The love of friends

These last few days have been a whirlwind of emails, long-distance phonecalls, excitement, stress and disappointment. Did I mention stress? Some of you may already know that we are planning to move to Halifax, NS in the next little while. We've put our place here in Vancouver up for sale, and we've been looking for a house in Halifax. Not the easiest thing to do from Vancouver.

Patty left for Halifax Thursday evening to check out a house and be on-site for the building inspection. As it turns out, this particular house will require far more work than we feel comfortable taking on at this point. A disappointing end to what had been till then, a mostly exciting, if somewhat stressful time.

I've been home with Nate and Snoopy. Of course I usually work Thursday through till Sunday. The first 2 days weren't too much of a problem since Nate was in daycare. But who was going to spend hours with him on Saturday and Sunday while I was at work? Some fabulous friends of ours of course.

Our friend Lauren offered to spend Saturday with Nate. She took him out for a sushi dinner, sang sea-shanties with him, and probably had to endure monster-truck TV. I'm sure she could have just come and hung out with Nate and done nothing else and he would have been just as happy, mostly because he just loves spending time with his Aunty Lolo.

On Sunday, my friend Bree took Nate to the pumpkin patch, and by all accounts he had a blast. How could he not? He got to hang out with his Aunty Bree, ride tractors, see farm animals, tromp through mud in his rubber boots and pick apples and pumpkins!

And in the days prior to me finding a sitter, one of Patty's co-workers Shona offered to hang out with Nate for a few hours on Sunday, and my co-worker Manuel offered to come and watch him during my Sunday shift.

All these people have busy lives, and yet they offered to help me out and spend their days off with Nate. It could just be the sappy father in me, but I think that's pretty special. So thank you all my friends, I feel so loved.