The Trio of Moving

We have been so busy lately, making trips all over.  We have made the two hour trip to our soon-to-be-new home several times and this past weekend we went to visit Munchkie's Daddy's family, a five hour car ride to both visit and bring stuff for storage.  It is very stressful planning yet another move, especially when you don't really know anyone in the area.

The three essentials for moving as a family are

• A place to live
• A job
• Childcare

These are all so intertwined that if you don't have one of the trio, you can't have the others.  Without a job, you can't afford a place to live.  But if you don't have childcare, you can't work, and if you don't have a place to live, you can't find a new job.  Oh it's all so stressful!  We have successfully found all three!  I can not even begin to express what a relief this is. 

Now, the prepping for the moving must start.  We are moving into an even smaller apartment so the downsizing has begun.  It seems that with each move we have made, we have moved into yet an even smaller place.  So each time we have downsized a little bit more than the previous time.  We are sorting through all of our belongings and deciding which ones are essential.  I love this.  I love organizing, cleaning out and getting rid of stuff.  However, I also like to find things we "just have to have."  So now I need to sort through all of this "have to have" stuff and decide if it's worth it to move it out of this house, up three flights of winding stairs and then back out again in one to two years.  If that isn't motivation to minimize, I don't know what is!

We also would like to make sure that the things in our house are eventually all very good quality things.  While everything is workable right now, the fact that we talk about if such and such piece will make it through a couple more moves, makes it automatically on my "let's not take it with us" list.  We also talk about each one and say, will we still want that in five years when we hopefully have an actual house to live in?  If it's questionable, away it goes.  It's just not worth it to keep moving all of this stuff that we aren't going to want at the end of our moves.

When we made our last halfway across the country move I also got really excited to do the sorting and organizing, starting months ahead of time.  But then when it came down to the days before the move, I got completely burnt out (probably didn't help that I was ending my first trimester of pregnancy) and just could not do anymore.  I am trying to pace myself this time so that I don't get tired of it by the end, but also not wait until the last days either.  We are making a list with photos of all the things that we will be eliminating and I plan on having a Name-Your-Price Facebook tag sale.  Our plan is to get rid of stuff, and maybe even make a little bit of money off of it. 

I'm really interested to see how this turns out.  Now that we have the basic essentials of the move figured out, and have begun the sorting process I am already designing the rooms in my head and figuring out how to arrange the furniture.  I think that finally, I feel like this is real, everything has fallen into place and we are really getting ready to start over yet again.