As expected, it’s been a fast and crazy couple of weeks.  The move dominated everything – time, space, energy, focus.

Loren, I think, is slowly realizing that this is where we live now.  He’s long referred to our old apartment as “back-home DC.”  It didn’t matter where in the city we were hanging out, our apartment was where DC was.  He picked up that phrase during our many return trips from Camp Davis, when we would pack up the car, buckle him in his car seat and tell him that we would be going back home to DC.  Over time he began to think that meant our apartment specifically, rather than the city as a whole.  It was completely adorable, but after the move has created a small problem in vocabulary.

We have to be careful now about how we refer to our new place.  Saying we’re going “back home” or to “DC” is confusing for him.  He immediately thinks we’re headed to the basement, where we’ll eventually see Harrison, Kirk and Betsy Q “upstayers.”  Instead, we’ve had to put special emphasis on going back to “our new house” in the “big building” with the “nice ladies” (i.e. the women that work in the lobby and front office of the apartment complex, who absolutely fawn all over Loren and Ruthie).

Verbal nuance aside, the move has gone pretty well, and we are loving our new place. This is the second time since moving to DC in 2005 that we moved out of a basement apartment (the first time was in 2007) and found ourselves powerfully drawn to apartments with lots of sun light.  Our new place is flooded with it on account of an entire side of our apartment covered in huge windows and sliding glass doors.

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I wanted to check-in while the kids were napping and I wasn’t actively doing any heavy lifting. We are officially moved into the new place, if not exactly finished moving.  I’d say we’re about 75% here.  There are likely several large boxes worth of Idontknowwhat stashed around our old place waiting for me.  As for the big furniture, we have a hutch, headboard, bed frame and dresser left to go – probably doable in one pick-up truck trip.  Otherwise, we’re in.

Of all the things I learned this time around, and there have been plenty (like how it would have been smart to buy frozen meals instead of eating out five times in a row – feeling great right now as you can imagine), the most important thing is that the next time we do this, we’re calling on grandparents to take Loren and Ruthie off our hands while we move (including sleepovers).  I don’t know why we didn’t lean on them more for this.  Amateur mistake.

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