Homeless

So, we arrived at the Homestead Suites near Monsanto's Chesterfield location where Ian would be working.  It would be our home away from home for the next five days until we closed on our house. The next day, Ian had to go to work, so the boys and I were on our own.  Unfortunately, it was raining and we had the Ripster with us.  If we left him in the hotel, he would bark continuously and annoy the hotel guests, so he had to come with us wherever we went.  Since it was raining, that really left Petco as our only option for an outing.  So, we went to Petco to replace Ripple's dog bowls that we left on the sidewalk next to McDonalds on our drive down.  Then, we watched a movie and hung out in the hotel room.

Finally, when Ian got off of work, our dear friends the Odegaard family rescued us from our hotel room.  They were friends of ours when we lived in Durham.  They moved to St. Louis with Monsanto several years before us, and we were so glad that we had some familiar faces waiting for us.  We headed over to their place for a little pizza and relaxation.  It was so nice to get out of the hotel and into a house with boxes and see some friends.  The kiddos immediately hit it off again and began playing in the basement.  Ripple behaved relatively well and only managed to jump at the girls and scare them once.

Over the weekend when Ian could hang out with us the weather cleared up and we managed to get out and explore our new city a while.  Over the weekend we checked out Chesterfield park where we climbed all over a huge statue of a giant reaching out of the ground.  Turns out giants make great slides.   After the park we headed into town to get a taste of St. Louis's famous frozen custard at Ted Drewes.  We weren't blown away by it, but who can pass up frozen custard?

That evening our dear friends again rescued us, and we met the Odegaard family again, this time at Des Peres Park.  We had a great picnic dinner.  Mary and I spent some time walking around the lake with Naomi in the stroller and Ripple on the leash while Ian and Matt and the rest of the kiddos all enjoyed fishing and otherwise playing around the shore of the lake.

That weekend we also decided to check out a park right around the corner from our hotel and Ian's work-Faust Park.  We drove up, and turns out there was a food truck rodeo going on at the exact same time!  We decided it was a good omen and decided to check it all out.  While the food truck event turned out not to be all that exciting, the park was great.  The playground was lots of fun-the boys enjoyed playing on the play structures while the dog enjoyed barking at all the kiddos that passed by.  Ian took the boys to ride the old fashioned carousel there, and after that I took them in the beautiful butterfly pavilion.  The boys were determined to have the butterflies land on them, so we spent a while sitting very still and a few made their approach and briefly landed on us.

(the goobers and I in the butterfly house)

(posing on a pony)

(happy boy)

One of our biggest tasks that weekend was the go check out our new house.  This would also be the first time that the boys would see it.  We pulled up to the house at the designated time and the previous home owners were still busily packing up with a U-Haul and piles of their belongings in the garage.  I felt bad because they still had so much work to do, but we still had to do our walk through.  So, we wandered around showing the kids all of the sights.  They were excited to wander around and check everything out.  We were all enjoying ourselves when we walked in the basement and saw water pouring from the ceiling!  I panicked!  Here we were a day away from closing and the ceiling was leaking!  However, we were able to flag down the owners, they called their handyman, and they determined that they simply hadn't capped the washing machine pipes.  It was a simple fix and we were very relieved.  Once we had seen the house again we were so excited to move in!