Moving In, Moving On (Babble)

We have new neighbors.  They’re in our old house.  It’s nice to see it looking lively again because I didn’t like looking across the street at an empty place, but it’s also a little sad.  But also a little exciting.  But also a little weird.

The closing went well.  It takes a lot longer to sign so many papers when you have to add all of that extra power of attorney information to everything.  There was a brief moment of bureaucratic panic when someone noticed Ian’s signature on the power of attorney form didn’t match the printed version in some way, and I thought that was insane since they let me take out a mortgage and buy a house with that signature, so was it really a problem to let me sell one now?  But it all worked out.

The kids came along to the closing.  Mona made a beautiful card to welcome the buyers to the neighborhood.  Aden decorated the envelope, and Quinn helped me bake cookies for them.  We made sure the new neighbors had our number in case they ever need anything, and I gave them a folder of all the manuals I could find for things in their new house, like the washer and dryer and the sump pump.  The whole thing took over an hour, which got boring for everyone, but overall my kids were good.  By the end when we were just waiting for our check I got them all playing hangman with me on a pad of post it notes and that kept them happy and not roaming the halls.

The only unusual element to the event was handing over the keys.  I gave our new neighbors the two garage door openers and about a half dozen keys, and then I explained there was one more.  Aden got her very own house key from her dad as a gift when she was seven.  It’s attached to a large shoelace and even though she’s never used it, she loves it.  When I told her the day before that we had to give the key to the new owners of the house her eyes filled with tears and she said, “But, it’s from my daddy.”  So I let her bring it to the closing and I brought a mill file in my purse, and I told her if the buyers objected to her having a working key I would just file down one of the bumps on it so it wouldn’t work anymore.  She didn’t want me mutilating her key, but she agreed it was better than having to give it up entirely.  Of course the new neighbors not having hearts of stone said she could certainly keep her key from her deployed dad, and Aden promised she would keep it in a safe place.  (I’m sure by next week they’ll have changed the locks anyway, but I think it was important to be honest.)

The night before the closing I went through the house alone.  Ten years is a long time to live somewhere, and Ian and I worked so hard on that house.  I thought about how big it was when it was just the two of us.  It was still roomy when Aden came along.  It was decidedly not roomy after we brought Mona home.  And with five people and a violin making workshop it was officially cramped.

There are just two people there again, and I can easily imagine their excitement as they fill the house with all their things.  We primed some rooms for them before we left so they can get right to painting as soon as they choose colors.  I’m sure they’re already discussing what to change and what to keep.  It’s a house with many possibilities–as long as you’re not cramped.

While I was walking around it one last time I looked in the upstairs hallway at the stripes I painted there with the leftover colors from the living and dining rooms.  I thought about the crazy hundred year old wallpaper we uncovered while working on some of the walls downstairs.  We tore down fake wood paneling and re-plastered walls and built baseboards and ran wood through my bench top bandsaw on the living room floor to make our windowsills.  We were so young then, back in 2000, just after I graduated from violin making school, before deployments or children or health insurance.

I didn’t cry.  I expected to cry as I walked around with my camera and took some photos to show to Ian how the house looked on the last day it was ours.  But then as I was coming down the stairs I snapped one more picture while thinking about each of my babies learning to climb those steep steps, and the flash illuminated all the dirt in the carpeting.  Every infant and toddler atrocity that happened to that carpet came flooding back and instead of feeling sentimental I thought “Eeeww” and was glad to get back to my new house where I’m blissfully ignorant of whatever horrors have happened on those floors before we got there.

The kids didn’t want to go in.  Actually, Aden didn’t want to go in, and her siblings just tend to follow her lead.  Aden walked around the old house once with me a couple of weeks ago when I was checking on some work being done, and she was disturbed by how it looked empty.  She cried when we were standing in my old room (which was once her nursery) and said, “I can’t really remember it the way it was.”  I know that pain.  Not wanting to let go is not the same thing as not wanting to move ahead.
I sat on the porch steps before heading off with the kids to transfer ownership of the house to new people.  I finished painting that porch alone in time for Ian to admire it when he returned from his first deployment.  The view of our neighborhood is different from that side of the street.

