cleared out around dinnertime, my mom and I got the kids to bed, and I went back to the basement to work until around midnight. Which: thanks Alice, Chari, and of course my Scott for the phone company while I tackled those last boxes. I made it to the bottom. At last.

Crawled into bed between sleeping baby and toddler, tried to sleep but couldn’t because, well, THE PUSHING. Then DID sleep because I woke up at 3 in a panic: RAIN. Oh noooo. Ran outside (blessing the child who carelessly left her umbrella on the porch so I didn’t have to hunt one up because I think the rest are packed already or else are in the van) and moved all the Freecycle stuff I’d left in my driveway up onto the porch. Stupid move, the "leaving in the driveway" bit. Whoops.

Fell back into bed, rather damp but too tired to bother finding dry clothes in the dark, sank (I think) instantly back to sleep. Woke up at five because Wonderboy was, I don’t know, annoyed about something? That’s the best I can explain it: just a random toddler sleep-gripe. Then the baby woke up and thought about staying awake, but I drugged her with breast milk. Good stuff, that.

And here I am at sevenish, awake again for the next contraction. I can’t believe the packers will be here tomorrow.