THE DEVIL IS IN THE DETAILS

Most everyone knows we have moved, so we frequently get some variant of the same question: Are you all moved in yet?

My answer each time is the same - - all of our stuff is there. . . but I wouldn't exactly refer to it as "all moved in" just yet. The essentials are in place, but the devil is in the details. Sheets and blankets are tacked in the bedroom windows to offer some privacy until our curtains come in. The living room sits mostly vacant, save for the television and a large china cabinet until we have the chance to go look for new furniture. Anyone who calls will find that they are unable to leave a message if we're not home because I haven't yet been able to locate the box containing the phone with the answering machine.

Moving is a slow process, particularly when you have small children and you and your spouse both work full time. I told someone yesterday that I feel like my life the last month and a half has felt like someone pressed the fast forward button. I feel like I am constantly in a state of rapid movement from one thing to the next until I finally collapse into bed at the end of the day. Bear with me if I don't update my blog everyday. My plate is so full, I think I need sideboards!

IT'S THE THOUGHT THAT COUNTS. . . .

I worked on packing up the kitchen stuff last night. This morning, Maggie asked me to make her oatmeal, but regretfully, the oatmeal container was packed in one of the 20-some odd boxes of “kitchen stuff.” She settled for scrambled eggs. I find it amazing that so far, I have packed up about 20 or so boxes of stuff out of my tiny little kitchen - - and still have a few to go. Grandma Dot would definitely be proud of the amount of stuff I managed to shove into one space.

Speaking of that, when I cleaned out one of the cabinets, way in the back I found something that I haven’t seen since we moved into that house six years ago and had forgotten we had. It made me laugh out loud to see it, in fact. Ten years ago, when Chris and I got married, one of the gifts we were given was an expandable trivet. That was the only gift that was in the package - - a small, metal frame with hinges in the middle to allow it to expand so a hot dish could be set on it. It had to cost all of about $3.99 - - the wrapping itself probably cost more than the present. I can still remember being baffled when I opened it because I couldn’t figure out what it was, or why someone would just give us a trivet. Harder still was trying to write an acceptable thank you note for such an odd and let’s face it, really cheap gift. Rather than having someone say, “you guys are worth less than $5 to me,” I would just as soon have gotten a card with nothing from them. If it really is the thought that counts, then we were apparently not very highly thought of.

So last night, I rediscovered the expandable trivet and had a good laugh remembering our bewilderment when we unwrapped it in August 1997. As I have not used it in the last six years and haven’t even given it a second thought, I figured we could probably live without it from here on out. After ten years, the sad little expandable trivet that never got used finally ended up in the pile destined for garbage collection.

THE OBSTACLE COURSE

My house has become an obstacle course. Everyone continually asks us how the packing is going, and I tell them my home has become a maze of boxes. I think they think I am joking, but if you were to come to my house, you would see that clearly, I am not. Boxes are stacked three and four high and several rows deep in most rooms, including the hallways. I have so many bruises on my legs from running into boxes that I could be a poster child for abuse. I think of these box-packed rooms often as something of a gauntlet.

My panic has mostly subsided over the fear of not getting done in time to move. We have a good portion of our things packed, save for the kitchen and our clothes. I also have not packed many of the kids’ toys yet. I actually had tried to pack some of them, but suddenly, toys that they seldom play with became prized possessions. Since those were the toys that they couldn’t have, then those were the ones that they wanted, and they kept coming along and opening the box and taking them out. I decided it was somewhat of a futile effort and just gave up until closer to moving day.

I must say that Chris has made great strides in our downsizing efforts. He has willingly parted with many boxes of things that I never thought I would see go out the door. As we were sitting in the living room last night, we were sorting through some boxes and talking, and I was drinking a glass of very good pinot noir wine out of a Garfield mug because my mom packed all my wine glasses when she came to help me on Wednesday afternoon. I told him that I was proud of him for getting rid of so much stuff. He told me that, for the record, he was done getting rid of his things, and the stuff that was left wasn’t going anywhere. I told him that ten years ago, he never would have imagined parting with all the stuff he is now, so who knows what will happen in another ten? A girl can hope, can’t she?

TIME CONCEPTS

As with most preschool age kids, Aleita has difficulty with time concepts. Like my nephew Truman, Aleita is having a hard time wrapping her head around the idea of the difference between a nap and going to bed at night. When she wakes up from her nap in the afternoon, she always assumes another day has started. She also can't seem to get the correct terminology nailed down for mealtimes. She will often come in as I am cooking supper and ask what we're having for lunch.

Of late, Aleita's difficulty with time concepts is evident in the difficulty she is having with the timeframe of when we will be moving into our new home. She always thinks that when we discuss moving, it is going to happen tomorrow. As she sees me packing boxes in preparation for the move, she assumes it is because we are pulling up stakes tomorrow. We have explained that it will be in a few weeks, and I even showed her the days on the calendar. I know that if I were one of those supermoms, I would have some cool activity called "X days until move" and we would dutifully march to the calendar each morning and X the day off with a bright red marker and count how many days left until the move. Sorry - with the maze of boxes growing every day in our home, I can barely find my way to the door, much less remember to do the X the calendar thing.

Anyway - today my mom came over and helped me do some packing. When Chris got home from work with the kids in tow, Aleita immediately wanted to start "helping." A 3-year old's help with packing isn't exactly that. Again, the supermom would've found some way for the young child to lend a hand with the packing, but this frazzled mom simply turned on the Backyardigans that my friend Tivo captures for me every day so that I can have a half an hour when we get home each day to quiet the chaos.

