Downsizing

I've decided that preparing for this move is a little bit like a pregnancy.  We have a rough "due date" but we really have no idea when we'll actually be moving out of our house.  For the past several weeks I've been thinking of September 15 as when we might be moving.  But now it's looking like we might be here a little bit longer - perhaps until the end of September.  

We really don't know at all though because this all depends on how fast Brandon's Chain of Command signs off on his paperwork.  It could be a week it could be two months.  It could end up needing to go a whole different direction and take 6 months.  What really happens is anyone's guess.  It kind of makes me wish for a pregnancy where you know the baby isn't going to decide to wait an extra 6 months.

There are a few other semi-similarities to pregnancy going on right now.  During pregnancy a mother will go through a "nesting" phase where she starts getting the home ready for the baby. She'll spent her time setting up furniture, buying new clothes and accessories, and cleaning.

Well, with this move we seem to be going through a de-nesting phase.  We are slowly getting rid of a lot of our stuff.  I want to make sure we get rid of all the superfluous stuff now before it gets packed, shipped across the country, stored for several months, and then shipped somewhere else. Even things that have survived our two other interstate moves aren't making the cut this time.   

It's actually been really liberating.  And it's all signaling that things are about the change a lot in the very near future. So let's take a look at many of the changes that have been going on in my home during the past few weeks. 

 This first picture is from Charlotte and Lydia's first day of school.  I took Derrick and Veronica to Enterprise to run an errand and we ended up at one of the parks there.  Derrick remembered other visits to that park and so he asked to "go see ducks and fish" So we went on a walk down to the little lake so he could see the geese and the fish.  It was really cute to see him jabber on about everything. 

Veronica LOVES our neighbor's Labrador dog, Lexi.  Every morning they bring the dog to the bus stop and every morning Veronica insists on holding Lexi's leash and walking back to our house with her.  Usually our neighbor holds onto the leash too, but I took the picture right after she dropped it on accident.  Every time I say, "okay it's time to get the bus" Veronica yells, "Go see LEXI!"

The girls go to a little Spanish class a few times a week during school hours.  They can count to ten in Spanish and are learning other things.  One day Lydia wrote this out for me and proudly announced that she could spell red in Spanish.  What's even more impressive / slightly funny is that she can't spell red in English.

One thing I wanted to make sure I did before we moved was to finish my scrapbooks.  Years earlier I finished everything up to about 2009.  With a few things done up to 2013.  But I still had a huge box full of loose papers. I didn't want to move with all those loose papers again. I wanted everything either in binders, or thrown away.

So every night during the Olympics I pulled out my giant box full of memorabilia, and worked on getting all the papers organized into my scrapbooks.  I spent about 10 nights getting ALL the stuff from 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 and so far in 2016 put into binders. I discovered that I still had stuff from 2007, 2008 and 2009 that I hadn't ever put in binders.  So I had go back and do those years.  I threw away a ton of unimportant stuff and so the stuff I did keep represents the very best things that I want to remember.

Then I got all the binders in one place and spent several nights just making sure everything was where I wanted it to be.  It was a big project.  This disorganized looking mess was actually the most organised everything had been in years because for once I didn't have a ton of papers in a pile in a box.

My sister Lindsey loves hearing about Antler's adventures so I made sure to send her this picture of when Charlotte wanted to take Antler to school.

I've wanted to clean our carpets forever, but I kept coming up with reasons to put it off.  But I decided that no matter what I would do it when Derrick started school.  So I borrowed my friend's carpet cleaner and spent a week cleaning the carpets.  I did about two rooms a day.  The kids thought it was great when I cleaned the living room carpet.  They loved having the couches in the kitchen.

I cleaned the carpet after they went to bed, but they had fun running around on the empty floor before bedtime.

And of course they had fun jumping off the couches.

Last year Derrick got really attached to a little stuffed cat that he called Baby.  It was super cute, but I never got a picture of it.  He found Baby again a few days ago and so I tried to get a picture of him cuddling Baby, but he didn't seem to want any photographic evidence of his affection.

Remember how I gave Charlotte a ballerina costume for her birthday/Halloween.? Well, that costume has been missing for months.  (I'm beginning to think I gave it away because it was too small.) And she has been so sad about it.  Well I found her a new one and she immediately put it on and danced around the room.  She says she wants to be a ballerina when she grows up.  Her plan is to be a therapist in the day time and a ballerina at night.

I decided that I didn't want to keep my aging collection of wedding decorations anymore.  But I wanted to give them one last hurrah before I got rid of them.  So I did the centerpieces for the First Relief Society Activity for our brand new ward.  I was trying to represent how women in different seasons of their lives can all come together in Relief Society.  I wasn't super happy with the end result, but other people liked them.