It’s been fun watching the new people start unloading their stuff.  It’s obvious they are happy, and I’m happy for them.  As interesting as it is watching them moving in as we are moving on, it’s peculiar to be so close by.  There is comfort in seeing our first house right outside our windows because the memories are nearer.  We will never be surprised by driving past the old house and realizing we remembered it differently, because it’s right there.  But it’s strange to see things happening to it and not have it be any of our business.  I’ve unlatched the gate to the backyard a million times and now I’m not supposed to.  I can’t pick the peonies when they bloom there in early June, but I’ll see them from my bedroom.  The transition is incomplete somehow, even though it’s officially done, like breaking up with your roommate or giving your dog to the person next door.  The ghosts of habits will linger for longer than they might if we had moved away from our neighborhood entirely.  It will be awhile yet before the urge to turn left instead of right at our intersection fades from memory.

But it’s good and it’s right.  This house is now home, and we create more family history here every day.  Houses are like good violins in that we become chapters in their stories.  We are merely caretakers of certain things in our own lifetime.  I’m hoping the stories we make here with our lives will be passed down as neighborhood lore after we’re gone and it makes people smile.  I know I’m smiling already.

Home (Babble)

(Mona, Aden and Quinn posing with our new headstone address marker.  We are so ready for Halloween!)

We’ve had a long, unusual transition from the old house to the new one.  This process has been out of the norm, so little of the typical advice about moving with kids applied, but maybe there is something in how our situation unfolded that could be useful to someone else, so I thought I’d share how it went.


Right after Ian got deployed in the fall, the house across the street from us went up for sale.  Not only does it have much more room, but it’s beautiful and I’ve always loved it and I knew we’d be happier and more comfortable there.  My husband agreed from afar to find a way to make that happen, and many power of attorney signatures later we closed on the new house at the end of January.  We started working on it and moving things over at the beginning of February.  (It’s now May, and although we are finally living in the new house, I still have some things to move over from the old one when when I find the time.)

Physically the move has been tedious.  It stretched out through snow storms, rain storms and a few really warm days.  There were spurts of big activity where volunteers would help bring the more massive things across the street, but a great deal of it was just me walking things over one at a time, usually in the dark.  The rule was anytime any of us crossed the street to the new house we had to bring something, and once it was there it didn’t come back.  (The kids had to think carefully about which toys to bring if they had to come along with me for an afternoon while I was painting or unpacking things.)

In some ways it would have been much easier to box everything at once and just have it all go to the new house in a day, and even though we just moved across the street we could have hired people to do that and had it over with.  But in our case I think that would have been the wrong way to go.  It was good to have time to remodel things a little without having to live in the mess or work around the schedules of the people doing the improvements.  And as easy as it is to think of a move primarily in terms of hauling and organizing objects, my biggest concerns were all about the emotional impact it was going to have on my kids, specifically Aden.

There are times I tell people that I don’t understand what Aden is thinking when she does certain things, but the truth is I wish I didn’t understand as well as I do.  I see so much of myself in her, and how her creative and sensitive nature can make some things in life harder.  I remember how complicated it was to be a kid, even when you have everything that matters like a familiy that loves you and a safe, comfortable home.  The down side (if it can be called that) to a nice life is that it makes change hard to tolerate.  It’s painful to watch good things end.

I knew Aden was going to have the hardest transition to make.  I’m sad to leave our old home, too, but I also knew how much happier I was going to be in the new one.  I started talking to her about the idea of moving the night we got the call from the neighbors that they were putting their house on the market.  I told the kids at dinner that our friends were moving and that daddy and I might buy their house.  There were a lot of tears, and part of me wondered if it was a good idea to even talk about it before we knew anything for sure, but I knew if it did happen I needed to give Aden a lot of time to adjust so the earlier we started that the better.

I brought up the idea of the move regularly, and Aden would cry and come to me with what seemed to her to be logical arguments against it.  I would refute her arguments and give her hugs, and on less patient days tell her I didn’t want to hear about it.  She had a long time to get it out of her system and I think that helped.  When the closing date was set and things were certain Aden told me that we couldn’t move unless we all agreed.  I told her not in this case.  We may all have to agree on what movie to watch on Friday Night Movie Night, but really big things were up to me and her dad.  I told her what house we lived in was about my life, not hers, and that she had to trust that I would make decisions that would work for her too, but that I needed to live in a house that made me happy and the job of being a mom easier.  I reminded her that someday when she grew up she would have her own house and she would understand why her kids didn’t get to decide that for her.  And who knew?  Maybe if she really wanted, she could buy the house across the street back one day and we’d be neighbors.  That idea cheered her up.

