Aedan: 62 Months, Week 4
Owen: 21 Months, Week 2
Sunday, June 23rd was our last day on Upland before heading out to Pennsylvania. We finally had gotten word that we could close on Tuesday morning, so our plan was to leave early Monday morning and make the nine hour drive from Upland to Wilkes-Barre where we would stay the night in a hotel.
Most of the time we leave to head home on Sunday mornings, but since we weren't leaving until Monday, we were able to actually go to Ema and Papa's church that day. Here are all the kids dressed up and ready for church, showing off their bug jar.
The kids love dancing around to silly songs played on Alexa, and "It's Raining Tacos!" quickly became one of their favorites. If you've never heard it, you should look it up and watch the video, and then you will understand a lot more about the motions that Aedan does to the song. They definitely have fun with this song, and it makes us laugh watching them dance to it.
After dinner that night, the kids put on a performance of Aladdin for us. They get Alexa to play the music from the new movie, and they choreograph all the dancing. I love how Owen swings his arms back and forth and jumps up and down using both feet. He loves getting into the music with them and copying whatever they do. He even can do a somersault pretty well! Samantha was doing somersaults off all the furniture and Aedan was doing a lot of jumping, dancing, and making silly faces.
Ben and I worked to get everything collected and packed up on Sunday night so that we could head out Monday morning as early as we could. Our goal was around 8:30. The drive was 9 hours of just driving, not including stopping time, so we weren't sure how long of a day we had ahead of us. We were a little worried about how the kids (and Izzy) would do in the car for such a long trip in one day, but they really did much better than we expected. We brought toys to play with, things to color, a movie to watch, and LeapPads to play with. The day passed by fairly quickly and uneventfully, and we reached the hotel a little bit after our usual dinnertime, but we pushed through because we just wanted to get there. The last hour or so, we just had lot of snacks, and that was about when Owen was starting to lose it in being stuck in his car seat.
We stayed at a Best Western in downtown Wilkes-Barre, so our first job was to get checked in and go pick up a pizza quickly to eat for dinner. We ended up eating outside by the pool, but no one seemed very hungry. I think everyone was just tired. We decided to let the kids go swimming for a few minutes after dinner, but the pool was outside and the water was a little cold, so they didn't want to swim for too long. Owen didn't even want to get into the water. Then, we had the job of getting everyone situated for bed. Ben's parents were kind enough to come out with us to help us move into our new house, so we got two hotel rooms. Samantha and Aedan were going to share a bed in the room with Ema and Papa, and Owen and Izzy would be in the same room as us. I think it was around 9:00 before everyone was finally asleep that night. Ben and I were exhausted and ready for a break, but we knew the work was just starting. It was a blessing to have a week in Upland between the craziness of moving out of our old house and the work of getting settled into our new house. It was a welcome reprieve, and I was thankful for it.
Tuesday morning came bright and early, and we had signed Samantha and Aedan up for a reading and art camp at Wilkes that they could attend for free because of Ben being a faculty member. We debated whether or not to sign them up simply because we were just moving in. However, we decided it would be good for them to have something to occupy themselves while we were busy getting things unpacked and situated in the house. That way we only had Owen to watch and entertain, and he would take naps in the afternoon as well. They missed the first day of camp on Monday, but the director said that was okay. We threw together a hodge-podge lunch for them from things we brought with us from Upland, and dropped them off a little before 9:00 so that we could get to our closing at 9:00. Ben's parents stayed with Owen and Izzy at the hotel while we closed. The realtor represented the sellers, so we weren't able to meet them, but closing went smoothly. We got the keys and garage door openers, and then we were off to pick up Owen and Izzy from the hotel before heading out to our house in Harvey's Lake. It was about 10:30 when we headed to the house, and we were excited to show Ema and Papa around our new place.
