How Not To Move
By Jillene VanNostrand

By the time I was 13, we’d moved to a new home 10 times. I have memories of my single mother packing our home the day before the move, loading the truck herself or with our help as we got older and then unloading later that day. The truck was always returned promptly. The day after the move, everything was unpacked and back in its proper place. I have no idea how she did it.

My husband and I just moved from a three bedroom apartment to another three bedroom apartment, cutting his commute down from an hour each way to a whopping eleven minutes. We have three sons under five, a cat, and a beta fish. We knew two weeks out that we would be moving and I thought that was plenty of time to pack everything ourselves, scour the apartment and get all of our security deposit back. I had visions of getting the kids to bed by 8 every night, packing a room a night and finishing that the first week and spending all of the next week scrubbing and carpet steaming. How wrong I was!

We ended up hiring movers. I had a four year old, two year old and four month old to wrangle. My husband, bless him, is terribly out of shape. You’d never know he used to be a Marine by looking at him now. We were still packing as the movers arrived at 9:15. By 1:15, they were done loading the truck and we still hadn’t finished packing everything up. We decided to come back for it later with the minivan. We all drove up to the new place with a very brief lunch break, signed the lease, got the keys and let the movers in. They had everything unloaded and where we wanted it in four hours. We paid them, tipped them generously and they left. Then the craziness set in.

Husband forgot the hardware to the boys’ bunk bed at the old place. One of the bulbs blew in the dining room, giving us very little light. We had no television to distract the kids with and despite my attempts at labeling boxes, couldn’t find which box had the kids’ DVDs in it. We found the adult DVDs easily enough but we weren’t quite that desperate yet. Quick disclaimer – adult DVDs in our home simply means anything not suitable for the five and below group. Not porn. We got them distracted with Legos, I popped the baby on the breast and began unpacking. Ten minutes later, husband declared himself to be hungry and we all braked for dinner. We explored the area a bit and settled on a combined KFC and Taco Bell. The boys wanted chips and cheese and we were too tired to argue. We went home, got the kids settled on couches and tucked in for the night, I nursed the baby to sleep and the husband got his stuff ready for work in the morning. After the boys were asleep I snuck out and started unpacking. Fourteen boxes and two hours later, I decided to get some sleep. Monday I managed another ten boxes before the boys woke up in the morning. I was feeling quite proud of myself, thinking we’d be able to accomplish a lot when the husband came home from work. He set up the internet, sat down to “test” it and got sucked into World of Warcraft for the rest of the evening. I didn’t get any more unpacking done. Tuesday was spent at the old place packing the rest of our stuff, attempting to take things to the dumpster and waiting around for the washer and dryer people while writhing in pain from mastitis. At one point, while nursing the baby, I heard the older two playing with tape in their old bedroom and decided there wasn’t much they could do. A couple of minutes later, my middle child began crying that he didn’t want tape on him anymore. He comes down the hall to me and I see that my older child has taped his waist, circling him at least twenty times. He still had the roll of tape and was unrolling it to let his brother come to me, like a dog with a harness and leash. He then pressed the tape to the wall of the hallway and his brother was stuck. My oldest was now laughing hysterically while my middle child freaked out. The baby started crying as I set him down to try to rescue the trussed up middle son. I had to cut his shirt off of him to free him from his packing tape corset. Luckily there was a pajama shirt for him to wear in the load of laundry we’d left behind in the dryer.

Husband arrived at the old place at almost seven, helped me load up the minivan and his trunk and declared that he didn’t feel like taking the trash to the dumpster because he was tired and we should just let them take it out of the security deposit. We went to our new home and I promptly passed out with the baby while he got the boys to bed and made time for World of Warcraft before he went to bed at 10.

Wednesday I went back for the last of the stuff and the fish. I turned in the keys and washed my hands of the old place for good. Came home to find that Husband set up the bunk beds and my desk and decided that was enough work for the day so he was playing World of Warcraft. Again. I unpacked some more boxes, cleaned up the kitchen and looked up ways to cure mastitis. The husband played Legos with the boys and despite my repeated claims that bedtime was in five minutes, let them stay up until nearly 10:30. They only went to bed because I decided that I was tired of waiting for Husband to finish whatever he was working on in WoW land so that he could get the kids to bed.

It’s now Thursday and I’m exhausted just thinking about all of the craziness from the last few days. I cannot fathom how my mother managed everything in 72 hours. This process will likely take us a month from start to finish. I have learned a lot from this process.

* Have internet access turned off a week before the move and don’t start it up again for a week after the move. Husband will be a lot more helpful without arenas to run and wife won’t procrastinate by reading Livejournal or playing Scrabulous.

* Don’t let kids play with packing tape

* Hire other people to do everything if it needs to be done in a timely manner

* Write down absolutely everything that goes into a box because you won’t remember that you packed kids’ sheets in a box that says towels and blankets instead of the box that also says sheets.

* Put a pair of nail clippers in your purse because you will snag several nails and the kids’ nails will grow out long enough for the baby to scratch up your boob while he nurses even though you just clipped his nails the day before the move. You’re never going to find something that small until you get to the box it’s in and since you weren’t smart enough to label the box with ‘nail clippers’ you have no idea which box it is.

* If you wake up on the morning of the move with a sore boob and all three kids suddenly have colds, maybe you should think about postponing the move for a couple of days. I’m sure if I’d just slept a ton and drank a lot of water, I wouldn’t have had mastitis tripping me up and I wouldn’t be any further behind than I am now.

* Finally, don’t tell oldest child we can get a dog after the move to encourage him to want to move. He will insist that a dog is necessary the day of the move and bug us about it every hour on the hour. He will even go so far as to insist that I can nurse the newborn puppy when I try to explain that we need to wait a couple of months for a puppy to be old enough to leave its mom.