After that there were very few tears.  We spent so many months where the kids got to explore every inch of the new house before we ever spent the night that there was nothing unfamiliar about it.  They knew its smells and its creaks and its best corners for hide and seek.  They had established where they liked to play with what toys and they had dropped many things down the laundry chute.  They had helped paint their own rooms, we’d eaten pizza several times at the new dining room table and ice cream in the breakfast nook, and had many hunts for chocolate eggs all over the living room.  It wasn’t foreign even if it wasn’t really home.  Every day after school we’d pull up to our intersection and I would ask, “Which house?” and about half the time they’d pick the old one, and the other half the new.  For weeks the two places were fairly interchangable, the determining factor usually being if they were hungry because all the food was at the old house.

One interesting thing about the slow motion move was that you could feel the shift from house to home.  The old house was home for a long time, and the new house was like an echo chamber.  As more things moved over the two houses balanced out for awhile, but then the house we were living in became stranger and the new one started sounding more normal.  Things started to look more familiar in the new house as it filled with our things, and the old house became more uncomfortable.  We were living in a space that had whole rooms with nothing in them and our footfalls would reverberate as we walked past.  We were sleeping on the floor for a month and a half and the kids had almost no toys.  While Ian was home on leave he moved the televisions and had our phone service shifted over.

By the time we spent the night in the new house, there was really nothing to miss in the old one.  It still held nice memories, but it wasn’t homey.  It was just a house.  The kids objected to leaving it more out of habit or in theory.  It was obvious they were ready to go be reunited with their things across the street and lead lives uninterrupted by having to evacuate frequently because of realtors doing house showings.

My last concern was getting them over the hump of the first night.  The first night in a new place is hard, so I promised the kids we would bake a giant pink cupcake to eat for breakfast the first morning there.  I figured if they woke up excited about a giant pink cupcake they wouldn’t focus on too much else.  We baked it the night before, they got to decorate it with vanilla frosting and every sprinkle we owned, and they went to bed buzzing about how in the morning they were going to get to eat it.  Worked great.  I didn’t hear one peep about how weird it was waking up in a new room, just about how cool it was to have cake for breakfast.  After that, their rooms were just their rooms, the kitchen was just the kitchen, and as long as the television works in the new family room they have no complaints.  I’m sure they could have handled a sudden move if we’d had to do it, but I’m glad I was able to make it a more subtle process.  They have enough disruption in their lives with their dad away, so that the move didn’t feel traumatic was important to me.

(Not a prize winning confection to be sure, but it sure was sweet.)

I’m so grateful that Ian was home on leave in April so we could all spend the first night in the new house together.  We got to buy a grill for him to cook on and use to make smores with the kids (and then the next day buy a cover for so it can sit on the deck until he gets back from Iraq because I won’t be using it).  I got his input on areas of the house that interest him, which has been helpful while picking out furniture and figuring out where things go.  But most of all thanks to his time here it’s now his home too.  When he comes back he’ll be coming home, and not to something completely new.  It was sad dismantling the home we’d made together without him.  It felt wrong.  Having him participate in the move even a little restored my sense of us doing this as a family again, and it’s made a big difference.

Another thing that has made this move less typical was buying a house from friends.  Having known this house and its previous owners for so long has meant that for quite awhile I felt like a bit of an imposter here.  Quinn called it “Paul and Melissa’s House” until just a couple of weeks ago.  Upstairs felt like ours first because we’d never spent any time there before we moved in so we only really know what it’s like our way.  Downstairs its harder not to picture how it used to be and to make it our own.  Every time we change something I wonder about what our friends would think, even though they would certainly understand that it’s our house now and we use it differently than they did.  Time will fix that, I know, but it’s still interesting. 

When I started sitting on the front porch steps once the weather warmed up, I felt out of place.  But after we moved our porch swing over from the other house the experience on the new porch changed.  We were using it in a way the neighbors hadn’t, so it didn’t compare anymore.  Little by little we’re claiming the whole house.  (Although, frankly, Mona claimed the whole thing for herself months ago, so this is strictly my problem.)

And I have to state what a huge role food plays in making a house into a home.  Baking that giant cupcake did more than provide a distraction for the next morning.  It made the house smell yummy and gave us a chance to create something together in the new place.  Since the food moved over, no one has asked to go back and visit the old house across the street, even though it’s still ours until the end of the month.

I can pinpoint the first moment the new house felt completely right to me, and I could sense it click into place as our home.  The Monday after we got back from our trip to New York, Ian and I moved the last of the things from the girls’ room over while they were in school.  We also moved over the rest of the kitchen things, including the food.  The plan was for Ian to pick the girls up from school and take them straight to violin lessons while I stayed home and made spinach quiche for dinner.  I was having fun seeing what cooking was like with counter space to use when I heard everyone come home early through the front door.  Turns out I’d forgotten that I’d cancelled that lesson before our trip because I knew they wouldn’t have had time to practice for it (smart plan–too bad I couldn’t remember it), so Ian just brought everyone straight home when I wasn’t expecting it.  I heard Mona noisily toss off her shoes in the front room and bound upstairs to play.  Ian was telling Aden she needed to get moving on her homework before she even thought about getting on her bike or turning on the TV.  She responded, “Oookay,” in a bored voice as if she heard her dad say that every day.  They both came into the sunny kitchen and Aden plopped into a chair in the breakfast nook and opened her backpack–again, is if it happened every day just like that.  Ian started explaining to me about the cancelled lesson and I think started to tend to the dishes while I cooked.  Quinn was chattering on and on while running about.  The house felt so alive with activity and it was so amazing to have all of us together as a family that I remember clearly having a flash of deja vu but from the future.  I knew this was what the routine would feel like one day, even though at that moment it was new.

The thing about that home feeling is that when it happens it feels as if it has always been that way.  It’s a lot like becoming a family.  Before you have kids its a big mystery how that will work and what life will be like.  Then you bring that first child home and everything is different, and you can’t imagine life any other way.  It just feels as if it always was.  When a home is right it feels like an extension of your family.  That’s why it’s such a lovely compliment when people stay with us and they say they feel at home.  It’s like saying we’ve made them feel included in our family, not just in our house.  Few things make me prouder.

It’s good to be home.

Moving In Slow Motion (Babble)

I think there are only a few easy ways to move.  All of them involve either not being attached to a lot of possessions, having a lot of money, or some combination of the two.  You could up and abandon everything because you are really spiritually developed or brain damaged and it doesn’t upset you, or you could not care about any of your things but afford to buy everything again in the new place.  You could love your millions of things and be able to pay some team of people to lovingly pack them all in a matter of hours and completely arrange them in a fresh location while you go off and distract yourself at the spa.  That sounds lovely.  That’s not happening here.

What we have on our side to ease this move are time and proximity.  Those things help, but not enough to put moving from one house to another with three kids and a deployed husband under the category of ‘easy.’   We’ve been at this moving thing now since the first of February, and I’d say we’re about halfway there.  (Maybe a little more than that, but possibly less….  I have no idea anymore.)  In the new house we have all the beds, my entire in-house violin making shop, many odds-and-ends-type storage items, photo albums, all the kitchen stuff I apparently don’t use, everything of Ian’s, art supplies, new tables and chairs, anything we own that resembles a couch, all the books and art, and a lot of toys.  In the current house we have the old tables and chairs, our dressers and clothes, the computers and TV, kitchen essentials and food, bathroom things, all the violins, and we sleep on mattresses on the floor.  It’s like limbo.  We’re moved, but we’re not moved.  We live here, but often spend hours over there.  We’ve reached a point where I’m not sure which house certain items are in sometimes.


However, having a second house across the street is more often than not pretty convenient.  When realtors want to show people the current house we can just dash over to the new house and can see through the windows when the coast is clear.  But because it’s so close, it lacks a certain urgency that would help get the move over with already.  The new house is there, I can see it, some days I never get in it (although I do have to pop over and check the mail) and we have a comfortable routine where we are that is hard to want to mess with.  Little things like shooing the kids out to the car in the morning won’t work the same way at all in the new house, so I’m loath to tamper with a system that functions.

