Dear Abbie & Ian & Tory

I’m dipping into the comments for today’s post. This comment comes from frequent reader, occasional user of proper punctuation Adam:

More preliminary moving? How long is it going to take?

That’s a fair question. We bought our house in November, and have been moving ever since. We could move faster, but our lease on our current home lasts until June, so we might as well take advantage of the place while we have it. That way, any damage caused by our cherubs in the ensuing time will be to the old home we don’t care about, and not to our beautiful new house.

With a lease that runs until June, the smart thing would seem to wait to buy a house until, oh, June. That way we’re not paying for a house we’re not living in, although the thought of a vacation home is admittedly romantic. House hunting has nothing to do with intelligence, though. We found a house, fell in love with it, and bought it before it disappeared from the market, forcing us to find a completely different house to fall in love with.

Therefore, part of the reason we’re taking so long to move is because we can. With June approaching, we’re now tackling the task with a sense of urgency, a sense of “dear lord, how are we going to move all of this junk?”

Last time I checked, Adam is single with no kids. He has no concept of how much junk a child collects during the early, formative, new-wardrobe-every-three-months years. They have clothes, dishes, garments, toys, attire, books, and outfits, all of which we have to move because there’s no way I’m throwing them away after all the money we poured into buying them. Multiply that collection by three kids, add in two packrat parents, and it’s a miracle that we can still see the floors in our current home.

It’s bad enough that we have a backbreaking amount of stuff to move, but we also have three kids to deal with while we move. Those kids aren’t helping us pack boxes, either. They’re doing normal, preschool-aged things, which for our kids means climbing to dangerous heights and screaming when they touch the floor either because they fell face-first or an adult lovingly returned them to safety. Between coping with toddler meals, toddler naps, and toddler tantrums, we have limited time left over for moving.

We spend much of that "free" time on home maintenance. Our house isn’t sitting in pristine condition while empty. Some things are growing, some things are accumulating dirt, and other things are breaking after the previous owner haphazardly fixed them in an attempt to convince us the house was pristine. When I’m at the house and not on childcare duty, I can’t worry about unpacking boxes. I have floors to sweep, grass to mow, and green swimming pool water to quizzically furrow my brow at.

We’re making progress, though. We’re moving a few boxes here and there and starting to see shelves empty for the first time in years. Our goal is to live out of our new house by Memorial Day. Hopefully we’ll have everything out of the old home by then, but if not, no big deal since we don’t have to be out until late June.