But then what? In this week’s episode, Sarah and I (who both moved in 2022) answer a listener question about the longer process of adjusting to a new place. Giving yourself a longer time line on big projects can be a big help. It also turns out that Sarah and I have different perspectives on putting things on the walls…

After talking about moving, we tackle other listener questions including some on later evening kid activities (while these can be challenging, we also appreciate that late start times allow kids who are in after care to participate), boundary setting, hormonal mood changes, and more.

Please give the episode a listen! And as always, we really appreciate ratings and reviews.

The work continues at the house. A carpet crew was coming to finish the playroom — a room that was originally going to be carpeted a month ago, but due to some under-measuring, and thus under-ordering, was not. They were to come between 9 and 10, but somehow wound up at the wrong house, and did not arrive until 11 or so. I had been looking out the window every 10 minutes trying to find them, since the doorbell isn’t working. Then in the afternoon, some furniture was supposed to be delivered between 1:30 and 3:30. To make sure I found that crew, I was also looking out the window every 10 minutes, hopping up to make sure they would get to the right door. They never came. They claimed to have knocked on my door for 20 minutes, but it wasn’t my house, because out of morbid curiosity I reviewed the outside security camera footage and, nope. Dispatch confirmed the address, so I have no idea what happened.

Anyway, all this was pretty frustrating, as my entire day was taken up with these waiting windows, and at the end of the day, I still didn’t have the furniture.

On the other hand, in the few minutes in between checking for trucks, I at least knocked a bunch of smaller tasks off my list. I managed to write/edit all my weekly Before Breakfast scripts. I worked on podcast notes for Best of Both Worlds. I answered a few time log emails (I am now approximately halfway through the emails I received on January 17th, so I guess that’s progress?) I edited and turned in a book review. I worked with my TBT statistician on updating some numbers. My expectation was that I was going to get nothing done, so with that as the baseline, I kept thinking well, let’s see if I can do a little something. Several somethings add up to a bigger something. Not a full workday, but something.

And then to try to cheer myself up, I put a few little treats into the day. My teenager is taking finals, and only had one yesterday, which was done by 9:30. So we ordered lunch together from a local Asian fusion place (chicken dumplings and rice for him, sushi for me). I watched the sunset from my bedroom window. I took a short soak in my tub. I read in front of the fireplace at night (so nice to be able to turn on a fireplace with a remote control!)

And now today is another day. We have a wallpaper crew here, but they arrived exactly when they said they would, and there are no furniture delivery windows. Some day this house will be done. The kitchen is almost box free at this point! It helped the process when I declared something a “drawer for stuff that has no other home.” Maybe every room needs one of those…

Photo: A clock. I know I have used this before but I’m trying to get this posted before a call and so I am re-using art. 

Over the weekend I did cross a major parenting milestone. The 2-year-old can now reliably sit and watch a video like Peppa Pig or the wide variety of YouTube offerings (“Hazel’s Mom” is a particular favorite). So when my husband took the 10-year-old and 7-year-old out for the afternoon, I left the little guy in the care of the two older boys while I went for a run in the neighborhood. He sat at the computer with the video on, and I had the 12-year-old sit in the same room with him (watching his phone), and basically neither moved for the 30 minutes I was gone. Success!

Speaking of the 2-year-old, he has been on a strike against napping in the crib. So over the weekend, I gave in and let him nap in my lap both days. In related news, my screen time totals on my iPhone are quite high…

I’ve been showering at night because it makes getting ready in the AM much faster. Unfortunately, I’m sometimes cold at night (though we’ve now set the bathroom heat to come on around my shower time). So I’ve come up with the strategy of hanging two towels over the shower door. When I turn the water off, I immediately wrap one around me. Then I can use the other for my hair without getting too shivery.

I also found my real towels this weekend, so I’m no longer using beach towels, though I did like that they were very large.

The 7-year-old recently celebrated a birthday. Since writing is a source of real tension, we had him record video thank yous to the people who gave him gifts. This inspired far less resistance.

We now have our “real” fridge and freezer, which is great, because we have more capacity. One current helpful life strategy is having set meals for certain nights. Wednesday, for instance, is always breakfast-for-dinner day. This tends to be pancakes, scrambled eggs, bacon, and fruit. Easy, and everyone eats it. Friday is pizza night. This will be make-your-own-pizza night again once we get our oven but for now I’m ordering in. We do Sunbasket kits on Monday and Tuesday (usually) as a way to have some variety. We often have steak one night over the weekend, which only leaves two days to sort out. In the morning, I almost always give kids toaster waffles plus fruit. (Some people add milk, or yogurt, and the occasional handful of chocolate chips). Most people have one toaster waffle, though my daughter has two. If you do the math this means we go through a normal box of toaster waffles in two days. This explains the appeal of Costco!