Our current house is on the market and there are showings nearly every day, but there is no timeline for leaving yet.  And the new house is still in the middle of a lot of projects.  Many rooms are nearly done, but nothing is quite finished.  We could live there right now, but I’d rather wait until the outlet covers are back on and all the switches work.

As confusing as living in two houses can sometimes be, I will admit that it’s great to be able to work on fixing something up and making the new house our own while still having someplace else to retreat to when we need a break.  I let the kids help paint their own rooms which I think will make a difference in how they feel about living in them when the time comes.  Aden decided her side of the room would be ‘irresistible iris’ and Mona’s is some kind of blue with the word serene near it.  (Mona wants her side to look like the sea.)

Luckily I think the colors they picked work okay together, although these are not colors I would have chosen myself.  But it’s their room, and at least we didn’t end up with Aden’s first idea which was red with giant white polka-dots which might have given me seizures in the morning.  (The door leads out to their terrace.  They are already completely crazy about the terrace and have had little picnics out there, even though it’s still pretty cold here in Milwaukee.)

Quinn wanted to use the leftover paint from Aden and Mona’s room, and threw in leftover green from the kitchen for good measure.  He has some story about the green being the rain and the purple is the ground….  Who knows?  Looks like a 1970’s daycare center to me, but he likes it and that’s all that matters.  It’s easy enough to change paint one day if he develops a different sense of style later.

The only sad bit of redecorating so far has been painting over our exisiting kitchen cabinets.  They were covered with Aden’s handprints and Mona’s footprints from five years ago.  Aren’t they cute?

But they are only cute to me because they were done by my kids.  I got some sweet pictures of the girls posing by their cabinets and then painted them over after they went to bed.  I will admit the new look makes the house more salable, but it broke my heart to paint over those little hands and feet.

The most stressful element of my life at the moment is trying to keep the current house clean for showings.  That’s hard with three kids, but moving all their toys to the other house helped.  I told them I couldn’t keep picking their stuff up all the time and still be nice, so they were going to have to be content with just a few toys over here.  They agreed, but an hour after I cleaned up the family room I returned to find they had simply made their own toys out of aluminum foil and cotton balls.  They’d constructed lizards and snakes and crazy little structures and I don’t even know what else.  The room was a mess and I was simultaneously impressed and annoyed.

But we’re getting closer.  Ian is due home for a short leave, and the kids and I decided we wanted to spend our last night in the old house and our first night in the new house with him here.  I’m looking forward to that.  And we won’t have to worry as much about their dad disrupting the routine in the new house because there won’t be one yet.  Everything will be new and I’m glad we’ll get to share that.  I wasn’t looking forward to settling into a different home without him, and this way we’ll have his input before we get entrenched in a new way of doing things, so the timing is good.

I wonder how the kids will remember this move.  I moved when I was three and still recall bits of that experience.  Quinn’s that age now, so I bet he’ll remember something about it.  Mona will proabably deal just fine, but with her it’s always unsafe to make predictions.  I’m sure Aden will say something guilt inducing for many years to come as she gazes across the street and recounts things that were better in the old house just out of loyalty to her young childhood self.  The new house is a way better fit for the teenagers my kids will one day be, so I have no regrets.  We will be hosting her next book club meeting over there, and I think having so many friends over will help as she starts creating new memories.

I just hope whoever buys our current house will love it like we have.  I’ve seen several young couples looking at it over the past couple of weeks and I imagine them starting their own little families here.  That would be nice to see.  It’s a good place to bring new babies home to.  I know that first hand.  (And if they ever need ideas for adding visual interest to those kitchen cabinets, I have a few.)

Arriving at Someday (Babble)

I grew up in a pretty house in a suburb of Detroit. People not from the Detroit area can’t imagine there is anything but the dismal blight there that gets shown on the news, but there are a lot of beautiful places and things, and some of the houses built back in the 1920’s are absolutely incredible. Something about the kinds of details those houses included, the layout, the scale, all appeal to me. My childhood home has leaded glass windows, a practical yet graceful layout, interesting tiles and doors, and I’ve always loved it. It was a privilege to grow up in such an attractive space.

