We’ve finally moved into our new house. As I mentioned before, we’re now closer to both sets of grandparents, though further away from work. In general, I’ve found that I don’t mind the commute–before, when my commute was 2 miles, I never got a chance to listen to NPR. Now, I’m all caught up on the news.
On various psychological stress scales, “moving” ranks as a significant stress. I would say that moving with children is what makes things stressful. I don’t think the kids care at all that we moved to a larger, nicer house. In some respects, I think Eleanor preferred the tiny apartment. On the first day, she wouldn’t let me go upstairs without her–it was like I was going out-of-state everytime I wanted to go upstairs to get something.
Anyway, I’m glad we’ve finally settled someplace that I hope we’ll be at least until the kids graduate from high school. (This is probably wishful thinking.) The last six months have felt like constant limbo, what with the following activities: moving the clutter into a storage facility so that we could stage the house for sale, painting and carpeting the house, the constant open houses, moving out of the house and renting an apartment, selling the old house, clearing the rest of the stuff out of the old house and into the storage facility and apartment, buying the new house, finally moving all of our stuff (half in the apartment, half in the storage facility) into our new house. We only used movers for the last move, so Bernard and I did most of the grunt work. I’m exhausted–and we still have 50% of the unpacking to do. It’s okay, I’ll just do it slowly over the next six months. I’ll be updating everyone with our new contact information soon.