Moving Day!

On Wednesday we moved out of our little house we've lived in for the last five and a half years.

It was bittersweet, for sure.

L and A loved getting to ride scooters all around the empty house, while I marveled at how big they are and how much life has been lived within those walls...

(Especially since the twins looked like this on the day we moved in...)

It's the house our family went from two to four, and our babies took their first steps right there in that living room.

The landscaping was new when we bought the house, and we watched the tree in the front yard go from this...

 

...to this...

 

(the boy grew quite a bit too)

 

We painted walls, built a shed, put up a fence, and made it our Home. We lived life well there, and I'll always be grateful we had our small house with it's even smaller mortgage that allowed me to work so little while our babies were so young.  

 

 

Since Wednesday, we've been staying with my awesome sister and brother in law (who just got married in July, and already opened their home to our circus...they're clearly crazy generous people), and are having the best time. Everything we moved in with us here is either coming on the plane or being shipped to Kuwait, and all our furniture and other belongings are in a storage unit.

 

We've spent the last several days enjoying time with friends, which has been both fun and hard. We have fantastic people in our life here, and saying good-bye to them for two years has occasionally put me thisclose to calling the whole move off. (kidding.) (kind of.) We've been beyond blessed with so many amazing people since moving here in 2007, and I'm resting in the promise that we'll all pick right up where we left off when we return in two years!

 

We are pretty much all set to fly out on Monday and begin our new adventure. Three outta four of us have developed stuffy noses, sore throats and congestion in the last day or two, so prayers for quick recoveries are greatly appreciated!

 

As you can see in the video below, the kids are picking up the Arabic David is teaching them pretty well!

 

 

Just start it already.

We've been telling everyone for weeks now that we'll start a blog for our move. With many friends and family members not on Facebook, it seemed like a good way to stay in touch, while also being a pretty cool way to document our time abroad for family memories. 

But you can get all up in your head about starting a new blog. Like I did. I couldn't figure out how to start and what to say. So I'm just going to start talking...

The most common question we get these days is "are you packed?"

The answer is kind of. But it's complicated, because we were given an original departure date of tomorrow, but learned last week we'd be delayed (paperwork issue) until the end of the month.

Last week David and I spent three days sans kids (God bless grandparents!) culling, sorting and packing into one of four piles…donate, store, pack, ship.

If I thought living in 990 sq. feet with no basement, attic or garage had put a dent in my hoarding tendencies, moving internationally is killing them completely. With each item we’re not taking with us, I have to ask myself “do I love this enough to pay money to either have it shipped over,  or have it stored here?” I’m finding the answer is often No.

Which is huge for me, by the way. And David offers up a Hallelujah.

(no seriously, when we got married and moved into our first apartment, I brought in a large tote full of backpacks, and he was like “when will we ever need that many backpacks?!” and I was like “I don’t know…but we might!!!” )

(we agreed I could keep two, and turns out I’ve actually only used one in the eleven years we’ve been married…so…he wasn’t wrong….:) )

So a LOT of stuff I would have told you I needed a year ago has found new homes, and I still feel like we have plenty here! The kids have “rediscovered” a bunch of their older toys they’d forgotten about amongst the clutter of all their other toys.

At this point we’re about 65% packed. We’re in an awkward there’s still a lot to be packed up but we also still live here for a while place.
Also, packing is not fun.

Without the kids around we were able to be super productive (and by “we”, I mean David. When I packed up things like all the twins’ newborn mementos I had to go down a few rabbit holes…it can’t be helped ;) ) and even have a good chunk of our belongings already into our new storage unit.

I was laughing with a friend this morning telling her when we first started, I was very thorough and purposeful with labeling each box…”K’s clothes: winter jacket, winter sweaters, boots” and by the end of the three days we were packing boxes like this:

 

Yes, that is a Hulk glove. One of Two. I don’t know where Two is packed, but in with light bulbs, our wedding box, and a few wrapped up candles seemed like an appropriate place for One.

Today most our boxes are labeled “Misc” and list a sundry of items grouped together like “K’s shoes, placemats, living room chotskies”, because why not?

Which leads me to believe that when we return, it’ll be a little bit like Christmas opening and re-finding all our stuff =)