When Ian and I were first dreaming of owning a house we got some books out of the library of different models and plans so we could figure out what we liked and what would work with our hopes for the future. The houses we kept coming back to were all from the same era as the house I grew up in, which should surprise no one, but it confirmed something about myself that was useful to know. I always hoped that someday I might have an elegant old house of my own.

I think most people have a mental list of things they hope will happen ‘Someday.’ Someday often seems like a mythical land where everything will improve and life will be easier. Someday my baby will sleep through the night. Someday I will make enough money that I can afford to replace that ugly furniture. Someday I will have my dream job or a spouse who loves me…or a pretty house. Real life is such that fixing one thing doesn’t solve everything, but sometimes it almost lives up to the expectation. The baby sleeping through the night is a big deal, even if it doesn’t help with the laundry.

When the house across the street from us came up for sale, my heart took a little leap. It’s a house I’ve liked since the first time I stepped foot in it, from the era I’ve always admired, and I wouldn’t have to leave my neighborhood. Financially it would be a stretch, but I kept coming back to a particular Someday in the back of my mind. Someday I wanted a pretty house, and it hit me that I was forty already, and if it was ever going to happen, Someday had to become Now. Now is the time for that house because we need every room, every closet, every cupboard. I could raise my kids in a space that was functional but with a window seat I could sit on to read to my son and pretty cabinets to store Aden’s clay creations. A formal dining room was not on my husband’s personal list of ‘Somedays’ but he likes helping me achieve the things on mine so he made it happen. I love him.

I’m still a little stunned when I walk into our new house. We’re rethinking things and changing light fixtures and figuring out what would make this house work best for us, but for the most part the house is just lovely and I can’t believe I’m going to get to live in it. The previous owners didn’t use the front door regularly, but we will be, so in the first room we’re adding a light fixture, moving switches, adding outlets…. Several rooms were already perfectly attractive colors that we liked, but we have to make them ours for it all to feel right, so we’ve been doing a lot of painting. We took out the carpet in our new bedroom because of Ian’s allergies and now it has a whole new look to it. Each time I carry an object over from the current house, the new one feels a little more like mine, but it’s still a strange transition.

Aden surprised me the other night when I announced to my mom I was running across the street for a moment to talk to my friends who were doing wiring in the kitchen. She jumped up as I headed for the door saying, “I want to come too!” She’s still been putting up some resistance about the move, but she does love the terrace off her new room, and her new closet. She walked around with me as I inspected progress here and there, and as we stood in her new room together, she turned to me with tears in her eyes and said, “Mama, I’m really trying to like the new house, but it doesn’t feel like my home. My room doesn’t feel like my room.” I was so impressed that she was able to describe her feelings that well. I held her while tears streamed down her face and told her I was feeling the same way. I experience the odd sensation of being excited about the new house when I’m in it, and then I cross the street and I’m home.

I told Aden that I took all of her emotion about the move as a compliment, because it means I did an excellent job of creating a happy home for her–one that she cares about deeply enough to fight for in her own childlike way. I did my best to explain that we were the ones who make it feel that way, and we will bring that magic with us when we all live in the new house. If we did it once we can do it again (only this time with a dishwasher and nice woodwork). She agreed to trust me on this. I know what it’s like when what you know and what you feel don’t sync up, and it’s uncomfortable, but we’ll both get past it. I’m sure sooner than either of us will expect.

By the way, the “We” who are doing all of this work on the house are my mom who came to paint the first few days, and friends who know how to do electrical things and are willing to help me sort out design details and watch my children while I move boxes. It is very strange to be doing this without my husband. I am not kidding myself that when it comes to decisions about wall colors and light fixtures and furniture placement that he would even have an opinion. I know it would still be all me because I’m the one who is interested, but not even to have him there to nod as I show him paint samples makes me sad. In our current house we built so many memories by working on things together. I like that I picked out light fixtures and my husband put them in. There will always be something for him to do later (there is always another project to do on an old house), but it’s weird that he’ll come home to it up and running and lived in already. We’ll have to be content with, “Hey, remember how you didn’t have to move that, or that, or that?”

Arriving at some Someday doesn’t mean the dreaming ends. There is always something new to hope for, and I think it’s acceptable to do that without seeming ungrateful for what you have. A certain level of dissatisfaction keeps things changing, and without change we don’t learn. I’m thrilled with the new house. I can’t believe that’s actually happening.
And you know what? Someday my husband will be home from the war and he can enjoy it with me.

