July 2017-The Dog Days of Summer | The Harris Family Blog

Look at these three hounds….taking a minute of the day to rest and soak up a few rays of sunshine.

Never mind, that’s what they do every single minute of the day. They just move from my bed, to the couch, to their favorite chair, to the front driveway, to the back patio. In all fairness, they take two breaks from this strenuous activity to eat.

Walter and Charlie went right to work teaching Cooper the lay of the land.

Speaking of rays of sunshine, have you ever seen two cuter girls? They too were taking a break from the strenuous activities at the city pool. I can fast forward 10 years in my mind and picture them doing this exact thing. Except that instead of cute one-piece swimsuits, they’ll have awful skimpy bikinis. And, instead of sunglasses, they’ll be shielding their eyes with their iPhones. Ugh….why can’t time stand still?

Moving along….literally. The countdown to the big day was on. We sold our house and moving day was scheduled for July 16. There was A LOT to do to get ready…..

There may have been boxes to pack, furniture to bubble wrap, children to feed, but DAMN IT I needed to get my hair done. Who knows how long it would be before I found a new hairdresser in a new city? #Priorities.

The days leading up to the move are a blur in my mind, I’m afraid. I was riddled with the guilt of trying to give the kids the best summer I could, while still tackling that mountain of to-do items. Packing a moving a house is one thing. Packing and moving to a new city is an entirely different thing, and although I knew this all along, I wasn’t prepared for exactly how much work it would be, or how stressful it was. In the end, I shipped the kids off to their very capable grandparents for a couple of days of pool time and snuggles. The transaction of selling our home turned into a greater fiasco than it should have been…BUT if I tell that story I will use words about people that are not kind and let’s remember that this is a family blog. Once we signed our copies of the closing documents, we headed out for one last hurrah in Old Town. And where does one go to get the full FoCo experience?

If you guessed The Town Pump, you would be right. We threw down a couple of Jello shots, and then moseyed on over to Lucky Joes to ensure we got a spot at the bar for Coors Light, peanuts and people watching.

Hangovers in hand, we woke up the next morning and headed to Denver for the new house closing. It wasn’t simple or seamless either (aforementioned people were real a-holes), and I vowed to NEVER do this again. The next few days were a whirlwind of miles spent between house old and new.

On the day of the actual move, once the moving company filled up THREE semi trucks. this is what my car looked like. Look at those poor sweet dogs. They had to drive for over an hour like this….

The next few days were a blur too. There was a sea of boxes everywhere I looked.

50 of them here….

Another 500,000 of them there….

Between unpacking those boxes, we also had to scoot back to Fort Collins multiple times for golf and tennis matches for the young man. Those weeks were a testament to Dory the fish….”just keep swimming, just keep swimming.”

In the midst of all of the chaos, we did have one small tragedy. Looks like a scene out of a horror movie….

But, before you get too worried that we’ve all been massacred by someone in a hockey mask, it was poor Charlie who’s tail got caught in the self-closing garage door. The kids had gone out to the garage to get in the car and I was lagging behind. The doors in the new house are BIG and HEAVY and I’m afraid Charlie’s back end didn’t quite make it in time. I heard howling and crying and opened the door to see what looked like a firehose spraying around the garage. You can imagine the amount of crying and screaming happening, so I was relieved that a quick bandage and some extra treats made Charlie Brown good as new. Poor Malory though will be traumatized for a while I’m afraid….she was the one who slammed the door on his tail. He keeps his eyes on her now for sure. Danger in the form of a 4 year old.