Hello from another week in moving limbo!
Positives from the week:
1-No one is physically ill at this time...except maybe Jack who appears to be coming down with something, but it hasn't landed yet so I'm going to take this win for one more day and cling to it.
2-My parents continue to feed and shelter us and be the best company, and pick Jack up from school etc etc etc. This would be a muchhhh harder move if I didn't have them in my corner.
3-We are discovering the magic of Utah parks! Yes it is freezing outside. But wow, the parks here are phenomenal, and so prolific. This is especially fabulous to us coming from a town that had exactly one public park, and it was pretty sketchy.
4-We have heat set up in our rental house. We even hosted a little play date with my high school bestie and her kids one afternoon to try and infuse some happy play into our formerly sad, empty, cold space. We're getting there.
5-We were able to attend some get-togethers with family members this week and it just warmed my heart so much. I haven't seen some of my Haines cousins in a decade and we had the loveliest casual potluck of Haineses yesterday. My kids played so well with all the other kids around that, even without Jared there, I was able to eat and chat with long-lost relatives the whole time (ok, I think I am the long-lost relative in this situation). I almost cried from happiness on the drive home.
6-Jared drives home to us tomorrow!!!!
Negatives from the week:
1. Jack is having a really hard time with school right now. He got put in a loud class, and his recess and P.E. hours haven't been what he expected. He's just taking all the changes pretty hard. I'm going to be in touch with his teacher to see what we can do to hopefully make things better going forward, but man. It's borderline impossible to get him to go into his school in the mornings and I feel so sad for him.
2. Jared is going to be driving home to us in the middle of a really bad weather system hitting Washington. And there kind of isn't another option because the entire 10-day forecast for the mountain passes we normally have to drive through show daily blizzards. He is going to go a different, longer route than usual to try and stay safe. Prayers.
3. I got a bad haircut. I'm normally such an overthinker so it's a mystery why I do this, but I have a bad habit of spontaneously deciding I want a dramatic haircut NOW, looking at professional places and realizing I'll have to wait several days and pay a lot of money, and then saying, "Eh, I'll just run down to Great Clips/Fantastic Sams," where I proceed to get a bad haircut every time. I shouldn't say it's a bad haircut. She actually did a pretty good job. It's just a lot shorter than I was expecting. I told her I wanted it grazing my shoulders, but somehow it ended up at my chin with even shorter layers all around. At first I was like, "Ok cute, this isn't so bad. I look like a 90s hot mom." But then nighttime came and I was like, "Oh no, no no no, this is 100% Severus Snape hair." I will say, I don't hate it. It just doesn't feel like me. But alas, as always, it will grow on me (*snicker, snicker*).
We're going to keep with the fish/river blog titles for a while yet. I'm quirky!
It's been another doozy of a week. I expect the doozies of weeks to continue for another month, at least. Moving is just doozy after doozy. This month feels a lot like when we took hit after hit when we first moved to Grenada. At least this time I have family nearby and we're not in a developing country. You guys. I hope I never take for granted not living in a third-world country. That was way harder than this, and this is pretty stinkin hard. Although in all seriousness, having kids this time around makes the playing field pretty equal to moving to a third-world-country sans kids. At least I was well rested then.
I tried to get us moved into our rental house this week. My parents live about 25 minutes away from the school Jack has started attending, while the rental house is a 5 minute walk from the school. So in my head it seemed like a no-brainer to move into the rental. But it was a brainer, and I did not have the brains to make it work. The first strike against moving into the rental house was when I loaded Alice up to get Jack after school one day, in hopes of staying at the rental all afternoon and night. It turns out that an afternoon in an empty house with two young kids, no other adults, no furniture, and no other belongings or toys is . . . a bit depressing. No duh, Laur. It was novel and fun for half an hour and then I started wanting to cry.
Strike two against moving into the rental house was when I realized there was still a large quantity of cat hair in all the carpets from the previous tenants. I am allergic to cat hair. It was not a good time. This is the point at which we bailed from attempting a night at the rental and drove back to my parents'. The next day I went back to the rental house, hoping to at the very least get Alice's crib set up for when we felt ready for another attempt. Unfortunately, the smoke alarm was chirping every minute or two. I adulted up, grabbed some fresh batteries, and did in fact change the batteries in my rental home's smoke detector. Very demure. Until it did nothing. Tried another set of fresh batteries. Nope again. Had my dad come see if he could fix it. Still no. Strike 3, and back to my parents' home. I texted our landlord, feeling kind of dumb. "Hey I don't like cat hair. Also I can't figure out how to turn off a smoke alarm lol!" (that's a paraphrase, not the actual text)
The next morning after I dropped Jack off for school, I once again stopped by the rental. It was frigid. The thermostat read 54 degrees. I tinkered with the thermostat, got some unpacking done for an hour or so, and the heat never turned on. The next day I returned to find the house at 46 degrees. I did not want to feel EXTRA dumb and have to send my landlord another text. "Plz help, I might not know how to use a thermostat and yes I am in my 30s." But I also didn't want the pipes in his house to start freezing and exploding, so after spending some time in the furnace room reading the owner's manual to the furnace with no luck, I let the landlord know that the furnace might be broken and he sent a furnace repair guy over.
