I can’t believe it’s the end of April already! Insert your choice of cliche here about how time is flying, but man. For real.
The weather’s been gorgeous all week and I’m hoping it holds through the weekend. Emma has a birthday party tomorrow, and we’re all going to the Astros game on Sunday afternoon. They’re doing “Kids Run the Bases” after the game and Emma is old enough to do that now so that will hopefully be fun for her! Think they’ll let parents run with the kids? Cause I want to do it too…
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Emma’s teacher messaged us yesterday to let us know that Emma would be winning her class’s character award at this month’s school spirit day — the last one of the year! It took a bit of complicated morning planning to get Charlotte dropped off before Emma, but both Jose and I were able to go to spirit day to cheer for her. Hooray! I also went back to have lunch with her a couple hours later. I’d already agreed to come to lunch as a reward for finishing her latest bedtime behavior sticker chart, but it turned out to be perfect to celebrate her character award too.
Both Jose and I noticed and later commented to each other on Emma’s at-school personality. She was excited to see us at the end of spirit day, but also more subdued than normal and very ready to get back to her class and into their daily routine — I think the recognition, plus the unusual sight of her parents at school, threw her off. At lunch she was more relaxed, but as her class started to get up, she threw her trash away and jumped in line with her friends without even telling me goodbye! It made me laugh, and I think/hope these are all signs that she’s comfortable with her friends and with her class and at her school. Kindergarten on the whole has been such a huge leap in her level of independence, and as a parent that’s pretty cool to see.
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Jose and I are going to see Hamilton tonight!! The tour arrived in Houston earlier this week and is here through mid-May. We didn’t get tickets through any of the usual options or lottery, so decided to just buy some off StubHub last weekend. They were marked up from face value, of course, but the markup was fairly reasonable given the demand, and the price fell below the limit we had agreed on before looking for tickets.
But here’s where I get to tell you our ridiculous ticket saga. The tickets we bought were physical, paper tickets — not electronic — so they had to be mailed to us. Jose ordered them on Saturday. On Wednesday, when they still weren’t in the mailbox, we went online to track them down and discovered that according to the tracking, they had been delivered on Tuesday afternoon — and via UPS, so they should have been on our doorstep, not in the mailbox anyway. There was nada. Our concern quickly turned into a minor panic when I noticed that the tracking said they had been delivered to League City, not Houston.
Our old house. The one we sold more than a year ago.
Jose had also used StubHub for our Astros opening day tickets, but they were electronic so he never realized that he hadn’t updated the address on his account. And now our pricey, unreplaceable Hamilton tickets had been delivered to our old house. The only info I had on the buyers was their names — no phone number, email, or other contact information. And what if they threw them away? (Or even worse — what if they opened them and said “hey, free Hamilton tickets!”)
Jose immediately called StubHub who were like “uhhh, you really need to do whatever you can to retrieve those tickets,” which of course is an entirely reasonable response since having the wrong address wasn’t their fault. It was 11:00 on Wednesday night by this point, so I began a barrage of messages in an attempt to get contact information for the current owners of our old house. I messaged our realtor to see if she could help. I scrolled back over a year on her Facebook timeline because I recalled that someone had tagged both the buyers and her on the day we closed. I sent both people a Facebook message but was concerned they might not see them since they’re not FB friends. I messaged our old next door neighbor to see if she had a phone number for them. And Jose decided he would get up the next morning and drive over to our old house to knock on the door and leave a note on the doorstep. Then, we went to bed wondering if we’d just flushed our ticket money down the toilet.
I woke up on Thursday morning and immediately checked Facebook to find that my old next door neighbor had the woman’s cell number. Hooray! I waited until the somewhat respectable hour of 7:30 and then sent a text. I didn’t get an immediate response, but remained optimistic. Jose left to drive over there, and I left to take the girls to school. I checked Facebook again when I got Charlotte to daycare and the man had messaged me back! And he had them! And he would leave them under the doormat! Jose arrived a few minutes later and happily retrieved the UPS envelope, we both breathed giant sighs of relief, and all’s well that ends well.
And thus ends the saga of our Hamilton tickets. Phew.
LOL what a saga over those tickets! I’m glad you were able to get them back, though!