After signing a bunch of digital documents (using a Passport account I was required to set up), I was finally official. All that remained was to move my little family to the greater Seattle area.
Now, I can’t remember the details of the relocation package that Microsoft offered me to help me move to Washingon, and I vaguely remember signing something about keeping the details to myself, but suffice it to say that Microsoft very generously reimbursed us for a lot of our expenses, from mileage to hotels to restaurants. Since we had our baby boy with us, the benefits were calculated even higher, and even though we tried to be fair and make sure he got his 1/3 of the benefits, there are only so many fried macaroni appetizers a one-year-old can eat, so I had to pick up the slack 
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We actually owned a little house before moving to Seattle under which we rented out the basement to a young college couple. We toyed with the idea of renting out our area of the house, but we decided the hassle wouldn’t be worth it, so we left it vacant. So, at the beginning of June, we packed up our little Neon, a stuffed-to-the-brim cargo bag
We stayed the night near Twin Falls, Idaho, then in Yakima, Washington. The next day, we arrived in Bellevue, where we found our Microsoft-subsidized apartment, picked up the keys, and moved our stuff in. Our apartment was nice, but it wasn’t really child friendly. The dining table was over carpet (not what we were used to in our house back home). The second bedroom was way on the other side of the apartment. There were floor-to-ceiling mirrored closet doors, which normally wouldn’t be a problem, but little hands leave many little fingerprints on glass. Overall, though, we liked how the apartment looked.
The major drawback of the apartment was NO AIR CONDITIONING! Come to find out, no one in Seattle even knows what that is! None of the apartments come with it. I know the locals say (at least the landlords do) “it’s only hot for 1-2 months in the summer”, but not when your apartment is on the 4th, muggy floor. Believe me, I was grateful for the nice looking, clean apartment, but my pregnant wife (did I mentioned she was pregnant with our 2nd child?) didn’t take to the heat very well. Consequently, the first purchase we made was a big, standing air conditioner
Anyway, once we got settled into our Bellevue apartment, we tried to relax a bit. The next day, had my first day as an intern at Microsoft.