This is where it becomes a really *fun* (embarrassing) story. Our landlord is really chill. I cleared the house back out, and he sent over a team of cleaners to scrub the place of all cat hair. He got the smoke alarm replaced and a furnace guy came and took a look. I get a call late Friday evening from my landlord. "Hey, everything looks good at the house. The HVAC guy came and took a look at the furnace. It looks like you just haven't set up your natural gas or power yet." 😳 I was dumbfounded. WHO LET ME TRY AND SET UP AND MOVE INTO A HOME BY MYSELF. WHERE IS THE ADULT HERE. I'm just a little girl. Anyway that was a little awkward. I think I was like, "Hee hee oopsie, sorry!" And then hung up real fast.
Luckily this gave me something to call and cry for Jared do because homeboy needs some homework assignments. He is straight CHILLIN in Washington with his free times and his naps and his gym bro seshes, and his teeny-tiny 18-hours-a-week work schedule, and his staying at a resort with his parents all weekend while I am over here actually physically dying. No sleeps. Illnesses. A presidential election. Too much adulting. Feral children. Can you tell I am bitter. Yes everyone can tell that. Jared will have his work cut out for him when it comes time to pack the moving truck though, and when he gets here I am taking several days to get away and sleep and sleep and sleep. All by myself. Speaking to no one. Doing little to no adulting. It's more exciting than Christmas to me. By far.
Ok that was a lot of writing. Turns out there's a lot to report during a stressful move! I have way more to say but should probably keep it to myself. Me and Alice are still sick. Alice is mostly better but I still feel pretty awful, especially in the evenings. I told Jared that it feels like an emergency situation that I need to get away to catch up on sleep when he gets here. It feels like my body is sending me messages that really bad things are around the corner if I don't start taking care of myself. So. One more doozy of a week, plus a couple days, then Jared gets here and then it's my turn to go take care of myself for a bit. Oh! Can't forget the big news--we got an offer on our home! It is contingent on the buyer's sale of their own home, which is pretty sketchy in the current housing market but it's still something, and they offered full asking price. Good selling juju over to our buyers, please and thank you.
That's all. I am unwell. But I won't be forever! You'll see! And now for some pictures from our week:
Step 1 complete: The kids and I are in Utah. I'm not sure I would say we "survived" the move to Utah, but we are definitely in Utah and the survival part is TBD. If last week we were salmon swimming upstream against the packing current, this week we have made it to our birth grounds and then proceeded to fall quite ill and abandon all energy/willpower. We now appear to be fish on the brinks of death, being carried back downstream. There's a glimmer of life left that will hopefully reignite sometime soon, but as of now, TBD.
The drive went pretty well. Some screaming and crying took place, but less than our last few Utah drives. I'm grateful that Alice can be entertained by shows and movies a little better now than when she was younger. This time I split the drive up and we stayed a night with my brother's family near Boise. The kids got to play with their cousins while I got to talk to Jordan and Amanda. Unfortunately the kids refused to fall asleep and things were pretty turbulent in the guest room until I threw the kids over my shoulder at 1:30 a.m., busted out to our car for my emergency stash of melatonin, and they finally gave in to the sleep around 2:30 a.m. The next day we played for a while and then drove to my parents' home in the afternoon/evening. I'm glad we got there when we did because Alice and I almost immediately came down with the worst colds of our life. I have never experienced sinus pressure like this. My head feels like it's going to actually explode from the pressure.
I'm so grateful my parents have provided us with a soft landing while I work to get our rental house move-in ready (without the assistance of any of our belongings, as our moving truck won't arrive for another 3+ weeks). This is the first time in over a decade when I've had the experience of staying with my parents and feeling zero desire to go see our favorite sights, eat our favorite Utah foods, do my favorite hikes. It's nice to know, "Hey, we're here for the long haul. It's ok to lie low and succumb to the sickness."
The dry climate has been rough to get used to (stuffy nose, cracked heels and lips and somehow ears), especially in combination with being sick. But it's an acceptable tradeoff to live close to family and all the other Utah things we've been looking forward to. It was magic to go trick-or-treating with my kids, alongside my siblings and their kids. Halloween was so fun and sweet, and it felt like I was in a nostalgic 90s movie of my own childhood. In that moment the sleepless nights felt worth it.
But alas, the sleepless nights continue. We are still very much right smack dab in the middle of a big move, and the kids are feeling uneasy, unsettled, unable to to fall asleep unless I'm laying right next to them. Because we moved a week before daylight savings, I decided to keep them on Washington time so it would be a more seamless transition. The downside was that last week, by the time I got the kids fully settled to sleep at night and was like, "Ok great, finally have time to text my landlord." "I can finally take a shower." "Let's register Jack for school." I'd realize it was 10:30 p.m. and Alice would likely be up multiple times in the night crying for me.
Jared has assured me that when he gets here in 3 weeks he is going to take over night duty and I should go catch a break. But, like, that's 3 weeks away and there are times when I genuinely question if my body will survive that long. There have been moments when I've questioned, in absolute seriousness, if I might actually die from stress and exhaustion. The kids are impossibly grumpy. And yet we persevere! I know I need to work on asking for and accepting help. There are loved ones here ready and willing to help if I can let go of the pride and, frankly, the habit of shouldering a much heavier load than I can carry on my own.
Oof, that was a big venting journal of a post. Thanks for letting me get that off my chest. Moving is hard. But also wonderful. And the logistical stress won't last forever! And now for some pics:
