Settling in

Sorry for the long absence. Big changes have been afoot in our lives: we sold our house and have moved into temporary (probably a year) digs up the street. This has led to an abundance of chaos and little time for things like blogging. 

We decided to try to sell our house this summer because not being tied to that house frees us to [eventually] pursue our longer-term goals — like moving back to Wisconsin. Trying to do everything at once seemed overwhelming, so we felt like seeing if the house would sell in the price range we wanted was a good start. 

It was a very trying process (how did we accumulate so much stuff?) that had us showing the house nearly every day for more than two months. (Have you ever tried keeping a house that clean with three kids? Crazy.) Just as I had given up hope, we hit the jackpot with three offers on the same day. (Again, crazy.) We closed on the sale on October 1st, and moved into a rental up the street (really, just at the other end of the block) on the same day. 

We’re starting to get settled in now. One room remains filled with boxes and we can’t locate a few of our essential items (receiver for the baby monitor, second phone), but overall I think we’re getting close. We have the top two floors of a two-flat, which is nice. The kids can go upstairs and be as loud as they want without us worrying about disturbing the guy downstairs. And it gives us a little separation so we don’t feel like we’re in each other’s laps all the time. 

The apartment is a little smaller than our old house (we lost about 300 square feet), but we have the entire basement for storage, and a garage space that’s also currently being used for storage. And while we got rid of a TON of stuff before we moved, we still have too much that we aren’t really using. My goal is to continue to weed out stuff while we’re here, so that we move only about two-thirds as much out of the house as we moved in. 

In the midst of all this, Ethan started 4th grade and the twins started preschool (I’ll do a complete post on that, including some pictures soon). Chaos! Colin seems to be having the hardest time adjusting, both to school and to the move. The school adjustment doesn’t surprise me; we knew he would have to adjust to following the more rigid structure a classroom demands. Him having a hard time with the move caught me a little off guard. I guess because he is less expressive of his feelings than the other two, I sometimes forget that he really is a sensitive little boy. I need to keep that more firmly in mind. 

So Colin tells me daily how much he hates this house and wants our old house back, and when we’re back at our old corner playing with friends, it’s hard to keep him out of the yard. But overall, the adjustment has been less painful than I feared.