It's Sunday afternoon and we've not packed a single box yet this weekend.
Right now Adam and Edward are having an afternoon nap and I'm sitting at the kitchen table with a great mountain of packing boxes on my right and a huge pile of stuff in front of me and wondering what to do next.
Yesterday we sold the washing machine, and the same people want to buy our IKEA kitchen utensils and toaster etc and are going to pick them up on Thursday afternoon. The iron and kettle people could not pick up last Friday and so Adam is dropping the stuff off to them on Tuesday morning.
Some good news is that Singapore Air has issued our flight tickets - thankfully they accepted a short note from the midwife saying that I am pregnant & that baby is due 18 January as a "fit to fly" certificate. The note doesn't say that I am in good health, or that the pregnancy is trouble free or even mention flying!
I'm not happy with it (the fit to fly certificate) as I am worried that we will show up to check in the staff with take a look at my Enormous pregnancy tummy and demand a 'proper' certificate.
So I've downloaded a tick-the-box fit to fly certificate from the Emirates website & am going to take it along to my final Dutch health check (this Thursday) and ask the midwife to fill it in. This should get around the language barrier as all she has to do is tick all the boxes, fill in my due date and name and sign it.
Hopefully I will have the older midwife, rather than the younger one this Thursday - the older one speaks better English, seems to be a pleasant person and the younger one wrote the very short note that I sent to Singapore Air. I would prefer not to have to try and explain in basic English why I need another certificate.
Adam was very, very stressed by the end of last working week and he unfortunately has a really busy week coming up. He has to drive to the Hague every day next week! It's actually not a long distance (by Australian standards) but there are bumper to bumper traffic jams literally all the way. Last Friday Adam took Edward and me into the Hague with him for the afternoon because I was going a bit crazy being in the house all the time. How my perspective has changed - I now find wandering around a shopping street & buying some lip gloss and travel toiletries to be a really good day out! Hmmmm.
And it took over 3.5 hours for us to drive home (should have been a 45 minute drive). I hope Adam doesn't get 5 repeat days of that because it adds a lot of hours to his normal working week.
To schedule him into 5 further days in the Hague as well as an evening meeting in some other Dutch place in his last week is not considerate at all of his company and is (in my opinion) a bit disappointing. Especially as Friday of this week the cleaner is arriving at 8am with a van to remove all our goods that are not being shipped to Australia, and after we have the end of lease inspection from the real estate people, we have no address in the Netherlands.
This is all complicated by the fact that we have an 18 month old child & I'm rather pregnant. Normally I would take the moving in my stride. But I am worried about how Edward is going to cope on Friday - he won't be able to play in the house & the weather is just awful at the moment but I suppose I could put him in his snow suit and sit in the back garden with him while the house is cleaned. He will have to have his nap in the stroller, which isn't ideal but it's only one day.
I'm hoping that Adam will have a light working day on Friday as I am without a mobile phone and by the end of the day he will be without a vehicle. I suppose the worst case scenario is that I take a bus from Eemnes to Hilversum with all our luggage & Edward as well, hope that some Dutch person will help me with the luggage (ha, ha as if that would happen!), and make my own way to the hotel.... and wait for Adam to arrive. Oh well, we will see.
Sunday, October 21, 2007
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