Excuse our mess

Our stuff arrived in our new house the Tuesday after we did. Which meant we only had one full day in our new house without any furniture! We spent it taking long walks around the family room and cleaning, and wondering if it could, in fact, be true that our stuff would be arriving so soon.

I knew Tuesday would be a bit of a challenge, as it was my job to wrangle the kids while Matt directed the movers. While child-herding has, in fact, been my "professional" employment ever since Kalina was born, it always becomes a bit more difficult when there are lots of strangers going in and out carrying heavy, non-baby-proofed things, and in a town I don't know my way around in. One could compare it to doing taxes while a band marches through, or cutting diamonds during an earthquake.

I decided to take my chances out on the road--and besides, the movers were hungry and thirsty and we needed groceries, too. I loaded up the GPS, which I've come to rely on after only a few weeks of use, took McDonald's orders, and headed out to the store.

Ten minutes later the GPS was still trying to get me out of our little neighborhood (which is, in my defense, quite twisty), and Kalina was openly questioning its every instruction and wondering if we were lost. Elise was hoping we'd be out of the car soon.

Finally, thanks to a road that I'd thought was only a service road for golf carts, we were on our way, for real. Second problem: the grocer the GPS was leading us to seemed to have misplaced its store--we couldn't find it anywhere in the residential neighborhood we were led to.

Now we'd been gone a good 30 minutes and were no closer to bringing home sustenance for our poor movers, let alone filling the fridge. I maintained a cheery attitude while I located a store--any store--that could help me cross at least one thing off my shopping list. We ended up at a gas station fronting a busy road. After I mispronounced the grocery store's name, and got actual directions to it as well as to a nearby McDonald's, the cashier took pity on us and helped me carry out my bag of ice and Gatorade, thus accomplishing mission #1: acquire cold liquids so the movers don't collapse.

By this time I had given up on grocery shopping, and managed to pick up lots of McDonald's food (mission #2), including Chicken McNuggets for Kalina for being so patient (plus, there wasn't much else for her to eat in the house, let alone protein), and I made it back home relatively safely. At least I had also fulfilled mission #3: keep the kids safe from the movers and the movers safe from the kids.

Fortunately, by now some of the toys were unpacked and we were able to carve out a place to play. Better yet: the movers were done and gone before naptime/downtime.

At which point Matt and I dug in and started the long process of putting our house in order. I began in the kitchen while Matt opened whatever boxes had ended up in the living room. We found some of the pairings comical--he found his PhD diploma packed next to his circular saw, while I kept pulling fine china out from in between Tupperware.

Several hours later, having found great places for an angel food cake pan, our blender and two sets of popsicle molds, I realized we still didn't have anything we could use to actually eat.  And that was when we began the process of trying to find the stuff we really needed, which is much more difficult than unpacking camping gear and decorative vases at random.

By this time, the kids were up so unpacking became a dance of "Don't grab that!!!" and, "We'll read that story right after I'm done with this box." Eventually we gave up on everything but kid care, and went out to explore the backyard.

The swingset is sound, we discovered, and both kids are fans of the slide. Which generally means there's one at the top (Elise being held by one of us as she climbs up) and one at the bottom at all times. This was fun in a sense, but soon wore on our muscles and our nerves as we tried to protect the children from each other and themselves.

We met some neighbors, and found that there are a couple girls next door just older than Kalina, plus a lot of empty nestors who think our girls are cute. Perfect.

As both girls were sleeping well in their pink bunny sleeping bag and pack-and-play, and seemed comfortable enough in their rooms, we actually didn't rush to set up their real beds. We focused on living quarters, including the basement, and Kalina cheered with each addition of an unpacked toy.

"My fish!" she'd declare. "Elise's exersaucer! Put her in it!" She was delighted. Elise was simply glad to be part of the hullabaloo. She, too, hooted with joy when some old favorites were unpacked. She then got a bit overwhelmed and stuck to me like glue for the next week. Endearing, absolutely. Conducive to unpacking, no.

