Moving and all that entails.

FINALLY both my children are sleeping... I am exhausted, but also hate to go to bed before my hubby gets home. Also, he has no keys.

Aaron is at our old place getting some of the last stuff together to make the rest of the move easier tomorrow (considering he has to do it in between work). Not to mention when loading the truck with the "essentials", we forgot to add our clothes to the lot. It's quite incredible how many things can slip your mind when you have so many things to do, and so little time and ability to do them. I need more arms. Or multiple me's so I can be in more places at once. Although I am not convinced we would have survived multiple me-break-downs, and there have been many me-break-downs the last few days.

I got a few things wrong in my last blog post.
1) Moving is never something to be excited about. Even if it's good in the long run. Don't waste your energy being excited about it. It's all about conserving every ounce of energy in order to come out the other side alive, sanity intact. (Although that last part is a little iffy regardless.)
2) I actually had ONE week to pack both houses. Not two.
3) Aaron was not available to help me pack. At all. I guess we had to keep the family tradition going and make sure I packed the whole house again. Keeps me sharp. Yes, apparently leaf season decided to drag my husband away just in time for this whole moving ordeal. He has done all the loading and moving though. I have not had to lift even a pillow. But due to his schedule, the move is taking three days, instead of the highly hoped for (and quite unrealistic) one.

This has by far been the worst move. Ever. And that is coming from someone who has moved so many times in her life she hasn't bothered to even count. Turns out, moving two houses in one week, with two kids (while watching an extra), and an overworked husband, are all terrible combinations. Who would of guessed?

It was beyond stressful, and to top it off, Aiden was having a really hard time adjusting. Can we blame him? He had lived in that house for over 2 of his 3 years of life. I knew he would have a little difficulty adjusting. What really tipped me off was the fact that anytime I packed something, if I left the room it would "magically" unpack itself. I left Aiden's room for last because of how much it was bothering him. I wanted him to feel secure in at least one room in the house. One of the last nights I was packing up all our paintings and instinctively grabbed the ones his Nana had painted for him that hung over his bed. Well, he didn't appreciate that and before I even realized he had left his bed, he had unpacked his paintings and hung them right back exactly as they had been. It was both cute and heart breaking.

Tonight is our second night at the new house, and much, much better than the first. Yesterday was chaos. Stressful. Filled with many messy melt downs--the kids even had a few. I felt like a monster. Then to top it off, Gabriel refused to fall asleep (for only the second time in his life), and Aiden threw a fit, demanding to return to our "real" house. Here I had been looking forward to this since what feels like forever, and our family was falling apart. All of us, adult and child alike, each throwing our own tantrum. Yelling, crying, being anything but happy. We tried to take a drive and cool down, but that only made things worse. When Gabriel finally fell asleep around 10, and Aiden remained awake and upset, I lay with him in his bed, just as frustrated and confused. I told him I was sorry I had been yelling so much. Moving is hard. Did it make him sad? He said yes. It made me a little sad too. But we had been focusing on the sad and hard parts of moving all day, let's think about what we love about this new house. We named a few. We loved that we could walk to the park tomorrow. We loved our yard. We loved how close our rooms were, we loved that Gabriel and Aiden would be roommates (as soon as we moved the crib...),  and that a lot of our friends lived close by too. We named everything we loved and ended up quite happy, snuggled up on his little twin bed, giggling and wondering what we had been so upset about. I woke up around 2 and made my way back to my bed. Gabriel woke up about every hour after that. But today was a better day. Tomorrow should be too.