Photo: Ice on a trail from one of my weekend runs.

It is also snowing! The new yard is beautiful in the snow and I went for a good stomp around this morning as a break from supervising virtual school. Yep, virtual is back, though just for the weather — the district has been making do even with staff members out for isolation and such. The older kids have done fine with online classes. The 6-year-old has been diving onto my lap and racing off and declaring that he hates zoom and asking what time it is every 7 minutes and so forth. This with a teacher he absolutely loves. I am hoping everyone is back in person next week.

Today should be the last day of the movers – it has been a four day project with packing and loading and transporting. We have furniture coming next week and no doubt a great many hours of unpacking and organizing but I am telling myself that things are improving. And so far the car hasn’t died again, so there’s that! I have walked away from this blog post — this short blog post — half a dozen times to deal with things. So may as well hit publish now.

(Just a quick reminder to sign up for the Time Tracking Challenge if you haven’t! Link is in the last post. If I go look for it I’ll get distracted again and never publish….)

We officially moved ourselves yesterday, though. We ate a Grubhub delivered dinner on the floor of the new kitchen because we don’t have any chairs. Or a table. We slept on air mattresses on the floor because we won’t have beds for a few days. It was not the easiest night. The toddler really fussed about sleeping in the portable crib, and was up until 11 or so. There are random beeps from various things. Nothing is where it is supposed to be so I kept tromping up and down the stairs. Some of the kids were wigged out by the new space, and some of the air mattresses were less than fully comfortable (I did OK, but I was also really tired). Also, the van battery died last night so we had to use the jumper cables, which added a note of whimsy (ha) to a tough evening. I would really like to replace the van but it seems there are no cars to be had…same problem affecting our oven, fridge, etc…

I know the first night anywhere is hard. I have a vague memory of our first night in the old house some 10.5 years ago. Everyone was freaked out by new noises and such. We will get used to things and when all our new stuff is there things will slowly come together. Already some of the kids’ new furniture is in and it’s really cute. And the 12-year-old has really liked having his own room. He’s already assembled the (indoor, foam) hatchet toss set he got for Christmas in there.

So, patience…And wow, there is nothing like seeing all your stuff come out of the cabinets to remind you how fast stuff can accumulate…Everything will find its way to a new home eventually.

It’s a local move, and we don’t have to be out of the house immediately, so nothing is particularly high stakes. We can come back and get stuff. I’m sure we will. But still — it is a lot of moving parts.

I spent the past week feeling a lot of nostalgia as I took things down from the walls and packed up toys and plants and loose items that would be hard to move.

If the nostalgia was robust, I’m not sure the progress was. Looking back, this was probably not the most efficient process. We split up the family for the post Christmas week. My husband took the four older kids on a ski trip and I stayed home with the toddler (since I don’t really ski and he doesn’t yet — so we’d just be hanging out in a rental house rather than our own house, which has his familiar crib and toys…). I had some childcare, and I used that time to take bins of stuff over to the new house. But I am only so fast, and I am one person. Plus when I did have the toddler with me, moving stuff was painfully slow. Once the rest of the family came home, my husband and I could both load stuff in cars, and the teen/pre-teen children could carry things and unload them and I made as much progress yesterday as I did during the entire week. Moving turns out to be a team sport.

I am telling myself it will all happen eventually. I did record a few more episodes of Before Breakfast, and I did some revisions on the book. I edited emails for the time-tracking challenge that will run from January 10-16. And I spent a lot of time with the toddler. We played with his new toys, read a lot of stories and (yes) watched a lot of Blippi.

The new house wi-fi is definitely up and running so we’ll have that. We’ll see when the address change gets registered with the school district, though, so bus service is unclear. We may wind up driving for a while. The logistics are making my head spin. Well, one day at a time for the first week or two and then I’m sure we’ll get into the groove.

I did not stay up until midnight on New Year’s Eve. I went to bed around 11:15, but then the toddler woke up howling around 12:45, so I guess I rang it in in my own way…

(Though honestly he’s been pretty good about sleep this week — slept through the night most nights, and not too early in the mornings, and I don’t think that would have happened in a rental house, so I’m feeling good about that.)