(UPDATE: Photos!)

A previous owner thought it would be cool to use a headstone as an address marker. It’s the most convenient landmark in the neighborhood. I used to say, “We’re the house across from the one with the headstone.” Now I just get to say, “We ARE the house with the headstone!” Here’s Aden leaning on it after school today just before she filled the mailbox with snow.

This is our current house as seen from the headstone. It’s nice! Just not big enough for five people and a violin maker’s workshop. If you’re looking for a nice place to live in Milwaukee only two blocks from Target and with cute kids to wave to from across the street, let us know.

Freshly painted dining room complete with drop cloths and paint cans strewn about. (It looks more blue in this picture than in real life–we tried to match the greens in the stained glass on the cabinet doors.)

Part of the living room with my pretty staircase.

Built in cabinets next to the fireplace. (We are still in the process of figuring out if the fireplace will be usable in some form. It took a lot to convince Aden we couldn’t just start making smores the first day we went in.)

View out the back screen door of our snowy snowy deck.

Other things will be more fun to take pictures of later when they’re not all torn apart and so messy. I’m so happy! I can’t wait to be all moved in at some point. It will probably be a couple of months yet. It’s sort of interesting owning half the houses at my intersection. I feel like some sort of tiny land baron covered in a lot of snow. I keep looking out the window at our new house and thinking about how the view could not be more different from what my husband is seeing in Iraq unless it were underwater.

The Plan (Babble)

We close on the new house at the end of the month!   And my favorite distraction of the moment is thinking about the move.  I have a plan.  (I like the idea of starting the new year with a plan.)

We are in the fortunate position of not being in a rush.  We can take our time and spread it out over months if we want.  I’m hoping this will make the transition for my kids (and myself) easier, but we’ll see.  (And this starts off as a basic packing list, but there’s some parental psychology stuff mixed in so stick with me.  Aden doesn’t want to go, so I’m not going to tell her to.  I’m going to see how long it takes before she asks.)

Step one:  Start with everything the kids won’t notice and does not impact their day to day lives.

I want to move my shop first.  It’s my own special favorite room and I’m looking forward to organizing it fresh.  I’ll pack up my wood and tools and cart them across the street and probably lay them all out in the kitchen so I can keep reusing the same couple of boxes every trip.  When all the bits and pieces are moved over I will find a couple of strong friends (who like pie) to help walk over my desk and workbench and drill press and anything else I wasn’t strong enough to already do myself.  Once the whole shop is put together and ready to use, I can turn my back on it for awhile and know it’s waiting for me as a treat when the rest of the move is over.


After the shop is in place, I’ll move on to the storage items.  The new house has much better storage space, so I’m really looking forward to the odd things we own having a home.  We spend a lot of time in our current house just shifting things around, and some stuff I really don’t know what to do with.  For instance, my grandmother had my wedding dress professionally boxed up.  I can’t get rid of it, but I have no idea what to do with it.  I have saris I wore in India that I doubt I will wear again but don’t want to part with.  I have interesting bits of wood and old negatives (remember negatives?) and an electric bass I never play but won’t sell.  And much more.  My highest hope for this move is that I will lay my hands on everything we own and really decide what to do with it.  I’m hoping a bunch of it can go, and what’s left will have an accessible home on a shelf and not be forgotten.  (I’m so excited by the idea of sorting everything that even if disaster strikes somewhere between now and closing, I would even consider sending the kids away somewhere for a couple of weeks, emptying the existing house, and moving back into it more neatly.  Yes, the clutter has driven me that insane.)

Step two:  Take all the pictures off the walls.  (My parents own an art gallery, so this is no small task.)  That’s just a lot of simple trips across the street and back–nothing to box or wrap.  I will store all of those in a corner and when we are all moved in, I will spend an enjoyable day hanging things.

