Apartment-Hunting Weekend

I'm not sure I've spelled it out explicitly here on the blog, but we are moving to Minneapolis in June. Geoff is coming to the end of his four-year residency here in Evanston, and the next step in the process is a one-year fellowship with the University of Minnesota Medical Center. So we are moving to the Twin Cities this summer and almost certainly moving again to a new, as-yet-undecided location again next summer. This is not uncommon in a medical career, but it still feels like kind of a strange thing to be doing at this stage of our lives.


So this past weekend was "find a rental in the Twin Cities" weekend. My parents offered to keep Cora for us, and we jumped at the chance. We knew she would have a much better time with them than schlepping around to view apartments with us. We were right. We are glad they had the time together, because Geoff and I are in agreement that separating Cora and the grandparents is the number-one most wrenching aspect of this summer's move. But that's another post.

Hazel, better known as "the baby who won't drink from a bottle," came with me so that she wouldn't starve. I was very nervous about trying to do a whirlwind apartment-finding trip with a baby, but it turned out that at four months she's at a great age for traveling--stable enough to go a few hours between feedings, enough head control to be easily carried around, but too little to get easily bored or squirmy. Plus she requires no feeding equipment or food, and slept right in the king-size bed with us, so she had almost no luggage.


When we arrived at appointments I would take her out of her car seat and strap her to me in the baby carrier and off we'd go. We got lots of comments on what a smiley, easy-going baby she was.

The only trouble we ran into was that by the end it was too much time in the car seat for her. She did fine on the drive up there (nine hours including several stops for baby care), then she was in the car seat a lot all weekend, and by the second half of the trip home she had had it and was making her displeasure known.

It wasn't in vain, though, as we did find a place! We arrived in town late Thursday night, got up Friday morning and saw three apartments. The first two made us think, "Meh, we could make it work if we had to." The third was much better, and I was relieved to see it. Finally, a place I could actually picture myself happily functioning with the kids. (Geoff, we have to assume, will be working long hours and we'll see little of him--if that turns out not to be the case, then hooray, bonus!)

It's a pretty generic and nondescript townhouse in a first-ring suburb, but it has the amenities to ease the hassles for a situation like ours (no lawn care, off-street parking, laundry in unit, etc.) and best of all, space. Two thousand square feet is a lot of space--our current place is 800, our place in Brooklyn was 500, and our place in Queens was 425. And this Minneapolis place is still fifty-five dollars less per month than we paid in Brooklyn. We considered putting down a deposit immediately but decided to sleep on it.

Saturday we got up and went to see one final apartment. It turned out to be very much like our current place in Evanston. A first-floor duplex, great walkable neighborhood, close to Geoff's work, building originally from the 1870s and nicely redone inside--definitely a hipper, more urban, more interesting home than the townhouse, and two years ago we would have jumped at it. It was a great home for a couple with one small baby. But needing space for a toddler/pre-schooler and a second child, and a work-at-home parent, and a long Minnesota winter to get through, it was just too small for us. It was a heart-breaker to turn it down, and kind of highlighted how much our lives have changed these past couple of years.

We didn't spend too much time being sad, though, because we're pretty excited about the townhouse. Like "wake up in the morning, remember that we got the townhouse, break into a smile" excited. We headed right over to put down our deposit on it. By Saturday afternoon we were back on the road to Illinois, and arrived home late Saturday night.

Tomorrow, a tour of the new place . . .