From there it was time to get to the hard work of moving in. All of our stuff was in the basement and garage, and they generally stacked things according to what room they went to, but it was difficult to decipher through the stacks of boxes and furniture everywhere. We decided our first job was to get the beds set up, particularly Owen's crib so that he would have somewhere to nap that afternoon, followed by everyone else's beds. I spent the afternoon rearranging boxes in the garage and making stacks for different rooms, as well as putting together everything that we wanted to go into storage in the attic. We decided to hire a couple guys to come to the house to help with moving the heavy furniture and boxes up to the attic, and it was the best decision we made in this whole process. They were super efficient and careful getting all of our heavy and bulky furniture and boxes upstairs, and it saved the rest of us a lot of sweat and frustration. You could tell they did stuff like that for a living because they had no trouble maneuvering everything around the corner at the top of our basement stairs without making any marks on our walls or floors.
Our goal for the first day was getting bedrooms situated, and we succeeded at that goal. The kids had a place to sleep, and I even got the curtains hung up in the kids' rooms to block out at least a little of the morning sun. That evening for dinner we walked down to the restaurant a block away from our house called Lakeside Skillet since we had no food in our house, and we were pretty hot and tired so we were looking forward to relaxing in an air-conditioned restaurant for awhile. The kids were hungry and devoured their food. The restaurant was empty because they are busier in the morning, and we were eating later at night than normal. Here are a couple pictures that Ben took of our house from the backyard that evening. You can see the beautiful sunset in the background. What a beautiful place we have found to live!
The next few days were all about getting moved in to our house and checking things off our do do list. Samantha and Aedan continued going to camp from 9:00-3:30 every day, which they loved, and Ben, Ema, Papa, and I worked on many things around the house. We tried our best to occupy Owen while we did stuff around the house. I spent much of Wednesday getting Owen's and Aedan's rooms unpacked. We had no food, so Ben went out late Tuesday night to get some groceries. We also had some things to get for the house like bolts for Samantha's closet, washers for the dining room table, as well as researching what type of lawnmower to get for our back yard and ordering parts to fix the shelf in our refrigerator. There are always so many little things to be done when moving into a new house.
It's always overwhelming to me because stuff is just everywhere, and I didn't know what box anything was in since I didn't pack any of them. A lot of the boxes just had stuff dumped inside the boxes, and we started to realize we were missing things. We couldn't find any of our trash cans, my green area rug that we had under our dining room table, all the stuff for our laundry, and some outdoor toys. Plus, the people that bought our house already pointed out a whole bunch of things the movers left at our old house that the movers already agreed to pay to ship to us like our baby gate from around our pellet stove, our reusable bags, part of our mixer, and the going away presents from our small group friends. There were a few other things left behind that the movers said they would just send me money to replace rather than shipping them. It was frustrating that not all of our stuff got moved. I thought it would be simpler having them pack, and in some ways it still was because it saved me a lot of work at the beginning, but now it seemed a lot harder. I felt frustrated that I wasn't able to stay until they were all done packing up so that I could have walked around the house myself to make sure they had everything packed up that we wanted. I was just feeling exhausted and felt overwhelmed when thinking about all the work that was ahead of us.
It was also pretty hot in our house since we don't have central A/C. Ben's dad helped us install our window unit that was left with the house, and it did a great job of cooling the main level, but not the upstairs. I was tired and hot, and my patience was wearing thin. Ema and Papa left on Thursday because they had to get back to Upland before Uncle Tim and Pla arrived on Friday. It was definitely challenging trying to get things unpacked with kids.
Here is Owen enjoying the cool air blowing out of the air conditioner as we hung out at the house, trying to get things unpacked that morning after Ema and Papa left. He loved feeling the air blowing right on him. It made us both laugh.
One of the big projects Ben worked on on Thursday was putting together the parts we ordered for the play set. We decided there was no point in buying a whole new play set with this one in the yard was perfectly workable. They even have the posts in the ground in cement, so it is very sturdy. We ordered the slide, the tire swing, two wings, and a trapeze bar. It took a bit of work getting the slide put together and attaching some wood underneath the play set to secure the tire swing to, but Ben did a great job putting it all together, and here is the finished product. The kids couldn't wait to play on it on Thursday afternoon when they got home from camp. I'm glad we were able to get it put together so they would have something to play with in the back yard. They loved our old play set so much. That was one of the main things they were going to miss from our old house.
