every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end

I was so excited to finally be on the way to England. It was mostly surreal, because it was just another plane ride, but a little part of it was kicking in and helping all of the instability subside. And then, gratefully, all three of our flights were mostly uneventful. I mean, I did have one flight attendant fight with me about whether or not Berlin's car seat was "airplane approved" and the fact that she couldn't see a big bold sticker on the car seat that proved it was adequate meant that she couldn't let me bring it on the plane, and all of this was at the front of the plane in front of a number of passengers and she made no effort to keep her voice down (and we were basically on a crop duster - short flight, not the one over the Atlantic) so a few minutes later a lady from the front row came back to find me and offered to look up the car seat's manual so we could prove to the flight attendant that the car seat was just fine (even though the car seat had already been checked at this point, I still just about burst into tears because the lady was trying so hard to help me out)...

That, and I left Berlin's Minion water bottle in the seat back pocket on the first flight, and he asked for it the rest of the trip. I honestly am still counting my blessings that it wasn't a worse experience.

Jeremy emailed me instructions a few days before Berlin and I left the US on how to make it out of the airport and to the bus station in Oxford, so fortunately, I didn't feel lost when we landed in London.  This was great, because before the email, I was definitely on the verge of hyperventilating that I'd never been to this airport or this country before (no, it didn't help that I knew I would be able to understand everyone when I got there). I exchanged some of my dollars for pounds, and we got on a bus (to another terminal to another bus) to Oxford.

And then we got to Oxford. The first day was certainly the longest day. I think I was expecting a little more grandeur for the beginning of this adventure. But I suppose it would be fair to say that most of what happened the first few weeks we were together as a family were pretty far from our expectations. And in hindsight, I don't think anything in my life has ever been "smooth sailing," so why did I think this was going to be any different?

When Berlin and I got to the bus station, we had a heyday of a time finding Jeremy. Jeremy's phone had some major issues when he got to England, and they hadn't all been sorted yet, so I could only get in touch with him if he was sitting at his computer. My phone worked if I was in WiFi, which meant that as soon as I got off the bus I lost my stable connection. Jeremy tried to give me directions on where he was going to meet us before he left his computer and I left WiFi, but he gave me cardinal directions to tell me where he was going to be with a borrowed car that he couldn't leave. I struggle with cardinal directions everywhere, even in Utah Valley (I know the mountains are always to the east. I know. But what happens when you drive towards Spanish Fork Canyon? Or when you drive through Provo Canyon? Or what if you go to Park City? They're not always to the east. Don't explain to me that driving through a canyon means your on the opposite side of the mountains. I won't get it), and I definitely knew even less about Oxford. So I asked the first person I found if he could tell me where "north" was. He had no idea. But in true British style, he said he was sure he could find it and offered to help me get wherever I needed to go.  Not helpful, since neither of us knew where I needed to go, so we wandered around the bus station in a circle, the man telling me the whole while different reference points to give to my search party, me too tired to realize that it was pointless, or to tell him that my phone didn't work.  Eventually we were in fact rescued by Jeremy, who found an illegal parking spot and braved getting the car towed to come and find us.

At this point in the day I'd been on the verge of tears too many times, and I think I started crying while we drove away from the bus station. I'd been awake for more than 24 hours on about 4 hours of sleep, it was only 2PM, and Jeremy told me that we couldn't move in to our apartment that day, on top of needing to return to the class he was missing. So he returned the car to its owners (the Flamms- an American family in our ward whose dad is Jeremy's classmate) and left Berlin and me with them to hang out until he had another break from classes. I'm grateful they'd made the same trip, because I don't know how we would still be friends otherwise from my total lack of sociality and general consciousness. They gave us beds to nap in, and that's about all I remember. At some point, Jeremy came back from class and we ate dinner with them, too.

Our move-in date was supposed to be the day that Berlin and I landed, but we were told we couldn't move in because 1) our payment hadn't cleared (foreign transactions can take up to five days to process. So even though Jeremy paid the agency on Tuesday, it was only Thursday. Two days wasn't enough) and 2) they were replacing the boiler in our apartment. The agency told us that we could maybe move in the next day. Fortunately, the bishop of our ward and his wife told us that our whole family was welcome to stay with them while we figured the whole apartment fiasco out. So after dinner with the Flamms, we went to Bishop's so that we could all go to bed. Jeremy had another lecture to attend that he thought would run late, so I put Berlin in bed and then crawled into bed with some work to wait for Jeremy to come home. I made it about 5 minutes. When Jeremy got home, I was passed out next to my computer with the light still on.

The next day would be better. What isn't made better by a good night's sleep?

[title from closing time by semisonic]

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 ii)

In the three weeks between submitting a passport application and waiting for it to arrive, we had an airplane test-run with Berlin and we flew to Lubbock to stay with my siblings for a week.

Test-run is the wrong word. If it went poorly, we were still going to Germany, so... preview. We had an airplane preview with Berlin. 

Overall, it went pretty well. Jeremy gave Berlin a grade on each flight, based on a scale of 0-100 and assigning the appropriate letter, and Berlin got As on both flights on the way down to Texas. Granted, they were short, but we were still grateful that they were smooth. That was certainly promising.

 

We used the advice we'd been given to feed him during takeoff and landing (the sucking and swallowing helps with babies' ears and the pressure changes), and he didn't ever cry about his ears, so it's something we'll continue. I guess we couldn't really say if it helped or not, but I'm not really willing to have him scream because I skipped that step. We fed him when he got the least bit fussy (because thus far in his life, the only reason he ever cries is because he's hungry), took turns taking him to the bathroom to change his diaper, and held him carefully for the 20 minutes he fell asleep. He was a pretty happy camper. 

Until we got to my mom's. And it was bedtime.

There's no way to know for sure if it's related, but Berlin was really constipated that first night. He's never had this happen before, and we've been on several flights since this one and it's never happened again, but he had a really rough night because we had no idea what was going on. After about an hour of just screaming, he finally fell asleep. He woke up in the middle of the night screaming, ate and fell back asleep, and then in the morning he woke up and was just unhappy. My mom remembered, randomly, that some of her kids had that problem after flying, and so she and my step-dad grabbed some generic suppositories from Walgreens. 10 minutes later he had a gross diaper and the tears were over for good. Like I said, Berlin's never had this problem before flying, and even flying several times after the problem has never repeated itself, but I always travel with suppositories now. Just in case.

We had a fun week, and at the end of it, we flew home. The flights home were mostly uneventful, though I think Jeremy did give Berlin an 85 on the very last leg. Probably because he cried once or twice because he was exhausted but tries to keep himself awake always. He's so afraid of missing something.

 Oh. Looking at the pictures and realizing there's an outfit change, I remembered. We did have one event. Why would you need to change an outfit for a kid who doesn't vomit or spit up? Considering the first flight, was a good sign because, hey, he's not constipated!

But Jeremy was the one who took him to the bathroom. That's why he got an 85. 

Still not too bad. And even though he was smiling and good-natured for the drive from the airport, the poor kid was so worn out, he fell asleep almost as soon as we got home. Even before we got home. We stopped by my cousins' house to see my aunt, and he fell asleep during the introductions.

So after a mostly uneventful trip, we felt like we had some really good experience. We can handle flying to Germany, right?

...right?