The thing about moving every other year or so, at least for me, is it forced me to clean up and throw out and organize. This week the kids and I have been cleaning and organizing bedrooms, and I can tell from the accumulation of stuff that we have been in one place for a loooong time.
I fact, we have lived in this house for over six years. And no I don't have proper curtains on all the windows. Don't ask. We have never lived in any other house this long. Fionn and Liam can't remember ever living anywhere else, while their oldest siblings remember 8 separate homes and the accompanying moves. Sometimes the younger kids feel a certain jealousy about the perceived adventure of a move (an adventure the oldest tell us we should hold off on for a few more years to spare them the experience of EVER helping to move the piano again--let alone the boxes and boxes and boxes of books).
Our first house we moved into before we had any children. The kitchen was wallpapered with a big brown and butterscotch colored plaid. Lovely. The bathroom wallpaper looked like tin foil. Even better. The previous owner luckily had moved his extensive beer can collection with him, though he left behind the 2x4s he had installed all over a basement wall to display them....and an antique piece of oak furniture which Kris restored and we actually still have.
When we moved again we had five children, and inexplicably decided to move within town, mostly to get a bigger house I guess. Or a different neighborhood? New ward? I don't know, and though we loved our house (in the end), looking back we still cringe at the financially stupid (sooooo stupid) move this was. At the time though, we blissfully signed the papers and moved our little family in.... and spent our first night sleeping in sleeping bags on the floor under windows that we couldn't fully shut against the October cold because the Virginia Creeper, that looked so picturesque in its fall colors against the brick on the outside of the house was nothing but, well, creepy where it had grown through the bedroom windows to the inside of the house.
On one move, my kids inexplicably all had Gatorade type drinks as part of their travel snacks . Not sure whose brilliant idea that was. But sports drinks make you have to pee something furious....I typically try to keep everyone a little on the dehydrated side when we travel and for good reason. Pretty sure we visited way more gas station bathrooms on that trip than I am actually comfortable with.
Once we moved into a not-quite-finished modular home. Everything seemed good until we realized that the doorway into the laundry room was too small for our washer and dryer to fit through. And the door that opened to the outside from the laundry room was a good 8 feet off the ground, with no stairs yet built. To the rescue? People in our branch who owned an auto shop. They lifted our appliances up to the back door with whatever marvelous crane-type thingy they use to lift engines out of cars. Genius.
Same modular home. Three bedrooms, two bathrooms. We were a family of ten with all the furniture and stuff a family of that size would be expected to have. By the time we had finished unloading the truck, we literally had a narrow passageway to walk from the bedrooms on one end of the house to the kitchen and bedroom on the other end through the stacked boxes and furniture that filled all available space in living, dining, and family rooms.
We were preparing to move out of Eastern Colorado, as in had already loaded all our worldly possessions into a moving van that was parked out front and were ready to spend the night in sleeping bags on the bare living room floor, when the town's tornado siren went off. So we spent our last night huddled in the basement with a radio and a few very terrified children who mostly just wanted to move to the mountains already where tornadoes were not much of a threat.
We have moved in a snowstorm. We have had our car breakdown on a move. We have moved into our new home and found the furnace so inadequate that we had to borrow heaters and all sleep in one room. We moved once when I was into my ninth month of pregnancy. We have moved with children puking into buckets on the way. One move dragged on for months and we lived amid our boxed up things waiting and waiting and waiting for our new home to be ready. So, yeah, adventures in moving...poor Liam and Fionn are so deprived!
