Travel notes: Day 1

Today we drove from Spanish Fork, Utah to Limon, Colorado (560 miles, 8 hours and 45 minutes of driving time).

Andrew and I are in the minivan with Benjamin, Zoë and Alexander. Miriam and Rachel are in the car with Grandpa. We're a happy little caravan. At least for today. At least until we told the kids we weren't stopping anywhere for dinner because we had so many snacks for them to munch on (and, like, good snacks—cheese and carrots and celery and nuts, if they should choose such things, which make a very healthy meal (but also many things that might not add up to a sufficient meal)).

Anyway, I took some notes from our car because our children are habitually hilarious.

At one point Zoë called my attention and I looked back and she was feeling her nose and looking very perplexed. "Mom! Mom! Mom!" she said. "I think...I think my nose...is an M!"

And, you know what, noses are M's...in a way. If you are strapped into your car seat long enough you, too, might discover this about yourself.

"See? Boredom is good," Andrew said. "You discover all sorts of things you never realized when you're bored."

Farewells

What a whirlwind of activity we've had this week! I eventually really do need to get all the pictures off my phone and camera and run through everything we've done (bowling, farewell parties, and so forth). On Tuesday we packed up the truck and said goodbye to mostly everything we own (and learned that we own far too much stuff). On Wednesday we met up with my friend Jade and her little girls at Red Ledges.

Jade and I became fast friends when her family moved into our ward in PoCo (from South Africa). I was so excited to have another little girl my age in our ward because for years it had just been me and *grumbly voice* Damen *end grumbly voice*.

I'm sure Damen is fine. But seven-year-old me certainly didn't think he was enough of a playmate.

Lia and Hona (sisters, very close in age (but not twins?), whose names, if you say them together are liahona) were also in my age group for a time, but they stuck together like glue and I think eventually moved to a Chinese-speaking branch or something.

Anyway, I was so happy to have a girl my age in the ward. Jade and I would take turns going home with each other's families on Sundays. That was a very common way for us to have playdates with our church friends because our ward boundaries were so large that it meant we'd only have to be chauffeured once to come home at the end of the playdate instead of twice (to be dropped off and picked up). Her dad would make "flapjacks" quite often and we just loved being together.

Unfortunately, she happened to move in only a few months (6? 9?) before my family moved to Alberta, but her friendship has stuck with me my entire life. I saw her once when I was 13 and I flew out to BC for a visit but haven't seen her since. We really are quite two peas in a pod though.

Before getting back in contact after years of radio silence, we both grew up, graduated from our respective high schools, and ended up at BYU. I taught English in Voronezh, Russia. She taught English in Voronezh, Russia. I did a study abroad in Jordan (as a trailing spouse). She did a study abroad at the Jerusalem Center (the first semester it reopened). I lived in Egypt (as a trailing spouse again) and she was writing to me about a job prospect she had in Egypt years ago (but ultimately decided not to take). It's kind of funny the number of very similar things we've done!

Of course, our lives also have been wildly different.

I got married young and have five kids. She went on a mission and then to law school (and somewhere in the middle got married and started having kids—her first baby was born just a few weeks before she graduated and her second is about nine months old).

It was so fun to reconnect with her, though, and to reassure my girls that friends we only get to be with for a short amount of time (like the two years we spent in Spanish Fork—which really is plenty of time to develop a long-lasting friendship, in my opinion and experience) can be lifelong—and important—friends.

Anyway...I'm sure I'll be back to revisit our last visit to Red Ledges once I get those pictures off my camera.

So spooky

The other night I walked into the kitchen while Andrew was in the pantry (I have a feeling we're going to miss having a walk-in pantry) and when he turned around and saw me he just about died of fright.

"I wasn't even trying to scare you!" I said while he was trying to catch his breath (we might spend a good chunk of our spare time trying to find new ways to scare each other).

And then he explained that he was so scared because our office chairs had been sitting at the top of the stairs for a while now and he when he'd glance at them quickly he'd think they were people and they'd startle him. "And then you walked into the kitchen dressed like an office chair and I thought that somehow one of the office chairs had followed me into the kitchen and it really scared me!"

"You thought I was dressed..."

"Like...an...office...chair...yeah. Now that I say it out loud again I can see that was maybe not the best..." he tried to excuse himself.

"Like an office chair?!" I asked, feeling a bit like Princess Sneezewort, a character introduced in The Princess in Black and the Perfect Princess Party, who is "not afraid of hiding," during hide-and-seek but is "afraid of never being found," because she blends in with the drapes, table lamps, and rug (and pretty much everything else).

"Well, you have a grey shirt on," he tried.

"Like. An. Office. Chair?!" I repeated.

It's possible I need to liven up my wardrobe...

Birthday privileges

Somewhere or other I squirreled away our camera and on it are the pictures from my birthday. But I'm not sure where it is at the moment, and also I needed to install a program to edit pictures (or at least make my pictures the right size) on this old laptop, so for the time being we'll have picture-less posts.

Lucky for you there are plenty of pictures on my mom's blog. She took all five of my kids out—by herself—to Thanksgiving Point for a day of adventure while Andrew and I spent the day furiously packing. And then at the end of the day she had us over for dinner.

I told her that if I had been the one to take all five kids to Thanksgiving Point by myself, it would certainly be a day that I would not want to come home and make dinner! But she had dinner ready for us when we arrived at her house—perogies, yum!—and a lovely carrot cake that she bought at the store (and that had so much frosting on it)!

When it came time to say the blessing on the food, Zoë thought that I should be the one to say the prayer, and said as much, but my dad didn't hear her and asked Miriam to say the prayer. So Miriam said the prayer and Zoë, who did a very good job at controlling her temper, passive-aggressively apologized to me after the prayer (I think deep down inside she wanted to get really angry with my dad for not having me say the prayer, but she also knows that she's not supposed to throw fits about everything, so a passive-aggressive jab it was).

"I'm sorry you didn't get to say the prayer on your birthday, Mommy!" she said. "We should always get to say the prayer on our birthdays but instead Miriam prayed. And that's just too bad because it's your birthday!"

She has apologized to me (less passive-aggressively, since my dad's no longer within earshot to benefit from her derisive tone, I suppose) several times since then. She feels very strongly about this.

We have a longstanding (and, our older girls might add, annoying) tradition of celebrating every last and first thing someone does on their birthday (and also at the New Year and also sometimes when the month changes, just for kicks).

"It's the last prayer we'll hear from three-year-old Zoë," we might say the night before her birthday. "The last time we get to tuck three-year-old Zoë in. The very last hug and kiss for three-year-old Zoë."

And then on her birthday we'd shower her with, "It's four-year-old Zoë! Her first four-year-old breakfast! Her first four-year-old breakfast prayer! Her first time brushing her hair as a four-year-old!"

You get the picture, I'm sure. Zoë is all over this sort of thing. Rachel...is a little bit over it (but lucky for her she gets to continue to endure it for as long as we're her parents).

Even though I didn't get to say the dinner prayer on my very first day of being 34, it was a pretty great birthday, anyway. And Zoë is excited that I'm finally her age again—in fact, right now she is the exact same age as Andrew and I. 34, 34, and 4. The very same!

Loading Day

Our moving truck was dropped off yesterday afternoon. We had three days to fill it but because we went ahead and hired movers—thanks to a rather generous moving package—it's already filled (to the brim!) and has been taken away. And we didn't even lift a finger.

Having moved how many times without the help of professional movers (answer: many times), I can testify that using professional movers is definitely the way to go. It took three men five hours to load at 28-foot trailer for us and all we did (besides move a couple of things out of the house at the very end to hasten the project) was sit around and fret that we wouldn't be able to squeeze everything we wanted to in there. But we did, more or less, manage to get our entire house into one trailer!

We've been selling things off and giving things away for several weeks now. Some things we knew we wouldn't have room for and other things we simply didn't want anymore. Other things we wish we could have held on to, but knew doing so was impractical.

Both Miriam and I are mourning the loss of our chairs. For me, it's my rocking chair—too big and bulky to justify moving across the country (again) when my nursing days are numbered. For Miriam it's her big red office chair, which we decided at the last moment to jettison when we started getting really nervous about not having room for everything else we needed to put on the truck.

She's sad, but has decided that if she had to choose between the organ and the red chair, she'd choose the organ every time. And the organ definitely made it on the truck, so she's happy.

And Karen's big comfy recliner will be taking the place of my rocking chair and Alexander and I will live out the rest of our nursing days in that chair, I suppose, so we can be happy, too.

It was weird sitting back and watching while the truck was being loaded, but it's certainly nice to not be completely exhausted at the end of our loading day! And our nerves feel a lot better now that everything is on its way to Georgia.

Now all that's ahead of us is packing our vehicles for our cross-country road trip...but for now we have a couple of days to breathe and enjoy Utah while we wait for Rachel to get back from Young Women's Camp!

Utter Chaos

Our moving truck arrives on Monday—ironically 23 months to the day we left Durham—but our moving crew isn't scheduled until Tuesday. In a way this is an act of grace because it allows us one more day to get our act together. Really we're pretty close to being done.

I think we have one or two more things to disassemble.

We like to joke that in our house we only ever disassemble (and never dissemble).

The sad part about disassembling furniture, though, is knowing that we're going to have to reassemble it all over again. It's kind of like making a fancy cake in that regard. You put all this effort into a project only to destroy/undo all your work. Oh, well. We're looking forward to getting settled even if it means putting all the furniture we just took apart back together again.

Moving always seems to breed chaos, at least for us (but surely for everybody).

The 7th floor

We took a break from our furious packing/cleaning/sorting routine this morning to visit Uncle Trevor in the hospital. He's having some rather typical quadriplegic complications and has been in the hospital since Monday. 

Yesterday we had a farewell party, which we awkwardly ended up throwing for ourselves (even though it didn't start out that way) and which I will write about in the near future, I'm sure. Right now I'm just trying to do a speed-write while Andrew is doing the final copy edits for an article of his that will be published soon. Anyway, we ended the evening playing hand-and-foot until late and we were cracking some pretty terrible jokes, which we knew we had to go share with Uncle Trevor. 

He seemed to enjoy having us there, though he was also pretty tired. 

The kids were mostly fascinated by the view from his window on the 7th floor. The hospital (Utah Valley Hospital, where Benjamin stayed in the NICU as a newborn and where Alexander was born (and where Andrew was born as well)) is undergoing some extensive renovations, so the kids were watching the construction workers demolish the tower opposite us piece by piece.

They can't take the tower down all at once because it's too near the rest of the hospital, so I don't know how long it's going to take to raze it but I imagine it will take a very long time.

We're hopeful Uncle Trevor will be home from the hospital soon, or at least out of the hospital. He may have to go into a care facility for a while since he has quite an extensive recovery in front of him, but he's doing okay, all things considered (some very scary, stomach-knotting words were tossed around (like, sepsis; he has sepsis (among other issues)) but he seems to be doing well). 

Lost his marbles

For weeks we've been hearing an odd sound in our car every time we rounded a corner—a rolling, a scraping, a gentle clinking as it came to rest on the opposite side of where it once was. We soon recognized it as the sound of a marble rolling around and we figured we'd better find it before it drove us crazy while making our four-day drive across the country.

We checked every cup holder (our van has a generous number of cup holders), every cubby hole, every secret compartment, every last nook and cranny we could think of. The rogue marble was no where to be found.

We continued to voice our consternation over the marble issue until Benjamin came forward to confess that he had "accidentally" stuffed a marble between the lining of the door and the window in—of all places—the back hatch.

How that could have possibly been an accident, we'll never know (because, honestly, he shouldn't "accidentally" have access to the back hatch), but a little investigation revealed that this was indeed the location of the missing marble.

It is stuck deep inside the recesses of our back hatch.

We began brainstorming on how to fix the issue: we would need to take off the lining of the door in order to fish around or perhaps we could just stuff something down there to keep it from moving or perhaps...

"Is it a metal marble?" I asked Benjamin. "Or a glass one?"

Benjamin started shrinking before my eyes; he pulled his head down and raised his shoulders until they were level with his ears. Appearing very turtle-like he asked with a trembling voice, "Which answer is the bad one?"

Ten

I am the world's best and most catastrophic rounder, according to Andrew. He told me this after he suggested we take a packing break and I said, "We only have ten more days!!"*

"Eleven," he calmly corrected.

"Today is almost over," I said.

"But today is not over yet so we still have eleven days. You are the world's best and most catastrophic rounder. You make everything sound like impending doom!"

So, there are eleven days until our truck arrives. But by the time we wake up tomorrow there will only be ten days until our truck arrives (and two weeks until we really take off) so in honour of eleven (almost ten) days until we once again cram all of our belongings into the back of a truck, I give you our ten highs and lows from life in Spanish Fork.*

* Now there really are only ten days until our truck arrives, which honestly feels more like nine...

I feel like we did something like this before leaving a few other homes (though I'm not sure we did one for Durham, but I could probably do one retrospectively). So without further ado, I give you a few lists of things that "we" think we'll miss/look forward to, and by "we" I mean "I":

Ten highs we experienced in Spanish Fork:

1. Alexander's birth
2. Miriam's baptism 
3. Benjamin started kindergarten
4. Rachel's spectacular last year of elementary school
5. Andrew graduated from Duke
6. Nancy got to play with gamelan and take a writing class
7. Zoë went from baby to big kid—from potty training to preschool
8. We got to go to Grover again (and visit Alberta, for that matter)
9. Rachel got to go to the temple for the first time at the Payson temple
10. We always had family to invite to everything

Ten lows we experienced in Spanish Fork:

1. Karen's death
2. Alexander's broken arm
3. We frequently felt smothered by family drama
4. Some of us have struggled to find friends here
5. Sometimes the train wakes up the baby at 2 AM
6. There are no bo-berry biscuits here
7. It's so far from the ocean
8. This last winter was so long and we were sick the entire time
9. The library was just so small, guys
10. We were perpetually stressed out over our impending unemployment

Ups and Downs

I started another post this evening, but then the baby started crying and I didn't finish it. I will try to get to it in the morning. In the meantime, Miriam has been trying to compose a piece of music every day this summer, which is simply not something I have ever thought of doing. I mean, I've always been a bit of a writer—constantly journaling and even trying my hand at poetry and lyrics since I was barely able to hold a pencil. But composing music isn't really something that I ever thought of just...doing...for fun...

Here's the song she wrote today (it's a duet, written for four hands):



I hope she keeps going because, frankly, that's pretty neat.