Our moving truck arrives on Monday—ironically 23 months to the day we left Durham—but our moving crew isn't scheduled until Tuesday. In a way this is an act of grace because it allows us one more day to get our act together. Really we're pretty close to being done.
I think we have one or two more things to disassemble.
We like to joke that in our house we only ever disassemble (and never dissemble).
The sad part about disassembling furniture, though, is knowing that we're going to have to reassemble it all over again. It's kind of like making a fancy cake in that regard. You put all this effort into a project only to destroy/undo all your work. Oh, well. We're looking forward to getting settled even if it means putting all the furniture we just took apart back together again.
Moving always seems to breed chaos, at least for us (but surely for everybody).
When we moved to Jordan we put all our belongings in one room of our apartment and then sublet it out. And that was crazy. I had to go to the dentist because I was in so much pain I could have sworn I needed a root canal, but instead I was told that I'm just a little ball of stress and had been grinding my teeth at night (and that was the root of my pain because my mouth was cavity-free).
When we moved to Cairo we took our one-year-old who never slept and had no plans for where to live and had to pack our entire life into a few suitcases (and everything else into an aisle of the big storage room of Reid and Karen's Orem house). It was actually all terribly exciting—but still stressful, I guess—and if I had to do it over a million times, I would.
When we moved back from Cairo we took two children with us and up until shortly before we left had zero plans for our future. So that was awesome. (But look at us, all grown up and future-fied. Our past-selves had nothing to worry about.)
When we moved to North Carolina, Andrew had just spent three weeks in Ghana, then he came home and Benjamin was born early so we endured the NICU and then moved. So that was a crazy time.
When we left North Carolina, Andrew defended his dissertation three days before leaving to drive the kids to Utah and I was super pregnant and wasn't supposed to lift anything heavier than twenty pounds so I would go around the house packing boxes and then would tape them closed and just leave them on the floor wherever I'd packed them. Oh, and I had a broken toe. Super fun stuff.
Andrew assures me that our current move is running smoother than any of those moves, that we're right on schedule, that we're super organized, and that we'll definitely fit everything in the truck. But I'm not so sure. It still feels rather chaotic to me.
I suppose we've had the added stress of weeding through all of Reid and Karen's things in preparation for Reid to sell this house. He doesn't want to (or need to) live here all alone after we leave so he's downsizing majorly and since we're here we were tasked with sorting and culling and repacking and distributing things that Grandpa didn't want to take with him. So between getting our own stuff ready to ship across the country we've been moving refrigerators out of the garage, archiving photographs, and making runs to DI (that stands for Deseret Industries, which is the "goodwill" of Utah (so if you're not from the Mormon Belt you probably don't know what that means; I had no idea what it meant until...my mom read me some poem a Utahn had written about funny phrases used culturally within The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but more specifically Utah, because it also talked about a lot of BSA stuff that I didn't know about either; anyway, the poem said something like, "and now our ratty clothes are going to DI" and I was like, "They're going to do what now?" and my mom explained that it was like the Salvation Army, which was the only goodwill place I knew of, probably (and this was well into my teen years, so, yeah)).
It's been a little chaotic. But we really are almost done. We've had so many wonderful people taking our little people out of our hair so that we can work unencumbered (my mom, specifically, has been amazing, but we've been farming them out elsewhere as well) and I think we can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel.
I think we have one or two more things to disassemble.
We like to joke that in our house we only ever disassemble (and never dissemble).
The sad part about disassembling furniture, though, is knowing that we're going to have to reassemble it all over again. It's kind of like making a fancy cake in that regard. You put all this effort into a project only to destroy/undo all your work. Oh, well. We're looking forward to getting settled even if it means putting all the furniture we just took apart back together again.
Moving always seems to breed chaos, at least for us (but surely for everybody).
When we moved to Jordan we put all our belongings in one room of our apartment and then sublet it out. And that was crazy. I had to go to the dentist because I was in so much pain I could have sworn I needed a root canal, but instead I was told that I'm just a little ball of stress and had been grinding my teeth at night (and that was the root of my pain because my mouth was cavity-free).
When we moved to Cairo we took our one-year-old who never slept and had no plans for where to live and had to pack our entire life into a few suitcases (and everything else into an aisle of the big storage room of Reid and Karen's Orem house). It was actually all terribly exciting—but still stressful, I guess—and if I had to do it over a million times, I would.
When we moved back from Cairo we took two children with us and up until shortly before we left had zero plans for our future. So that was awesome. (But look at us, all grown up and future-fied. Our past-selves had nothing to worry about.)
When we moved to North Carolina, Andrew had just spent three weeks in Ghana, then he came home and Benjamin was born early so we endured the NICU and then moved. So that was a crazy time.
When we left North Carolina, Andrew defended his dissertation three days before leaving to drive the kids to Utah and I was super pregnant and wasn't supposed to lift anything heavier than twenty pounds so I would go around the house packing boxes and then would tape them closed and just leave them on the floor wherever I'd packed them. Oh, and I had a broken toe. Super fun stuff.
Andrew assures me that our current move is running smoother than any of those moves, that we're right on schedule, that we're super organized, and that we'll definitely fit everything in the truck. But I'm not so sure. It still feels rather chaotic to me.
I suppose we've had the added stress of weeding through all of Reid and Karen's things in preparation for Reid to sell this house. He doesn't want to (or need to) live here all alone after we leave so he's downsizing majorly and since we're here we were tasked with sorting and culling and repacking and distributing things that Grandpa didn't want to take with him. So between getting our own stuff ready to ship across the country we've been moving refrigerators out of the garage, archiving photographs, and making runs to DI (that stands for Deseret Industries, which is the "goodwill" of Utah (so if you're not from the Mormon Belt you probably don't know what that means; I had no idea what it meant until...my mom read me some poem a Utahn had written about funny phrases used culturally within The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but more specifically Utah, because it also talked about a lot of BSA stuff that I didn't know about either; anyway, the poem said something like, "and now our ratty clothes are going to DI" and I was like, "They're going to do what now?" and my mom explained that it was like the Salvation Army, which was the only goodwill place I knew of, probably (and this was well into my teen years, so, yeah)).
It's been a little chaotic. But we really are almost done. We've had so many wonderful people taking our little people out of our hair so that we can work unencumbered (my mom, specifically, has been amazing, but we've been farming them out elsewhere as well) and I think we can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel.
Fingers crossed for this chaos to pass as easily and quickly as possible. It will get done, somehow! And happy birthday. :)
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