We had a belated 2-year-old birthday celebration with the other kids last night. We even had half of an ice cream cake sitting in the freezer so we pulled that out for everyone to have a few bites. The little guy managed to blow out his candle quite well and is getting the concept of opening presents (though he had a lot of help there…all the other children seemed to want to help him!)

I have read about half-way through Twelfth Night in my Shakespeare reading project! I hope anyone who started reading War and Peace has enjoyed the first few chapters….

Today is a day for posting retrospectives, so I will play along. It’s been a good year, if a tiring one.

I just remembered that the year started with a real professional highlight: I was on the Drew Barrymore show in early January! She was so sweet, and called herself an uber-fan, which was really exciting to one of my kids who kept pointing out that she is the girl in ET. The girl in ET read mom’s book! Nice.

I had done a pilot version of the Tranquility by Tuesday project in fall 2020, and (happily) got statistically significant results. So I ran the full Tranquility by Tuesday project in the spring with what wound up being about 150 people. Participants answered questions about their time, learned nine time management rules over nine weeks, answered questions about the implementation, and then reported back at the end of the study (and a month later, and three months later). I wrote the manuscript of the book, and am now on the second round of edits. As I’m reading various “best of” lists for 2021, I’m aiming to write one that will make it on to some 2022 lists. So that is a goal.

2021 was another year of the Before Breakfast podcast — a new episode every weekday morning. And Best of Both Worlds! We launched our Patreon community, and I have really enjoyed the monthly meet-ups.

I feel like much of the year has been consumed with home renovation stuff. We got our permit and our historic commission approval early in the year. We passed inspection (thus closing out the permit) this week. So all clear to move in! Phew, since I booked the movers for next week….I’m trying to keep the mindset this will be an adventure, rather than total chaos when no one can find anything and we have boxes and only half our furniture for a while…

The house really does look nice. There are a few things that are not done. Our shutters aren’t on, so the outside of the house doesn’t look finished. The oven arrived, and was dented, so it was sent back, thus putting us into supply chain chaos to get a replacement, so no oven until February. We can probably make do since we have a stove and a microwave. If not I guess I can get some sort of toaster oven? Our dishwasher also didn’t arrive, but we had kept the old one in the garage from before the renovation so it got reinstalled for the next few weeks. The fridge arrives — fingers crossed — and will be installed Monday. In time for the move Tuesday.

Due to a measuring snafu, there is no carpet in the playroom. That is coming in late January. As is wallpaper in another part of the house. Various pieces of furniture are back ordered. Some stuff that would have been junked will be moved, used for a few months, and then junked. (Or donated if possible…but some stuff is in pretty lousy condition.) Eventually things will be done. Or at least at a sustainable level of un-doneness. By the time I am writing my retrospective for 2022 I want to be feeling very at home in the new home.

I spent yesterday taking down kid artwork in the current house. Some pieces had been on the wall since 2013 or so, which was really giving me the nostalgic feels. This house has so many memories. I am excited about the new one though it is strange to think I only have a few more nights in this current one. And all this art my babies created! And now they are teenagers/pre-teens texting me. Well, some of them. I do still have a baby who will no doubt create his own art that can go up on the walls at the new place.

Even if we didn’t wind up moving during the calendar year of 2021, the year still brought a lot of transitions. One kid started high school, another started middle school, and another started first grade at a new school. It has not been 100% smooth, but we are muddling along.

I feel like I have put a few good systems in place. We now have a good meal system of doing Sunbasket kits on Monday and Tuesday, breakfast-for-dinner on Wednesdays, and make-your-own-pizza Fridays. That only leaves Thursday for figuring out (well, and weekends) but that all feels a lot more manageable.

It was not my best year ever for athletic endeavors, but I do keep running. I ran with a friend on the last Saturday of every month, which we kept up the whole year. We celebrated our streak by stopping (a few days before Christmas) at a brewery that we run past every time — it was quite tasty!

It was also not a particularly distinguished year for reading. There was one big win — I finished War and Peace after reading one chapter a day for the whole year — but I felt like I lacked the mental energy to tackle much else. I read some books on the natural world (a few titles on birds and hummingbirds in particular) and some books by podcast guests and that’s about it. I am not particularly proud of this low tally because I know I had a lot of time that I could have used for reading, including some brainless stuff if I had wanted, and I just didn’t. I spent a lot of time scrolling around on Twitter while nursing the toddler and trying to get him to sleep and such.

On the other hand, I did build a lot of Lego sets with the kids. And I did a number of 1000-piece puzzles. So there’s that.

Anyway, everyone is healthy and reasonably happy so on that measure the year has been a success. Much transition, many long projects shepherded through, and hopefully in 2022 I can start enjoying some of those things!

