Family Pride’s Blog

There’s nothing like a week in which you pack up your whole life, move to a new city, open a new office, and ready yourself for your first cruise ever! Friday, June 29, the Family Pride staff taped up the last boxes in the DC office that needed to be shipped up to 41 Winter Street, our new digs in downtown Boston. And we opened those same boxes in our fourth floor office near Boston Common bright and early Monday morning!

Now we’re sitting pretty on the r family vacations summer 2007 cruise, but that’s getting ahead of the story. Here’s how we got through last week, and how we ended up where we are today:

Heading out Saturday morning, I drove up from DC to Boston in my car, with Sara Leckey, Development Associate at Family Pride, in tow. (Actually she was in the seat beside me, but I digress…) As any good Family Pride staffer would, Sara and I maximized the moving experience by taking the opportunity to stop off over night in Brooklyn and visit friends. She and I started working at Family Pride on the same day over a year ago (we like to call it our “workiversary”) and have grown quite close since then–thus it only made sense that we would move in together once we shifted from DC to Boston. By Tuesday night of last week, our apartment in nearby Somerville was mostly unpacked (if not a little bare). And the office–well that’s another story entirely.

As many of you know, we lost phone service in both DC and Boston when we opened the new office–a fluke of expansion. The same can be said for our Internet connection and–shh, don’t tell anyone–we had to steal wireless signals from our neighbors all last week just to get by. It’s like the nonprofit equivalent of roughing it while camping in the woods. But we knew there were only so many problems we could fix, printers we could set up, and photos of your families we could tack up on our walls; we had to prepare ourselves for the fastly approaching r family cruise!

Just a week after I left my house in DC for good, I woke up at the crack of down–literally, 5:30am–to drive around Boston picking up Family Pride staff members to deliver them to Jennifer Chrisler’s new home in Newton, MA. Jenn had arranged for a shuttle bus to take the staff and some lucky others to the port on New York City’s West Side. The drive is 4.5 hours long. We left promptly at 8am and needed to get there around 1pm. Danger, apparently, is our middle name.

It was a morning of intense hustle and bustle as we loaded everyone onto the bus. And $130 in parking tickets later (Somerville isn’t very forgiving of new residents without time to get their parking stickers), I was more than happy to leave my car in Jenn’s driveway, safe for a week from overzealous meter maids.

The bus ride was eventful, to say the least, especially since it almost cost us the cruise, but I can’t write about that now. We’ve got a late-night staff meeting planned and if I don’t run now I’ll be late. Check back tomorrow morning. I’ll finish this story soon!

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