You've Got to Be Kidding

This week has not gone well in many, many aspects. I will spare you all of the details, but for the week before needing to move in, it has not gone well.

If you have been keeping track, our closing date was set for Friday with Saturday being an extra moving day. For the last 3 weeks especially, many people have been working extremely hard to help us get ready, and Ethan and I continued to work late into the night after everyone went home, and even to bed.

We are exhausted, the kids are stretched to the limit, but we are ready to move on Friday. The house is livable, utility and post office arrangements are made, and the whole house is in towers of boxes with just the necessities out for the next few days. Many people have worked hard to get us to this point, and family members have signed up for vacation time to help us move.

And then it happened. Shortly before we had to leave the house for youth activities, the phone rang. The closing date had just been changed. Not a day. Not two days. But two weeks from now - at best. It could be longer.

So we are presented with two choices. Choice number 1: Wait to move. Choice number 2: Move anyway.

Right now, I'm not happy with either of the choices.

If we stayed here, we would be able to work on the house a bit more and get some more things polished up, the biggest one being getting the flooring laid. We had planned on just going room by room, but this way we wouldn't have to move any furniture. (Although, since we are doing stick down planks, it isn't like what you would have to do to put carpet in.) But, our whole house is packed up. My whole kitchen, all of the kids' toys, towels . . . You name it. So I would need to unpack quite a few boxes in order to stay here and then have to repack them again. Plus, there are towers of other boxes all around the house that we would have to weave through until we moved.

The last 3 weeks though, we have busted our hind ends (along with others) to get to this point where we could move. Caleb has been so sad lately with all of the chaos and not seeing Ethan much or having much quality time with me. I have been telling him the last few weeks when we are going to move, and he has been watching it on his calendar. He knew that date was when we would have more family time again, not being at different locations, and that all of his things I had packed away would be coming back out. I was also looking forward to being able to just put the kids to bed and down for naps in their own room - all set up and cozy, but then I would still be able to work on little projects on the house. It would seem kind of silly, however, to move when we could stay here and work on some of these projects without having to move furniture and unpacked boxes around. Plus, we will have another month's worth of housing allowance going to this place whether we move now or not.

So without much time to process this, here is our game plan. We aren't going to move until we have the floor laid. When the floor is down, we will reassess our situation. Hopefully we will soon learn when the new closing date is so we can pace ourselves.

I feel like we have been giving our all and running a marathon (or a 100 mile race if you are our crazy ultra running friend who blogs about it!) trying to set a personal best, practically passing out many times in the process only to get to where we think the end is and hear, "I don't know where the finish line is. In fact, I don't think this race has one marked. Also, no one was really timing you anyway. Nice run though. You want a cookie? (By the way, you also owe us another payment for the entry fee.)"

So, I apologize for my rant. In order to offset it, I'll close with some positives. We have truly been blessed with all of the hard work that has been done by MANY people to help us get to our Friday deadline. The house is looking great, and it will be closer to being completed than we would have gotten to when we do move in. I'll leave you with a picture of our cabinets going up from earlier this week. (I haven't had a chance to take one with them completely up, but they look great!)