My blog was temporarily eaten by evil blog fairies. Or maybe something happened in a terrible fit of blogtaneous blogbustion. Email from my host provider also apparently looks like spam. In any event, 2 phone calls to tech support, several comments from you my readers, and somewhere between 24 and 48 hours later, I’m back, hopefully safe and sound.

I am happy to report that significant progress happened this weekend. From the must do list, I cleaned out space for the bassinet, found and cleaned the bassinet, and put it together where it belongs until Esmerelda Freugenspeigel outgrows it. I also found the abdominal band support doohickey and washed it.

From the need to do list, I packed 6 boxes of books we’re keeping but that I can live without for at least 6 months, and 4 smaller boxes of books to donate. One went to the book drive at the Dream game yesterday, one will be going to Jen, and two are getting posted to freecycle.

It occurs to me, beloved readers, that while a lot of you who know us in real life know why book packing is on the need to do list, most of you probably don’t think of that as a critical pre-baby activity.

We’ve decided to move.

Moving closer to family has been on our list of things we’d like to do for awhile now. It zipped up the list in the first few months after Noah was born, and we had some vague intentions around getting serious about it during 2009.

And then the layoff happened.

As I contemplated looking for a new job here, two things became even more clear to me. First, the idea of committing myself to living and working here for a minimum of 2-3 more years gave me an upset stomach. And second, I’d need to get another really good job here for us to afford our mortgage.

Certainly there are people and things we will miss very much. But the idea of being close to Grandma and Grandpa and some of the extended family holds a lot of appeal. Many of the friends I have in Milwaukee have been friends for 20 years or more. Even for Jill, starting over there isn’t quite as awful as the idea of starting over somewhere else, although the idea of starting over at all is seriously stressful to her.

So the plan is this:

* Work on getting the house ready to go on the market
* Have Esmerelda Freugenspeigel
* Jill adopts Esmerelda Freugenspeigel
* Sell house
* Semi-simultaneously, look for work in Milwaukee/see if Jill’s job will transfer
* Move to Milwaukee

Ideally, all of this happens in 2008, before my severance package runs out.

But I was talking about this weekend.

Saturday, both of us worked like crazy. Unfortunately, the main areas where we worked now have that horrible look where you’re packing and you know you’ve made huge progress, but right now it looks more chaotic and disorganized than ever.

Sunday, Jill took Noah to the playground to wear him out in the morning, while I cleaned and tidied. In the afternoon, Noah and I napped while Jill went to the Dream game on time. When Noah and I woke up, we joined Jill for the last quarter of the game, and the ice cream social & autograph session for season ticketholders after the game. Many entertaining pictures (and 2 video clips) are up on Flickr.

These are my favorites:

At 4 am, Jill woke up violently ill.

Ironically, it was the weekend when I was 34 weeks pregnant with Noah that Jill spent the night at the Duke University Hospital ER. Guess how many weeks pregnant I will be tomorrow?

We are both hoping that this was a stress induced reaction. Last time they were not able to make a positive diagnosis, only that she was not having a heart attack after all.

At 6 am, Mr Loves Buttons on Electronic Devices’ alarm clock went off, loudly in between radio stations. Fortunately I talked him into going back to sleep.

But it’s now 6:52 am and time for me to get dressed and go to work.