Brandon went to Louisiana to help clean out houses.  His group was assigned to two houses that needed all the junk removed and all the floors and part of the walls ripped up.  They left Friday evening, and then camped overnight outside an LDS Stake Center.  They worked all day on Saturday, and camped in the same place that night. On Sunday they had a short sacrament meeting, did a little bit more work, and then came home.  He came home with an added sense of disdain for junk.  That's come in handy as we have gone through all our stuff.  

While he was gone I set about going through more of our stuff.  I decided that we should have a big painting party and use up the bottles of finger paint we've had for over three years.  The kids thought that was fun.

I cleaned out our storage shelves in the toy room.  Charlotte and Lydia had fun posing in different positions on them. 

Here's Charlotte, no wait, that's Lydia.

Here's another funny pose. I'm hoping to sell these shelves, but so far we haven't had any takers.  This unit is really hard to move if we do take it with us Brandon is going to cut it apart and make two separate book cases/shelves.

On Saturday night we skpyed with my parents in Brazil.  Lydia drew this picture of my dad.

Charlotte and Lydia noticed a lot of dead grass on the hill behind our house.  So they started cleaning it up into garbage bags.

That turned into bringing it home and making a giant nest for themselves.  Oh well, at least they were outside.

On Sunday the kids and I had to go to church without Brandon.  We weren't the only family there without their dad though. Actually the vast majority of the men and young men in our ward were gone.  It's a good thing our Bishop didn't go to Louisiana or else there might have been a bit of a problem over who was actually presiding in Sacrament Meeting.

Several months ago I wanted to figure out the exact date that Veronica would be the same age that Charlotte and Lydia were when she was born.  So I counted the back on the calendar and figured out that would happen on August 28th.  But on August 28th I rechecked my counting and realized that we'd actually hit that milestone on August 18th.  Oh well.  We took this picture anyway to commemorate the end of the baby years. THANK GOODNESS!

My friend Melissa's family moved to Hawaii in June.  Her daughter misses Charlotte and Lydia so she sent them a letter with some things that she drew for them. They thought that was so fun so Lydia wrote back with her own drawings.

Here's Charlotte being silly with Antler's old house.

And here is Antler's new house.  Antler's bed is in the basket.  Her TV is the blue blocks and her couch is the yellow blocks.  Her food and water dish is an old contact case.  And her play area  is on a washcloth.

I finally got my scrapbooks all together and completely organized last week!  There are 13 binders here that hold things from the 31 years of my life.  One binder has a large amount of my school work - mostly the papers and essays I wrote in high school and college. Another binder has all the letters Brandon and I wrote back and forth when he was in Basic Training. The rest of the binders have pictures, awards, vacation memorabilia, stuff from the kids, etc.  I am so glad this is done!

My next project was to put together some little books for the kids.  They all made soooooooooo much art work last year that it was hard to know how to save it.  The last thing I wanted to do was save it all and have to move with stacks and stacks of papers.  But I also couldn't bring myself to get rid of all of it either.  I wanted an easy, organized way for us to be able to look back at the things they had created.

What I ended up doing was going through all the papers and sorting them into a pile for each kid.  Then I saved about 30 papers that represented each kids' best work or something I knew they were very proud of.  I threw away A TON more paper than I kept.

After that I put the papers that I saved into a binder for each kid.  Each paper is in a sheet protector.  It's really easy for the kids to flip through the binders and look at their work.  And they all LOVE to do it.  I made Lydia's first and she was so proud of everything that she saw.  Charlotte waited eagerly for me to finish her's and she was so excited to see everything.  And even Derrick was happy to look through his book.

I totally forgot to take a picture of the kids' art books so I'll have to make sure to include that in my next post.

There are two other Pre-k kids that use our bus stop. Each of them has a little sister about Veronica's age.  It's so cute to see the three little sisters all waiting for their older siblings and they all give each other such big hugs when they are reunited.

We've been hiding inside for the past several months because its either too hot, too humid, or too rainy to go anywhere in the evening. But one day a rain storm went past before dinner and so we went on a walk after dinner.  It was actually pretty nice outside.  Charlotte looked so cute running around and dancing in the grass that I just had to take this picture.

Last week the school had an open house night where we could have a chance to visit the school and learn about the kids' daily routine.  I was planning on all of us going, but Charlotte and Lydia told me that it was going to be boring and they just wanted to stay home.  So I went by myself.  It was fun to see the work they have been doing.  Here is a picture Lydia did.

And here is Charlotte's.

I stopped by the Pre-K pod to talk to Derrick's teachers  He is going great and is so attentive. His teacher remarked about how much Derrick has improved in the last year.  This time last year he'd hardly let any of them touch him and now he is so comfortable in the class and is willing to try so many new things.  I think my biggest regret with this move is that we will have to take Derrick away from this program.  I'm hoping the program at the elementary school where we are moving will be just as good.