Within a few days, we all had bedrooms that resembled bedrooms, a living room that resembled a living room, and a family room that lived up to its name. The kitchen functioned--and even cooked meals--and the basement was becoming every bit as fun as Kalina had hoped.

So we took a break went to the large local park. I'm not sure we got more than 100 feet from the parking lot the whole time, but that was okay: within that distance there was a little lake with ducks, a bridge over the lake and in between two tiny waterfalls that Kalina pointed out, steps up to a gazebo and, naturally, a gazebo. We were set. There was also a short trail outlining the lake that Kalina and I did eventually run around (yes, run, but that's okay, I was just glad she was happy).

Elise was elated to seek the ducks--so much so, that she decided to learn the word. "Duh!" she exlaimed at every opportunity. "Duck!" we'd always reply. We were glad, too, that we'd packed her shoes, as we hadn't packed her stroller. While Kalina and I ran around the lake, Elise explored at a slower, but no less enthusiastic, pace with Daddy.

We've also been on some neighborhood walks, even discovering a neighborhood park within walking distance. (How did I not know this ahead of time?!?) Most of the neighbors are chatty, which suits me just fine.

So, how are we settling in? For the true test, ask the 3-year-old. I asked Kalina the other day whether she missed the old house. "No," she said. "And what's your favorite part of the new house?" "The basement!" she shouted.

Kalina doesn't seem to be looking back. It took her a good (albeit hectic) week to explore the farthest reaches of the family room. She wasn't too sure about crawling on the stone kitchen floor at first, but has now ventured through it and beyond, and has not only found the living room and dining room, but has discovered two ways to get to the staircase. Previously, we weren't actually sure she knew that the stairs were part of our house. They seemed so far away. Now, they need to be babygated ASAP.

Elise has also taken quite a few independent steps in the house, and has added "dog" to her repertoire, ironically, before "cat." Possibly because although the baby owns a stuffed puppy, she's not allowed to play with Kalina's prized kittens, who have spent the past month or so tucked firmly under her arm at all times. A doggy person she will be, then.

In fact, the only downside to the new house, it seems, has been the brown recluse spiders. We killed close to a dozen brown spiders before we got the bright idea to look them up online (it also took getting internet hooked up), and we're confident that we've seen at least a few of the real deal here (the others being harmless house spiders)--several in our bedroom and one, caught in a sticky trap, under Kalina's bed. After a healthy amount of freaking out, Matt filled a few holes he thought they might be coming from, got rid of as much cardboard as he could (they enjoy cardboard), sprayed some pesticide and put out a bunch of sticky traps, and we haven't heard much from them since. Needless to say, we're still a bit on edge.

Incidentally, ridding the house of poisonous spiders is only one of the jobs Matt's taken on. Every time I see him, it's, "I caulked around the shower," or, "I just scraped mounds of mouse and bug droppings out of the outdoor storage," or whatnot. The garage is clean enough that we could picnic out there, and all the lightbulbs function.

We're now in the process of polishing off the final boxfuls, which are always the trickiest because all the momentum is lost. The only picture we've hung so far has been a calendar, but we hope to get to those soon, too. And we've made our first Craigslist purchase to fill in some of the gaps: Matt got a nice computer desk that will hopefully help keep us all more organized. I'm still blaming the mess on moving, and plan to for a while. After that, we'll revert back to our usual excuse of, "I have two young kids at home all day long."

And last, but certainly not least, in our book, anyway, Elise slept through the night last night, for the first time ever, at just over 11 months. And all it took was a couple nights of Matt going in to settle her instead of me. Incidentally, we tried this a few months ago and it didn't work. Better yet: I slept through the night, too! Probably the first time I've gotten 7 straight hours of sleep in at least a year and a half.

Stay tuned for more of our adventures as we tour our new home and city. So far, we like them. Maybe we'll stay a while.

Photos: Our house, very much in progress. About a week ago I took the camera around and got some snapshots of the rooms as we settled in. The dining room was full of boxes until this past Thursday.