I am very task-oriented, sometimes to a fault, but I guess it's helpful in a situation like this where you are trying to get moved in to a house as quickly as possible so that life can feel like normal again, especially for the kids' sake. By Friday all the kids' rooms, the kitchen, and our bedroom was done. (Ben's mom unpacked and organized our entire kitchen for us. It was such a huge help, and I am so grateful to her for that.) Then we had to finish the bathrooms, toys and books for the living room and basement, and then decorations and pictures after that. We had some arranging to do to figure out where we wanted our shelves and things to go. The sellers left their pool table, which was nice, but it took up space we were originally planning to use in a different way.
Friday I also made my first trip to Aldi. It's about 20 minutes from our house, and my sister shops there pretty regularly for her groceries, so I was excited to check it out and see how it would work to start doing my grocery shopping there and try to save money on our grocery bill. Shopping in new stores is always a little overwhelming at first because I don't know where anything is, but I was able to find everything on my list, and even picked up a little sprinkler for the kids to have fun playing with in the back yard to cool off on these hot days.
After a busy week of pretty much non-stop work as long as we were awake, we decided to take Friday night off to just relax and hang out with the kids. We hooked up the sprinkler and everyone had a blast running around and getting wet. I loved hearing the laughter and squeals of joy, and seeing the kids enjoy our new back yard. Seeing them play like this made this house feel even more like home.
Samantha and Aedan got creative and made their own water slide by spraying the slide with the sprinkler. They were having such a blast! I just love how much fun they have together. (Owen didn't really like getting wet so he mostly hung back and watched.)
Samantha and Aedan love to spin around super fast on the tire swing together. Also, Owen loves to join Samantha and Aedan on the tire swing, and Aedan, and then Samantha, lovingly holds on to Owen's back so that he doesn't fall off backwards, and Samantha makes sure she doesn't get them spinning around too quickly.
With the ground going up on a slope, it gives Owen good footing for swinging back and forth on his tummy. He really likes to do this, as you can tell by the smiles on his face. (You can also see Izzy happily frolicking around the yard, probably chasing a bird. So far we have just left her off her leash, and we keep our eye on her when she's outside. She listens and comes when we call her, so we are going to try that for right now and see if we can train her what the limits of our back yard are.)
Since we had been so busy getting unpacked, we decided to take Saturday to take the kids somewhere fun. We drove down to a children's museum in Bloomsburg, which is about an hour from us. We were excited to actually live close to things to do like museums and zoos and lots more family activities. This museum was on the smaller side, but it was the perfect place to spend our morning and early afternoon. They had a special exhibit going on where you could try out playing different instruments, and Samantha and Aedan had a lot of fun with that. Aedan was really good at playing the brass instruments, and Samantha expressed interest in learning to play the violin. I would love for them to have an interest in learning music.
We visited all the exhibits in the museum, but their favorite was this area where they could dress up. They met these other girls that joined them in acting out their play, and here they are all taking a bow at the end.
We ended up leaving for a quick lunch at Wendy's before going back for some more play time. The kids were having so much fun that they didn't want to leave, but we reassured them that we would be able to come back again sometime, and we had already been there for several hours. Owen had woken up early that morning and was getting tired and ready for a nap. It was a good day, and I think it was good for Samantha and Aedan to see that our new home is closer to fun places to go, and that even though it's sad that we moved away from our friends and what we knew, we know that God led us to our new home and our new city, and that he will continue to provide for us. I am excited about exploring this new area, and I'm glad that we moved early on in the summer so that we have the rest of the summer to get acclimated and enjoy time together as a family.
(Blog about June 23-29, 2019)
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