Moving Out and Moving into #16

The last few weeks have been consumed with moving. I quit school with a kids a couple of weeks before I was planning to because I was not doing a good job homeschooling them or packing. I knew that the packing had to happen and that we could start school early in the fall and do some stuff over the summer and several of our subjects were already done so I don't feel bad about it. I knew that we were planning on taking the whole month of June off because it is Glenn's break so we didn't quit too much before I was planning to.

It seemed to me that packing goes better every time that we move and this time was no exception. I am learning some tricks to make it easier for myself. Not easy mind you but easier. For a while when I first found out that we had to move because of our landlord planning to move in I had a goal of 5 boxes a day. That was manageable until I was done packing books. They are the easy part but we do have a lot of them! After that I struggled because I didn't know what we were and were not going to need in the last 2 weeks we were in our last apartment.

One nice thing about this move was that, though it cost us a half month's rent, we had a 2 ½ week window to move in. That makes it so much less stressful that trying to move everything out and in in one day. Glenn and Phil, one of his classmates, did most of the heavy lifting on two consecutive Fridays as study breaks. That was a HUGE blessing to me (and to our marriage – we often get mad at each other when we move heavy stuff together.)

As we were packing and cleaning the last couple of weeks we have had lots of visitors from the kids on our block. We are sad to be leaving our old street because we have left 6 sad kids that were frequent visitors to our home behind. We are planning on being intentional in keeping in touch with the kids and families on our old street because we know that God put them in our lives for a reason and being only 5 blocks away it won't be easy but if we plan in that direction we will be able to continue to have a relationship with them.

We spent our first night at our new place on Friday (after a fun visit from Russ, Camy & Malachi) but went back to our old place for a couple of hours on Saturday and Sunday to finish packing the last of the “yucky stage” and clean up. It looks a lot nicer than when we moved in (with the toilet and sink in the dining room, about an inch of sawdust and construction materials all over the place). On Monday we stopped back to grab our bags to take to Salvation Army and turn our keys over to our landlord.

Our new living room is still a hallway of boxes but more unpacking is getting done every day. It has been fun to finally use our lockers that we picked up off craigslist to help us get organized. A tour of our new apartment will be posted when we get unpacked (which we are hoping to have mostly done before we go to PA next weekend – we'll see on that one.)