The Utah Shipment

On Tuesday morning three wonderful young people (from Miriam's seminary class...not from our ward) showed up to help us haul our Utah-bound stuff up to our U-haul moving pods. Our driveway is steep so this was rather a herculean task, but we managed to have the job done in a little under an hour (which felt pretty incredible). 

Here's Benjamin walking down the driveway with the two young men who showed up (we also had a wonderful young woman show up):

And here's Benjamin placing a box inside of the cube:

We only had the youth lug things up into the cul-de-sac for us before (attempting) to ply them with doughnuts and chocolate milk (which they refused, stating that they were "good"). 

We had mapped out the dimensions of the moving cube on our floor and practiced how we might pack things before we even ordered the containers. I honestly think—mathematically/practically—that we could have gotten everything into a single pod...if it weren't for that pesky weight limit!

Several bins are full of family history stuff—photo albums and things of that nature—and those are surprisingly heavy, so we decided that we'd have to split our shipment into two containers, unfortunately. So then we just...started thinking of what else we might send to Utah. What might our kids want for whatever college apartment they eventually set up? What might we still want access to but didn't want to ship to Qatar? 

We came up with quite a few things, so even though we ended up winging a bit of the packing at the end, our pre-packing planning helped us load these cubes quite efficiently, I think. 

Here's Phoebe and Alexander posing by a rather full crate. Phoebe is saying, "Go away!" to our stuff instead of the traditional "Cheeeeeeese!"

Lucky for us we got to cool off at a little pool party after we finished packing things up all by ourselves. Our youth group decided they wanted to throw a "farewell party" for our family (and finally remembered to invite us at like 4:30 that afternoon...forgetting entirely to come help us move...which is fine...I'm not bitter...it just paints a very accurate picture of our experience in this ward...ahem...anyways...).

We often feel like our ward is small, but this looks like a pretty big group of kids!

Seventeen kids all together! Plus two aged-out teens (sitting on the stairs). Of course, their numbers were bolstered by the younger siblings present. If we take those away, there were twelve youth present (which, I believe, is 100% attendance). 

It was a great way to cool off and we didn't have to make dinner because they had pizza! So, two good things!

This morning we did a "final sweep" of the house and found a few items that we had talked about sending but hadn't gotten ready to ship. So we packed those things and then strapped down our load (best of luck to those unloading on the other end—Grandpa, Darla, Rachel, etc.—who have to figure out how to unstrap that spiderweb of rope we put up).

A word of caution: These pods were not very hot inside when they first arrived and either I simply didn't have the pleasure of running into the roof/ceiling on the first day or they had been kept in a more sheltered/shady area prior to their delivery BUT by the second afternoon we were working in them, they were plenty hot inside and the sun had been beating down on their metal roofs for a long time. The roof/ceiling was scorching hot. I accidentally touched the ceiling with my forearm while I was tying a knot or working on ratcheting something and...I swear it scorched my arm hair off. 

It was sizzling hot. 

The rest of the crate wasn't so terrible—being inside was tolerable, if sweaty, work. 

Touching the roof, though? Agony. 

So best to avoid that if you can.

Anyway...

We locked things up at around 2:30 this afternoon and these containers are ready to be picked up and shipped off! Fingers crossed they're happy with our weight distribution and don't have any trouble lifting the boxes (a lot of the limits/guidelines are in place for forklift reasons, which makes sense)...

The house feels pretty empty now, though...to be fair...there's also a surprising amount of stuff left inside. We've got about 6 weeks to get everything else ready to go—suitcases packed and the house vacant.