First the moral of the story. Moving is hard no matter what. Faced with this difficult task we chose to see moving as an opportunity. An opportunity to organize and shed skin and plan ahead. And also to rip up carpet, finish wood floors, tear out and rebuild a bathroom and freshly paint every room in the house. But seriously, the logic is clear that all these improvements will be much easier now before we have all our possessions here. But we may have confused the notion of easier with plain easy, which it was not. A recount of our most momentous transformation since Solly was born:

On March 22^nd Rachel began her new job as a Nurse Practitioner; more days, more hours, more responsibility.

On March 23^rd we took possession of our new home after an amazing roller-coaster ride of events. I have recorded these events in my journal for posterity, but would rather not re-live the stress through telling it here if possible because what is important is that we are in our house and we love it.

On March 29^th I began my two-week leave from work. This time was set aside to take on the many improvement projects in our new home and pack and clean out the old apartment. Walking into the empty, unheated house that Monday morning I saw my challenges anew: a living room painted blue like superman’s tights; a lavender office; a bathroom with pepto-bismal tile, original linoleum, and a custom plywood vanity; a yellow bedroom with grey carpet. The goal was to complete the transformation before the big move on Saturday.

I called in as many favors as I could from family and friends during this week to help. Rachel’s mom Deborah joined us the whole first week to act as the nanny for Solly so we could both be productive. Her dad Greg arrived on the 31^st and quickly painted 3 rooms. Good friend Bryan helped demolish the bathroom. Brother’s Paul and Gabe gave their time to multiple jobs on multiple days. My parents brought dinners…my dad installed new baseboards…my brother John set up the wireless network. The results are fantastic! See if you can tell the before and after:

....And then we asked them to help move the furniture!

On Saturday April 3 our cute little house was waiting for us to move in and we had a firm deadline of 11AM to move all our stuff out – the new tenant at our apartment was planning to move in on Sunday and the carpet cleaners needed the majority of Saturday to clean away the stains we left after 3 years there. A fantastic crew of supportive friends made quick work of our things and we were physically moved to our new home before noon. But that is of course only half of a move - the other half is arranging the furniture and unpacking boxes. We convinced everyone to move the furniture into the right rooms and even put the boxes correct closets - then the celebration began!

It may have been foolish of me to think that we were near finished with the big move after everyone left. A whole week left on my break and all I had to do was unpack! Man was I wrong. The best metaphor of the week following the move is of a rubick's cube; in order to move the clothes into the closets - the boxes of books need to be moved out - and they should move onto the bookshelf which is covered with tools - which need to be put back into the garage - which is full of boxes! It was during all this that my body began to tell me that it was not interested in a career in moving. Aching shoulders, tendonitis in my wrist, even lower back pain. Every night after the box/furniture shuffle I would allow myself to eat and drink well to guarantee the good sleep I would need to do it all over again.

And each morning I would also rev myself up for the day with the new luxury of fresh orange juice from our big tree. Thats living!

Conclusion:
We love our new digs. We now have our space capsule for our life ahead and our trajectory in life is good. There will be so many memories here....I can't wait to live them.

We owe so much thanks to all the assistance we received from our circle. Without all of you, financially, physically, and emotionally, we would not be here in our own home. Thank you Deborah, Greg, Tona, Dave, Frank, Gabe, John, Paul, Bryan, Willow, Robert, Tamara, Jed, and everyone else who contributed to this major event.