Settling In

After Christmas, we really focused on unpacking boxes and figuring out what would go where. It can be really stressful to realize that nothing is fitting easily or feeling like a completed job! We did not remember much about the house, so we kept finding out fun things like (off the top of my head) there was no full-length hanging space in the master closet, zero towel or TP holders in Hadley's bathroom, broken closet doors, drafty windows, evidence of rodents, numerous burned out light bulbs, overgrown landscaping, lumpy carpeting, no vent in Owen's bathroom, yard drainage issues, sketchy garage door opener, polka dot paint touch-ups, dated master bath, and no proper shelving in the garage or in any closets above the rods. And it was just dirty, having been unoccupied for at least two months. Hello, spiderwebs and numerous trips to our local home improvement stores! Oh, and in the middle of it all, we had a city water leak under our driveway. Talk about a massive hole! We have our fingers crossed that our sprinklers come on with no issues later this spring...

One of the most frustrating home discoveries were these tiny uncovered windows in every room on the front of the house. Apparently, they were hidden under skinny curtains during showings, and when the previous owner finally sold the house they took those with them, leaving two skinny, single-pane, gaping panels in every front room open to anyone passing by. Hello neighbor! At least the cats liked them.

Luckily, one of our neighbors is full of advice, so we asked her about her solar screens. She recommended a place, and within about two weeks we had custom screens on all the front windows (which face southwest), so that should feel nice in the summer and gave us a quick privacy solution.

The previous owners also apparently purchased two vats of beige paint (one light beige and one more adobe colored) and painted everything one of those two shades. It was too much tan for me, so I decided to let the kids pick a color for their rooms. This delayed fully unpacking their rooms a bit, but I felt it would help them to own their rooms a little more. They were eager to help, and we only had a few minor paint clean ups.

Here are the after pics (that is, after painting, furniture shopping, and much unpacking). Hadley wanted her room to look as much like her Idaho room as possible, while Owen opted for a primary blue color. Since their rooms are bigger (and we sold most of H's furniture), we got them desks too. Much improved over the beige, in my opinion!

We broke up the home chores by getting outside on sunny days, visiting friends around town, and making a trip to the ranch. I guess we did acclimate to the north, because it's still jarring to see blooming flowers in the middle of January. 

It's also jarring to see warnings posted about alligators on a bike path not far from your house! Though the flooded bike path seemed all too familiar.

We explored a local STEM center that had a free day for the kids. We had a great time making art, building popsicle stick catapults and towers (they won kudos for building the tallest tower that day), and making oobleck (kind of like slime).

Big city = big team sports! We made it to a free Dynamo scrimmage game on a cooler night with Uncky Dan and family.

Finally, school was approaching, but we were all sick! Owen had double ear infections and was deaf as a post for the first week of school. I had to assure his teachers that he wasn't ignoring them. What a first impression! But, at least he was fever-free and got to go the first day. Hadley came down with the virus later and had to miss the first day of school with an ear infection and bronchiolitis with a cough to wake the dead! But she got to go the second day! So I didn't get a cute 'first day of school' pic of them... Dad missed a lot of the excitement by healing enough to fly to Boston to start his new job training for a couple of weeks. I escorted the kids to and from school for a couple of weeks until they felt comfortable to be on their own. It's about a 5-minute bike or scooter ride from our house, and the school dismissal is very well organized by directional groups, crossing guards, and walkers separated from wheelers. Overall for school - so far, so good. They like their teachers and are making friends, but the day is noticeably longer (by 1.5 hours!), and they have to get up earlier. But, they have much smaller classes (18 compared to 28 in Idaho), science instruction every day, and paid, dedicated specials (art, music, and PE) teachers. Seems like a trade up in my book!

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!