Today, Aleita wasn't having it. She looked around the living room and noticed that her books were missing from their baskets. When she asked where they were, I told her that I had packed them, but that I had left a few out for her. She went up to her room and found the ones I hadn't yet packed (so we would have at least a few to read in the next few weeks) and she brought them down to me. "Let me put them in the box," she said. I told her that we were leaving them out so we would have books to read. She started to get very upset, and through our dialogue, I realized that she thought I wasn't packing them because they were getting left behind. Mind you, I left out some of her favorite books and she wasn't about to just leave them there for some other family to enjoy. No, sir indeed - - especially since she can't get the idea out of her head that we are leaving tomorrow.

After she and I had talked about it at great length, I felt she was starting to understand that we were not leaving her books behind. She looked at me thoughtfully for a moment, then said, "I'm going to get my Little People so you can pack them. I'm not leaving them here too!" So much for reasoning with a three-year old.

HEAD EM' UP, MOVE EM' OUT

There is a thought that keeps running through my head constantly now. . ."WHEN IN THE H*&L AM I GOING TO FIND TIME TO PACK ALL THIS STUFF?" When we first set our date for closing on our house, it was about five weeks away. That seemed like more than enough time to get our things in order and be able to move out. Our moving date is now three weeks away, and I am really not that much closer to getting things ready to go than I was two weeks ago. Panic is starting to set in a little bit. How I am going to get a five bedroom house packed and ready to go in three weeks?

It's not as though I have been sitting around twiddling my thumbs. The past two weeks have been extremely busy for us and have mostly been filled with all those things involved in finding a NEW place to live (it seemed a good idea to have someplace to go to once we actually had all the stuff in boxes.) We now have the new place all ironed out, but finding the time to get our current house packed up is somewhat challenging.

The day gets started about 5:45AM each morning for Chris and me. We both work all day. By the time we pick up the kids and get home from work, it is about 4:30 or 5:00PM. By the time homework is done, supper is made and eaten, baths are given, bedtime books are read and prayers are said, it is pushing 8:00PM. I don't know about you, but after fourteen hours or so on the go, I need a chance to sit down and take a breather for a minute. I know I quite literally need to "get packing," but I am finding that my time, as well as my motivation to do so is limited.

Part of the difficulty also lies in the fact that we are moving to a slightly smaller home, and need to downsize. Chris and I both realize that we have a lot of stuff that we really just need to get rid of because we have allowed too many things to just accumulate that we don't need or use all that often. Moving presents a perfect opportunity to sort through our belongings and cut out some of the unnecessary clutter. The problem is that sorting also takes extra time.

We plan on working on it as much as possible this weekend. However, I am going to have to get myself psyched up to listening to the whining that will commence from the children once they realize we will be working in the house all day packing. Saturday is typically our "go do something day," especially when the weather is nice. We have a family membership to the zoo, so that is a popular Saturday destination spot. It is nice sometimes just to head to the park and let the kids play, and then go somewhere for lunch. When we have stay-at-home Saturdays, it also means that we will be listening to the bickering that will no doubt commence between Maggie and Aleita. They manage to play together nicely for about an hour, then the squabbling begins. It usually results in the two of them being forced to go to separate areas of the house to play so that we don't have to step in to referee an argument every three minutes.

I figure that I will probably end up taking a day or two off of work in the next few weeks to get everything finished up. Packing up without two extra little helpers around is sometimes much easier. It will also make it much easier to get rid of a certain hideously ugly monkey bank that my husband had as a child and insists on moving with us from house to house. Just kidding, honey. . . really.

SOLD!

On Saturday afternoon, we told Maggie we needed to talk to her. I believe the exact words I used were, "Maggie, we have some big news to share with you." All of a sudden, her little face tensed up and she worriedly asked, "Are we getting another baby? I don't want a another little sister!" Chris and I were both laughing so hard that neither of us could answer her for a bit, causing her to repeat louder, "ARE WE GETTING ANOTHER BABY?!?"

Once I stopped laughing, I told her that the news wasn't quite that big. I explained that we had people that wanted to buy our house, and that we would be moving in about a month. She, of course, has asked the same question that everyone else asks once I tell them the house has sold: "where are we moving to?"

That is a good question. The answer is: I don't know just yet. Chris and I agreed that we didn't want to do too much house hunting before we had committed buyers for our house. It is just too disappointing to find a house you really like, but not be able to move on it because your house hasn't sold yet. We also refuse to do a bridge loan because we are not willing to get ourselves in over our heads by having two homes at once.

Unfortunately, this means that we are now concentrating a lot of our efforts on finding new digs. We have agreed that we aren't going to "settle," and that if we don't find what we want right away, we'll rent for awhile until we do. Hopefully that won't be the case, but we'll have to see. When we bought the house we live in now, there was about a month between when we sold our previous home to when we could move into our new one. My parents were generous enough to let us live with them during that time. At that time though, Maggie was only 9 months old and still a cute little cuddly baby. Now Maggie is six, and Aleita is three and the energy and noise level has dramatically increased (to say the least.) I am not sure if Grandpa and Grandma would be ready for a month with our two wild ones.

For now, I am a little overwhelmed by the idea of packing up an entire house in about a month. I know it will all come together, but I know my stress level is definitely already a little elevated. Got any plans for October 13th? Moving party at my house!!