Saying Hello

As we waited for the movers to start unloading, I thought it would be a neat record to take some pictures of the empty house. (Hopefully, in a few years we can compare what we started with to the home that we created as a family.) Of course, I had two little photo bombers helping me with that task! Here are the master bedroom and living room.

We did have to get up early to make it out to the house by 8 am before the movers. Owen looks like he can't wait for his bed to arrive!

And this large room upstairs we're calling the game room...

Those rooms soon became inundated with boxes of stuff! Lest we thought that we were done... maybe more like halfway...?

When we stopped at the house the night before the movers came, all three of our adjacent neighbors actually came over to introduce themselves and welcome us to the neighborhood! We took that as a good sign. One even brought this thoughtful housewarming basket!

Within a couple of days, we had their kids (similar ages!) in our backyard. And then our kids in their backyard! Bonus, they have a heated pool and hot tub! Swimming outside in December - we have definitely gone through a major life change.

The weather was incredibly nice, so we went exploring one day and found three playgrounds within an easy biking/walking distance from our new house.

Unfortunately, our holiday season didn't really feel like one. I had sold our tree to make room on the truck, and all of our decorations were all packed up in boxes, which didn't arrive to our new house until December 20. Imagine our delight when the cable guy went up in the attic and hollered down that we had a tree up there! What?!? And it had working lights. It was truly a Christmas miracle!

Someone was excited to break out the Christmas dress on Christmas Eve! It was a little strange to try out a new church on such a big holiday, but they had a great program.

We had a low-key Christmas morning at home. Thankfully, Santa got word of our new address and found us among the boxes! Phew!

  

One benefit to moving back to Texas was to be closer to family. And that has definitely been nice to balance out the chaos of moving, to know that we'll see them again pretty soon rather than once a year. We got to spend Christmas day with cousins Addie and Will this year! And then go home to sleep in our own beds. :)

Getting There

We were able to sign our closing documents early, so we didn't have to stick around until Monday morning after all. After a second round of cleaning the house in the morning, we finally got on the road around mid-day. 2 cars, 2 cats, 2 kids, 2 drivers. Oh boy! For those reasons, we decided to make the ~1600 mile trip in 4 days. Buckle up! I looked in my rear view a lot that first day, looking back not only for my husband's car, but at the beautiful landscape we were leaving behind. So long Idaho!

I was hoping we could make it to Moab for dinner, but it got dark quickly and we got hungry around Green River instead. Aren't my co-pilots the cutest?

I was bummed that we rolled into Moab in the dark and that our schedule didn't allow for any national park detours. It's such a pretty area. So I was ecstatic when we got to drive right by an arch off the highway the next morning! (We needed some levity, since Owen had barfed in the hotel room before dawn! We said a prayer and crossed our fingers as we got into the car for a full traveling day with a sickie, hoping it was just food poisoning or travel sickness.)

The map indicated that we would be extremely close to the four corners area on our route today, and a 30-minute detour would put us at the actual marker. So, we did make a small detour. (The windy, remote roads leading to the monument caused a road-side emergency stop for barf #2. This cannot be happening.) It was super cool to know exactly where we were geographically, but the monument was a little sad. Lots of empty vendor booths on this chilly day and not much else.

After that, Owen was promoted to the front seat (that always helps me with motion sickness), and we thankfully did not have to pull over to the side of the road the rest of the day! He did take a picture of Shiprock, NM for me, which was a strange, huge rock jutting out from the otherwise barren landscape.

And the end of that nerve-wracking day called for some adult refreshments...

We started off the next day excited to know that Uncky Dan would be signing papers for our new house while we were in the car. We tried to brush off the call we got from our lender that morning (the morning of closing!) with questions we thought we had already answered. It later became apparent, as we were in separate cars in probably the most desolate strip of interstate in the middle of New Mexico, that our lender required some more documentation from us (the day of closing!). What?! 40 miles later, we pulled off at the first McDonald's to use their WiFi to appease our lender.

While we were feeling particularly homeless, we crossed into Texas and felt a glimmer of hope that we were, in fact, headed home.

And then the rain came. The skies grew dark and it rained quite a bit. We found out that we had not closed on our new house that day, after all of the phone calls and documents sent and forms we filled out over the past several weeks. But we did witness an extremely vivid rainbow (and even double rainbow sometimes) that again gave us a glimmer of hope.

By the time we reached Lubbock, we just had to get out of the car to walk around Tech's campus for a bit to stretch and vent. But by the end of the day, we received reassurance from our lender that all was good for closing the following day.