I've had a lot of success selling stuff on the various Facebook groups for Fort Rucker, but I had some smaller things that I knew would take forever to sell on Facebook so I decided that we should try our luck with a yard sale. I also decided it would be a good time to try to sell some of the larger things. So on Saturday we had a yard sale.  

We did okay considering it was Labor Day weekend and so half of Fort Rucker was off enjoying a 4 day weekend. Many of the small things did sell.  However, I was shocked that no one even even seemed interested in the furniture. That's usually what I'm out hunting for when I'm out looking for yard sales.  It ended up being a valuable educational experience for me. Usually I'm afraid to make low offers on large furniture because I don't want to offend the people selling it. But being on the selling side taught be that the people just want to get rid of their stuff at that point.  Seriously if someone had offered me even $10 for any of our large stuff I probably would have taken them up on it.

Instead its all back in our garage waiting to sell on Facebook or get picked up by the thrift store.

One of the things we got rid of was our giant TV.  This TV was obsolete when we got it for free 10 years ago.  Every time we've moved we vowed that this was the last time we'd move with that heavy TV, but we've always hung on to it.  We've really liked that the kids could touch the monitor without messing it up.  But it was time to get rid of it.  We put a "FREE TV" sign on the tv for the yard sale, but no one wanted it.  Later when I went to take some small things to the thrift store I found out why.  There were four medium TV's and one large TV sitting by the donation shed.  There was an even larger one inside the shed.  Clearly the era of heavy TV's is over.

So we put the TV on the curb and the trash guys picked it up and smashed it in the truck today.  It was kind of a sad end to something that has served us so well for so long. But it was time.

Not only did we get rid of the TV, but we also decided the entertainment center was past it's prime.  It's still in great shape, but I'm not sure it would survive another interstate move.  So I'm trying to sell it. (Seriously, make me an offer. At this point I'll give it to you for $5.)  And we also decided to get rid of the couch. I'm still a little sad about this one.  I spent a lot of time nursing on that couch.  But like many of the other things we are getting rid of - it just too heavy and old to justify hanging onto.  The futon won out because it can pull double duty as a guest bed.

I thought we'd all be a little traumatized by the drastic change to our living room.  But we adjusted really well.  A computer has taken over for the TV and everyone is just fine with that.  In fact, it's kind of liberating to have so many things gone.  I have to keep reminding myself that we can't get rid of EVERYTHING.  That we do actually want to have some furniture when we get to wherever we are going.

Charlotte decided that we needed to spend some of our yard sale money at the dollar store.  And she was so helpful with everything that I decided she was right.  So Brandon took her and Lydia to the dollar store.  They each picked out some costume jewelry.  Charlotte came home and dressed up real fancy.

Lydia also got to pick out an extra toy (she'd cleaned their room all by herself) and she picked out this coloring paper.  She spent a lot of time carefully coloring the whole design.  I think I need to get her one of those adult coloring books.

On Sunday she wore her Wedding Dress Halloween costume with all her jewelry.  She was so happy with her outfit that I let her wear it to church.

Here are all the girls with their white shoes on the way to church.

And for some reason Veronica decided to start sucking her thumb so we had to get a picture of that.

Monday was Labor Day and we had plans to go to a spring, or maybe Providence Canyon, but we never got very far with those plans because Lydia was diagnosed with strep throat on Friday.  She got the penicillin shot and I thought we were in the clear, but she still wasn't feeling that great on Monday.  And Veronica and Derrick woke up at 5:20 and were way to cranky to take anywhere.  You may remember that we celebrated Memorial Day with Derrick having strep throat.  He ended up in the ER when his throat and mouth started swelling too much.  So when Lydia's throat seemed extra swollen I decided it would be a good idea to go to Instacare during business hours. The doctor acted like I was over reacting, but he did prescribe a steroid for her throat which was what I wanted.  And we avoided a trip to the hospital in Dothan.

The other most eventful part of labor day was when we cleaned a lot of the walls.  I'm actually pretty proud of my stain removing skills.  Check out my cleaning board on pinterest for some of my tricks.  I've learned  how to get ink off walls with rubbing alcohol and cotton balls.  (warning the paint comes off too) and crayon comes off with WD40 like it's nothing.  The only thing I haven't got off yet is dry erase marker and purple ink.  So housing provided touch up paint and told us to cover everything with a thin layer of spackle before we apply the paint.  I went around the house removing stains while Brandon came behind me putting spackle on the ones we couldn't get off.   You can see all the white spots on the wall in this picture.

Well that's us lately.  At some point in the near future we should (hopefully) get word about when this move is going to be happening.  No matter when it happens we will be ready.