Step three:  Start boxing books.  This one is a pain.  I remember when I filled out an application to a charter Montessori school for Aden before she got off the waiting list for the public one, there was an innocent looking question on the form asking how many books are in our house.  I came up with a rough estimate of 3,000 if I’m remembering correctly.  If I’d thought to add in cookbooks and some of the textbooks hidden by the toy shelves it would be higher.  I’m not looking forward to dealing with the books.  Every time we’ve moved and Ian has had to lug my books somewhere, he always takes a moment to show me how light his library card is.  But hey, I’m also a geology geek, and it’s better than the boxes literally filled with rocks he’s had to haul around because he loves me.  This time Ian is not here, so I get to move my own rocks and books as well as his library card.

Step four:  The doodads.  One of the things I love about the new house is not just the storage space, but the display space.  There are surfaces available for vases and rocks, objects both beautiful and weird, important bits of art and highly sentimental pieces that I’m looking forward to having out finally.  My mother is probably reading this and feeling alarmed tha I’m going to clutter things up in the pretty new dining room, but not to worry!  With the new storage available I will rotate things—I’m not going to display everything at once.  I will box the doodads and enjoy sorting through all of them with my kids later in a home game of show and tell.

Step five:   Now we start dipping into the real spaces.  I’m going to move over everything from the kitchen but the most basic things and start stocking the new fridge with the things the kids like.  All the snack crackers, cookies and bananas will be in the new house.  The old house will be a wonderland of vegetables.  (What’s that, Aden?  You want grapefruit?  Well, let’s walk across the street and have some!)  I’ll also start moving over all the bathroom items that aren’t often used.  (Hot rollers from the 90’s?  Can’t part with those yet, but now they’ll have a drawer.  Plug-in heated foot bath?  Yeah, there’s time for that–in some parallel universe where my novels also get published and my kids remember to put their shoes away.)

During all of this time I’ll have let the kids start working on their rooms.  Quinn’s will be purple, apparently.  With orange rabbits.  I’ll let him pick whatever he wants off the sample cards at the hardware store and all the kids can help.  I play fast and loose with paint so they can do whatever makes them happy.  I’m hoping by decorating their new spaces they will start getting attached to them.  Mona wants her side of the room to look like the sea.  I’ve been going through old photos that show anything of their current room but the best I can find are these:

The far end of the room is Aden and Mona’s and it’s split down the middle, purple on Aden’s side and yellow on Mona’s.  The front half of the room is Quinn’s and it’s all blue with clouds.  The funny thing is, I painted shapes among the clouds (a bunny, a sheep, a duck) but the kids find shapes in the regular clouds I made.  They see a mouse and fish and bird somewhere.  I wanted them to have defined spaces that were their own, even if they were all sharing a room.  Aden and Mona are still going to be sharing a room at the new house, so I need them to get coordinated about what they want to do.  Aden currently has no opinion because she’s trying to look more victimized, but I think once Mona starts going at her half of the new room with bright blue paint and picks out a new comforter covered with fish, Aden might start taking an interest.

Other fun with paint in our home:

Those are Mona’s footprints running across our lower kitchen cabinets.  Now I’m just distracting myself thinking about paint.  Back to the moving plan!

Step six:  Big furniture.  Living room and music things go across the street.  We disassemble the guest and dining rooms.  Bookcases and cabinets move.  Most of my bedroom moves, and some of theirs.  This step involves lots of friends and pizza.
Step seven:  Clothes.  All but a few basic outfits per person, across the street.
Step eight:  Here is where I hit the kids where they live.  Moving the bulk of the toys, the art supplies, and the TV.  My thought is we can keep sleeping and doing meals at the old home, but more and more be spending time in the new one.  Eventually we’ll do all the meals there, and I’ll have to get them up early to cross the street with me to have breakfast before school.

At this point I’ll work on fixing up the old house and freshening it up for sale while I wait Aden out.  I have no idea how long she can take our house just being her mattress, a blanket and a stuffed bunny, but it will be interesting to find out.  My hope is she will volunteer to move over and we will go and have a little party and all will be well, but it’s hard to say.  As bad as she is at change, I was much worse at her age, so who knows how much of my stubborn gene will come back to bite me in Aden form.

So that’s the plan, at least for the moment.  It evolves and mutates as I play with it in my mind while I wait in line at the bank or fold laundry, but I’m excited about it.  I think this move is going to be a really enjoyable distraction, and I’m looking forward to emailing Ian pictures at each stage.  (If only having a new house didn’t involve losing two of our favorite people as neighbors–Paul and Melissa, we’re going to miss you guys.)