Phew! The final car day was all business, like an arrow to our new house. Closing actually happened, and we had movers coming first thing the next morning! We got to Houston just before the title company closed, which worked out for us to grab a key and check out the place that we could barely remember before movers arrived. Hallelujah! We made it! The kids approved of their new playset, and we dropped off the cats before the last bit of the journey to Uncky Dan's house!

Saying Goodbye

Although we had to spend a lot of our last moments in Idaho packing, we also had to say good-bye to some amazing friends. Flower was one of the first people I met in Idaho at a playgroup. She's the best listener and most unselfish person I know, such an easy and precious friendship. I know it will remain, just in a different form.

We started with the two boys (Jacob is hers), very close in age, but have certainly expanded our group since those early days! Thank goodness we have many ways to keep up with each other's family as they grow up.

Leida is another dear friend I met through the stroller bootcamp class. She is so generous and kind! Everest and Owen were born just a couple of weeks apart and were fast friends since they could walk.

And how cute are these BFFs? Nothing like a buddy just 4 doors down - you can walk to school together, walk home together, and make plans for when you can go to each other's house later that day on the walk home. So cute when they FaceTime each other!

A tough one for the kids was to say good-bye to their favorite babysitter of all time, Meg. They used to beg me to make a date so that they could have Meg over. She would indulge their imaginations and expand their pretend games with them like no other!

Our sweet friends threw us a good-bye party at the local brewery, complete with baby-sitters and a taco truck! It meant so much that they insisted on doing this for us and they gave beautiful toasts in our honor. I promised I wouldn't cry... We will so dearly miss the wonderful friends we have made here.

They even secretly collected pictures and surprised us with an inch-thick "Idaho adventures" book, which looked back at our last 8 years there through the eyes of our friends with personal letters, too. Pretty special. The kids love flipping through it. (I have to mention that both kids' teachers had their classes create surprise books for them too. Each page is a creation from a classmate reminiscing about the kids with a hand-drawn picture, as well as some pictures the teacher took. We love them!)

As we were packing up everything in our house, it struck me how blessed we were with this house. More space than we needed, everything was/is in great shape, and there was no significant work to do moving in or out (other than the hail storm repairs this year and the furnace repair the first winter!). Most importantly, it's the first and only house the kids remember, so I asked them what their favorite parts of the house were and documented them with photos to remember it forever. Owen's immediate answer was the vent in his room that he used to call down to me when I was in my basement office. I had to laugh that that was the first thing he thought of!

His other answers were a bit more traditional: reading by the fire (which attracts cats!), and the big screen downstairs. We'll all miss that one!!

Hadley loved her room and the cubby under the stairs, complete with mini-window.

As we were packing up and paring down our belongings, the kids watched a lot of their old toys and clothes go out the door to be donated or sold. They were totally on board with most of the things that had to go, but the one thing that made Hadley cry was selling her skis. I was a little surprised by her reaction, but I told her that we would ski again! She just would probably be a little bigger by then and therefore need bigger skis. This seemed to placate her, but she requested a picture with her skis nonetheless.

We packed pretty much for two weeks straight, outside of work and school. It's a strange thing to see your life quantified by and confined to a pile boxes.

Finally, it was moving day! We sold several pieces of furniture and had a ton of donations so that we could fit onto the back half of this truck from Idaho at a bit of a deal. For a while, it looked like we were not going to fit (what was Plan B?!?), but it was a Christmas miracle that they could shut the door with no room to spare! 

Kids were interested in the movers for about 20 minutes and then ready to do something fun not in the 20-degree, doors open wide, drafty house. Since it was Owen's birthday, I took them to Barnes & Noble (once it opened) and Jimmy John's (their request!) for lunch. Then they played at their friends' house, while we finished up the move and started the cleaning phase.

Another weird feeling is to look at the house so filled with memories as it is empty and ready to receive its next residents. I hope it brings them as much joy as it did to us!

Just one more night in Idaho Falls. Our lovely friends, the Trudells, of Adam and Ella fame, put us up for the night. It worked out great, since we could leave the cats at the house, kids could have a sleepover with their best buddies, and we could walk over to the house in the morning to finish cleaning before we hit the road. As a small token of our thanks, we took them out for dinner at Owen's favorite place, Fuji, for teppanyaki and sushi.

Again, it was Owen's 9th birthday, so I will leave you with this stunning display of flossing (it's a dance move, for those that don't know) while the restaurant staff sing happy birthday to him.