The Joyner Journey: The Dallas Experience

This past weekend we went to Dallas to visit Dave's parents and look for baby stuff. I was late eating lunch with my girlfriends before we were supposed to leave, so Dave was in a huff and a hurry to leave at 2pm on Friday, and thus the story begins....

I was inside getting the last few things together and Dave had taken our one bag (we packed in the same bag) out to the car to load up, when he realized it was locked and he didn't have his keys. So, he sat the bag down behind the car, and apparently never moved it. Because when we arrived in Dallas we had no bag...and nothing for the whole weekend (a Target run got us through the next couple of days). At first we thought it was kind of funny and that surely we had just left it out on the driveway and our friends the Souths (who were feeding Harper) could go by and it would be sitting outside, but when they arrived the bag was no where to be seen. They checked every where inside and out, but no sign of anything. Its about now that we started adding up just how much it would cost to replace everything in that bag, our dental night guards alone would be 600 a piece, not to mention the bobbi brown makeup I have been collecting for years. It was going to be close to $3500.

We tried telling ourselves that the neighbors might have picked it up and they hadn't contacted us because they didn't have our numbers. We decided to hold out hope on filing an insurance claim or police report until Monday morning when we headed home and still hadn't heard anything. Luckily the insurance was going to cover it, and the police report had been filed so we thought the story of the lost bag was coming to a close.

But here's where it gets weird...after being home for about 15 mins the phone rings and an unidentified woman asks if we are looking for a brown duffel bag. Dave says that we are and she tells us that she works in a building on Andrews Hwy (down south) and that this brown bag had appeared in the lobby of the their building on Friday afternoon and no one had claimed it so she went through it, found our number on the dental case of Dave's night guard, and was calling to get our bag back to us. We were bewildered...how did this bag end up in the lobby of a random office building down south, when we had headed out of town going the exact opposite direction...Dave went to pick it up and nothing was broken or stolen...truly crazy. But it did appear the bag had been drug under the car.

So all we can figure is that we ran over it when we backed out of the drive way, drug it a good ways, and then someone found it in the road, picked it up, decided they didn't want it and left it in this office building. I guess God answers prayers in the most uncommon ways.

Here is the bag after being drug behind the car:

I am just so thankful to have our stuff back...but still can't figure out how it ended up in the lobby of an office building next to the Coke machine.

As for the rest of the weekend we had a great time. Dave's cousin Joe, his wife Gilda, and their 9 month old daughter Charlotte came over to the Joyners for lunch Saturday and we had a lot of fun meeting the baby for the first time. We also were able to go baby shopping! I think we have finally made some decisions about bedding, furniture, and our stroller. I think I am most excited about the stroller. I had been researching it for some time, and came across the Baby Orbit line....this is not your ordinary stroller. It has all these amazing features and it's design is for people who travel a lot. The starter kit includes the infant carrier, the car base, and the stroller base...I had found it online before we saw it in person and Dave had been adamantly opposed to spending that kind of money on a stroller/car set...but when he saw this beauty in action and all that it could do he too was smitten. So, I think the grandparents are chipping in and we hope this is what everyone says it is. When we were in the store looking at it, another customer came up and said she had the orbit and it was the best money they had spent, she went on and on, which is the best kind of endorsement you can get, another parent who has used it with both of her kids.

We also like this bedding from DwellStudio: