In Between-ess and Notes from the Chaotic Last 24 Hours of the First Part of the Move

I've been working on a post about Kelvin, but won't be able to finish and post it today (meaning Monday, since it's not long after midnight)...

Meanwhile, a (hopefully) quick update on our in-betweeness, or our current homeless state. (Sorry, it ended up a really long post, I guess that living these things was quite painful, so I feel the urge to share them with you).

Chaos
Friday was beyond crazy and tiring. On Thursday evening a friend arrived with two other people to clean the house for us. It was already 9 p.m. and the boys were supposed to be in bed, but in the chaos of me trying to clean our kitchen as much as I could while they cleaned upstairs and K dismantling the desktop computer, they just started playing like two little manics around the house. Their room was cleaned first so we could put them to bed, so in the meantime they used the one crib mattress that was still out to make a "slide" in our closet. When I came up to help get our bedroom ready for cleaning I found out they had nearly emptied one full box of tissues, first bringing each one into the closet as they did a circuit around the room, then bringing it back to our "bed" (two mattress pads on the floor). I scolded them and had them pick them all up and put them in the trash... Then they went downstairs and got into a box full of packing styrofoam "peanuts." They ended up turning it upside down and spilling this huge amount of peanuts on the floor of the already messy living room. Tons of fun for them and lots of stress for the frazzled parents!

K simply passed out when he put the boys to bed and was unable to get up when I called him, so I continued cleaning for quite a while after our friend left, taking our cat with her, nearly midnight. It was in this quiet period that I thought out and subsequently wrote the previous post. I removed our thermometer (wired to the outside through a window), pulled out nails, switched the cars in the driveway so my husband didn't need to do it the next morning, and tried to organize some more. It was then that K finally got up, and went to carry upstairs all the stuff that was still there in the basement. I went to bed before he did, but I'm glad he helped me a bit, because the worse was yet to come....

On Friday morning he left at 6:45 with Kelvin. I tried to sleep until 7-8 because I knew I had a lot to do. Well... I actually had an impossible (to my personality type) task ahead of me: emptying the house until noon that was the time the closing was scheduled for. The buyers had already done their walk through on Wednesday (thankfully -- that's how we got the fridge, see previous post) so I didn't have to worry about them. Oh, I forget to say that in the middle of the previous night K had been absolutely stressed out about all the stuff that had remained (he hadn't thought that it would have been much better to have ordered another storage box to be delivered since it was already included in the price anyway! -- that would have made things so much easier!). I wanted to simply ask our kind neighbor to store it temporarily in her basement, but he didn't want to bother her. Thankfully I remembered our Brazilian friend who lives nearby and since I had helped her many times before we knew that she would definitely help us. K finally breathed a huge sigh of relief.

Back to Friday morning (and this is probably going to be the most boring post ever in this blog -- sorry about that!)... I called my parents to tell them about the night before and the tasks at hand (the phone was soon to be disconnected) and our friend who said it was OK to leave our stuff at her house. Before starting to load the car to take our things to our friend's house (I calculated it would take 3-4 trips with the minivan), I removed one of the two second row seats
and took some remaining things to donate to Go0dwill as well as lots of cardboard boxes to recycle (I was already feeling terribly guilty for having put our old computer desk [the same you have Tracy] in the trash after we failed to find someone to take it -- it was too big to transport to donate too). Then I started loading the car.

Now... you must understand how difficult it is to do this type of task for me. I like to organize (more like categorize) stuff and to clean, but I'm almost incapable of de-cluttering, tidying up anything (e.g. washing the dishes and then leaving the counters all nice and clean), so it was almost physically painful and thoroughly draining to empty that house. The hardest part was figuring out exactly what to do with the stuff piled up into two small fridges (one loaned by the next door neighbor) and one big cooler. I had to toss out some stuff, but decided to save most of it into two coolers. Then I had to load my potted plants, many buckets and pails (including the kids' beach ones), cat paraphernalia, two huge boxes of kitchen pots, food, utensils, etc. which hadn't fit in the last storage box, the food that I was going to bring to the hotel, the vacuum cleaners, brooms, mops, etc... etc... I did two trips -- one with plants and some lighter stuff, and another with the car packed to the roof and when I came back I realized that there was stuff for two or three more trips!! It was already past noon by now and I began to despair. I called my lovely neighbor to ask her if I could put my stuff into her SUV so we could do one trip to my friend's house. I had just called her when the new owner arrived!!! He was very nice and patient and told me to take my time, but it was quite stressful to have to finish emptying the house with him there, especially because he started asking some questions about the house and doing small talk while you're trying to figure out what to carry next to the car is pretty tough. In about 20-30 minutes I was done -- it was almost 1:30 p.m. by then -- exactly the time I was supposed to be 40 minutes north of there to pick up my son! The worse part is that I was only able to reach K on the phone around 1:10 and he was able to go get Kelvin (who remained with him at his work for the rest of the afternoon). All this while Linton was a trooper -- out of my way playing in the car or in and out of the house. He's priceless this little boy, he totally is.

My neighbor urged me to eat at her house (delicious Bangladeshi food cooked by her mother-in-law) and then took me and my stuff to my friend's house. I was completely wiped out... but I needed now to fit all of our stuff in her already crammed basement. Oh how I wished we had ordered an extra box by then!!!! Good thing K and Kelvin got back only at 5 pm and by then I had already put away everything, making sure to leave the things we'd need this week closer to the door to be picked up on Sunday night. We had dinner with our friends (she has twin children the same age as Kelvin, a boy and a girl), parked one of the cars and left for Maryland.

Weekend
It was with great effort that we drove the 2 1/2 hours to my brother-in-law's house since both of us were dog-tired and sleepy to the extreme. K drove for most of the time, but I had to drive for a short while because he was almost falling asleep at the wheel. And then, after we had to stop at the shoulder for a sleeping Linton to pee (poor thing, he was awakened by his urge and was crying, trying to hold it in -- potty training does have a few minor disadvantages, doesn't it?), K resumed driving. To make matters worse, we ran into a traffic jam at the Beltway -- at 9:30 pm at night on a Friday they closed two lanes for some unfathomable reason since there was no roadwork being done!

The boys and I hadn't seen our relatives in two months so it was great for the cousins to play together and for me to catch up with my brother- and sister-in-law. We also took turns sleeping in (I did it on Saturday and K on Sunday) and tried to relax after what will probably remain as the most stressful and tiring week of our lives to date for a while! On Sunday evening we came back, stopping at our friend's house to get the other car, to unload a few useless items and grab some other ones.

In Limbo
Well, when we arrived at the hotel last night around 9 p.m. my husband was glad he had booked this one (a suite type place) even though we wouldn't have needed it for the whole week since the closing might happen on Wednesday and not on Friday. K bought the hotel at Price!line before our broker gave us these news and he was stressing about the "wasted money," but now we're happy that we'll have a couple of days to clean the house and get it ready for us to move in.

The boys just ADORE the hotel. Kelvin's main reason is that we have to use a card as a key and he's absolutely fascinated by that. Linton is calling it home already and both boys woke up (both were sleeping when we arrived) asking tons of questions about the room and everything. Kelvin's first question was: "Are we in an upper floor?" (they love elevators). Linton's were quite funny: "Why is there a kitchen in the room?" "What's that light?" [the microwave] and so on...

OK, gotta go to bed now, but hopefully I'll find some more time to blog tomorrow.

I still can't get over the fact that we did the whole moving out of the other house process with the two boys in tow. That made it harder because nights were the best time to work -- like now is the best time to blog -- since they were sleeping like two little angels ;)

P.S. Still to come: "Photo blogging the move." Stay tuned.