I'm so sick of making lists of things I'll never finish

I'm learning that moving is not for the faint of heart. No matter the distance of the move.

Moving is also not for people who enjoy organization, sleep, or happiness.

Okay, so I'm a little dramatic. There are, perhaps, ways of being organized about a move that allow for happiness and sleep. I'm not a terribly organized person- chaos is my style, and I thrive on scrambling to make things happen last minute (product of one procrastinating parent and one perfectionist parent- yes, they were, in fact, trying to kill me) - but with a project as huge as a move, I really have worked hard to be organized because there was too much to do to try and do it all last minute.

Don't worry, we still pretty much did everything last minute.

Not for lack of trying, however. We started downsizing even before we knew were were moving to Oxford (so, in May. We decided on Oxford in June). My in-laws sold all of their furniture and moved across the country for medical school with only a mini-van and their car to take what they still owned, and we were jealous of all the purging they'd done. Of course, the enthusiasm for this idea of downsizing was much greater than our efforts before we actually decided to move, but having the mindset early certainly helped. As soon as we decided we were going, Jeremy and I started listing all of our furniture on KSL and Craigslist and indoor yard sales on Facebook, knowing that we didn't have very long to sell stuff and being unsure of how long it would take to actually sell that stuff, if it would sell at all.

Our dressers sold very first, within 12 hours of listing them. We were literally taking stuff out of our dressers as people were walking in to take them away. Then we sold our couches, which were a few of our only pieces of furniture keeping our clothes from the floor. And a week or so after that, we sold our massive storage shelves. And a few days after that, all of the hangers we have ever owned. So that was fun.

While trying every day not to knock over various piles of clothes, we were also going through everything else in our house and trying to decide what things we were going to keep (either in storage or packed into a suitcase). We based this evaluation on each item's worth to us in time: our catchphrase of the summer quickly became, "Are you going to care [about that] in 10 years?" It is much easier to decide the value of something by trying to imagine what you would actually do with it 10 years from now if you weren't going to see it until then. We don't necessarily intend to be gone that long, but for the sake of making decisions, this exaggeration worked. I started throwing almost everything away. Jeremy, fortunately, is more nostalgic than I am, so some of the memories we've made in the last seven years are actually in tact, squirreled away in someone's basement. But before they were neatly packed into someone's basement, and for the majority of the summer, they covered our house as half-filled tupperware of things we wanted to save, piles of things we weren't sure about, piles of things we still needed to go through, garbage bags full of yard sale-able stuff, garbage bags of stuff going to DI, garbage bags full of garbage, all covered by toppled piles of clothes accented with occasional toys (because we have an increasingly energetic toddler who didn't want to be left out of the fun).

So our house was a disaster area for almost the entire summer, but we felt like we were making progress. Before we arrived at move-out day, we had sold all 5 of our couches, our loft bed and our guest bed, our dining room table and chairs, all dressers and shelving, and Berlin's crib. The only piece of furniture we had left was a Lazy Boy. And that sold at the (second) yard sale within an hour of being set outside.

But that's moving day. I'm getting ahead of myself.

We still hosted when we could, even without a table and chairs. We just brought out food and dishes and set them on the floor. Notice that Berlin is towering above us in his high chair. On this particular occasion, the power went out while I was cooking, so we couldn't even finish preparing our classy, uptown spread. 

I hope we remember this summer for a long time :)

The point of all of these ridiculous details is just to say that we worked hard to plan things out and not do things at the last minute. We had a yard sale at the beginning of July and sold lots, but we didn't bring everything we had to sell outside (it was just way too much, AND we hadn't finished going through everything), so we knew we'd have another yard sale, even though we were successfully selling lots of other random things in between (bikes, hand mixers, tarps, candles, blenders, frames, tablecloths, etc. all online). We planned to have another yard sale right before we left, like on the Saturday before the week we moved out, around Jeremy's birthday (then our house would mostly be empty and we could clean all week before we moved). But it's the home stretch that always is the craziest. And I maybe did it to myself (or to us?). In hindsight I could have simplified my life, but I'm not very good at narrowing down my list. Just adding to it, and thinking all of it is really going to happen somehow.

That Saturday before we moved out, August 8th, was Jeremy's birthday. His 30th birthday. And I know all of the whirlwind maybe shouldn't have stopped, but surely it could just for a party. 30 is a big deal! How could we just breeze past that? I also really wanted to have a going away party at some point, so wasn't I doing myself a favor by killing two birds with one stone?

(Just for the record, that phrase doesn't work if getting the stone, by itself, is far more effort than killing each bird individually would've been.)

But I got it in my head that I wanted to have a party. A surprise party. A party that I started to plan a month before so people from out of town could drive down with plenty of notice, but I also wanted it to be a kind of party that would be worth making the drive for (red flags all over the place. What was I thinking?). Jeremy went to Tennessee for a workshop for three days, the Monday-Wednesday before his birthday, so I took full advantage of him being gone and planned and cooked and decorated and schemed.  But I also worked my tail off on our house because I didn't want Jeremy to wonder how I could make zero progress on the house when I'd had so much time to myself and figure the party out (when he asked me about my day, I couldn't exactly say, "Well, I decorated your friend's house for a party you're not supposed to know about and I didn't even think about the house" now could I?). I ran myself into the ground, but I finished tons of house projects, and for as many hiccups and flying wrenches that the party plans endured, the party went off without a hitch. Jeremy was totally and completely surprised, and he got to see and bid farewell to so many more people than he was expecting.

I didn't take a single picture at the party. And besides a couple of small groups who took pictures with Jeremy, these two pics are about the only ones that were taken that evening. This is at the very beginning of the night when people started trickling in.

And this is about half of the people waiting at the doorway for Jeremy to make his entrance. That's all we got. 30th birthday party and no pictures to show for it :) oh well.

In short, no second yard sale happened that birthday Saturday. And we were moving out the next week.

We decided to still have a yard sale the day we moved out. Our planning/thought process was that by the end of our yard sale (12 or 1PM, realistically), everything would be out of our house. We would finish the cleaning we hadn't during the week, and then we would drive away, putting us at Jeremy's parents' sometime around midnight. Not the most ideal time after a full day of hard work, but still pretty decent for as much as we had to do.

So, naturally, none of that happened.

Our living room at about midnight Friday night, before the yard sale

Our living room Saturday afternoon, after most of the yard sale was over. Not much progress.

Well, actually, we did have a yard sale. It was mostly over by 1PM, and it felt like a raving success because people paid us for more than half of our junk, and we had a place to take the leftovers. But our last customer left after 5PM (because we put everything in bags and boxes, left those outside, and tried to go inside and finish. And people continued to come by and look through the bags and boxes). So we didn't actually have our yard de-junked until about 7. There was intermittent cleaning from the time that we woke up that morning to when our yard was clean, but serious, concentrated cleaning didn't start until 7PM.

For the majority of the night, I could only think of the line from Toy Story when Andy's mom says, "Say 'Bye house!'" 

And Andy replies in such a melancholy way, "Bye house." It makes me incredibly sad to see everything so empty.           

This picture was taken at 4AM. When we finally left. We hardly had energy to be sentimental, but thank heavens Jeremy took a picture. Three years at our first apartment, three years worth of firsts, and I would've left without even glancing back, I was so done with all of the work it took to get it that clean.

We somehow managed 4+ hours of driving in a very packed car full of everything we didn't finish organizing, and everybody but the driver had stuff on their laps. And we promptly collapsed upon arrival.




[title from even if it kills me by motion city soundtrack]

how to travel overseas with an infant (part i)

Spoiler Alert: I still don't feel like either of us would say we actually know what we're doing, so the title is a lie. But here's what worked and didn't work, so maybe this would be better titled, "Some things we learned when we attempted traveling overseas with our infant, some things that worked, and some things we might do differently next time," but that's really long and I don't really want to change it.

For almost every year for the last seven years, Jeremy has spent the week or so surrounding Easter in Russelsheim, Germany, teaching at or, more recently, running a jump rope camp. In Germany, and a lot of places in Europe, they take their Easter holiday a little more seriously than we do in America, so students, and many adults, have the two weeks surrounding Easter off. This also means that the schools are not being used, so this camp is held the week after Easter at a school, camp runs all day in the gyms with short breaks in the cafeteria, everybody showers in the gym showers and then sleeps in the classrooms, etc. It really is so much fun, and I wish I'd had more camps like that growing up. I also always loved any reason to use school things, property or otherwise, for non-academic things, so really, this was a little kid dream come true for me.

Last year, I went with Jeremy and helped teach a tiny little bit (insert link for future post on how little I actually know about jump rope), and I absolutely loved it. We both had a great time and Jeremy was excited for me to be able to come again, but this year with a young baby, we only considered going for a minute. For a month or two, the plan was that Jeremy would go by himself and Berlin and I would kick it at home for the week. And then, about a month before Easter, Jeremy said, "Why not? We don't have any idea how long we're going to have this opportunity. And Berlin is only going to fly for free for so long."

So the next day I took Berlin to get his passport pictures taken.

Lesson number one: Babies need passports. Who knew?
Number 2: It is possible to take your own pictures at home, size them right, cut them out, etc. I've done it before. But, especially with an infant, I would not recommend it. Lots of places will take them for you for $7 or so, and then your work is done. To me, it is $7 well spent.
Number 3: When you call whichever place you've decided to get aforementioned pictures, make sure they know the passport pictures are for an infant. So they can prep.

I went to Maceys' photo center and told the guy at the counter I needed passport pictures. He had me walk back to the area with the white backdrop and asked me to stand facing him, when I said, "Oh, these pictures aren't for me. They're for him," and held up Berlin. The guy and his friend working with him both looked completely confused. "Babies need passports?" "Do you know the specifications for those?" "Do you need a picture of the whole baby?" "Maybe just his head and shoulders?" One of the guys hopped on the computer and started to google baby passport pics. I'd done my research and told them what I knew, the pages they'd found confirmed it, so then started the circus of trying to hold Berlin and his head up in front of the white background, trying to keep my hands out of the picture, trying to get Berlin to look at the camera, and trying with everything to get Berlin to squeak out one of his giant smiles.

In case you haven't seen it on Facebook already, here is the result:

Baby mug shot. I don't even think this looks like him. But all things considered, the guys did a really good job. And the U.S. Department of State accepted it, so we went with it. He'll get a new one in five years and still won't be old enough to know that he should never forgive us.

So passport application, check. We had just over three weeks before we were leaving, so with the door-to-door promise of three weeks, we hoped their wouldn't be any issues.