Happy New Year to everyone! Thanks for reading this blog this year. I really appreciate it.

In other news: I track my time and so I know how I spent all 8760 hours of 2021. If you’d like to find out where the time really goes — just for a week — I’ll be running a time tracking challenge from January 10-16. You can sign up here. I send you motivational emails each day, and I’ll be posting here about it too.

Photo: Empty pantry, ready for us to fill it…probably a metaphor in there somewhere…

I set my alarm for 6:10, intending to nudge the teenager out of bed, so he could take the bus to school. (He shares a room with his little brother, who can sleep a little longer, so we come wake him rather than have him set an alarm that is going to wake his brother too. This will not be the case in the new house thank goodness!). My husband and I had a walk-through meeting at our new house at 7 a.m. with the contractors to take stock of what needs to be fixed before we move in a few weeks from now. Our nanny agreed to come at 6:45 or so.

Well, I woke at 6:40. My alarm was ringing…but silently. I’m still not sure what I did there. My husband was up and in the shower but I guess hadn’t noticed that none of the rest of us were moving (including the teenager). I threw on some clothes, woke the kid up and drove over to the new house while my husband did the school run (since the bus was long gone by that point).

The house is coming along nicely. I trudged through with my coffee, flushing toilets to make sure they worked, turning on faucets and light switches and so forth. We may not have an oven when we move in, but we will have a stove so I guess that’s good. In any case, I was in the midst of that when I got a text from another child who asked if I had the felt and foam half-sphere he needed for an earth science project. What? He’d mentioned something on Friday, but I had not understood that this was needed by Monday morning. He thought I had ordered it or something and then when I was gone when he needed to leave there was general panic.

And so I found myself at Michael’s craft store after the construction walk-through. This was quite the place! They did indeed have foam half spheres. And full spheres. I bought a variety, plus felt for creating the various layers of the earth. And potato chips because I was hungry by this point and not inclined to make healthy breakfast choices. Is there any thing this store doesn’t have??? It’s a good thing I don’t go there often.

Anyway, I drove my bag of stuff over to the middle school and left it with the security guard who has a book shelf for just such forgotten things. Indeed, I saw that there were materials for other children in the same class sitting there.

By the time I got home it was 10:30 a.m. I attempted to get started with work, but wound up needing to deal with the forms to lock in the movers for early January. On the plus side, I learned that the Notes function on an iPhone can scan documents and turn them into PDFs. This is very useful knowledge!

Anyway, we’ll see what I get done over the next few hours before I take two of the kids to get dose #2. The people running the clinic (for 5-11 year olds) have promised a special guest at the post-shot waiting area. So…is it going to be Santa? I’m not sure it’s possible to keep kids socially distanced from Santa, and streams of children all piling on the same guy would be ironic at a Covid vaccine clinic. So maybe it won’t be Santa. One of the area sports team mascots? I’ll report back!

Photo: Colorful felt!

As I mentioned last week, I was having some real trouble figuring out what to buy the 12-year-old. I didn’t want to get him only video games.

I went to the “better” Target yesterday (slightly farther from the house, but more merchandise) thinking I would mostly round out what I’d gotten the 6-year-old. But, while there, I realized that the genius minds at toy and game and general consumer product companies don’t want to write off the 12-year-old boy market either. There were all kinds of options! I wound up getting a number of non-screen things I’m quite happy about and that I think he’ll love.

(Sorry for the vagueness for those looking for ideas…my kids sometimes read the blog!)

Anyway, it was a reminder to me of the trade-offs of in-person and online shopping. I love online shopping. That is how I will do most of my holiday purchasing. It is so efficient to choose presents while, say, nursing a toddler. Driving all the way to the not-closest Target took a fair amount of time. Even maneuvering the cart was kind of a challenge since little kid toys are often quite big (and big kid toys are small…go figure!) On the other hand, it feels harder, online, to discover things you didn’t know you were looking for. I think there is a similar trade off with reading news online vs. reading a “real” newspaper. I read the New York Times online and we get the Wall Street Journal delivered. I definitely read more random stuff in the WSJ. Then again, there are a great many days when I don’t read the WSJ because there was never a good time to sit down with the print newspaper. I almost always glance at the online headlines.

So it’s probably good to get a balance of both. But I will be trying not to go to physical stores on the Friday after Thanksgiving. That day always just seems crazy….

Photo: Many packages. Though I’m pretty sure this Amazon delivery is a pair of immediately-needed kid shoes, and not a Christmas present. 

But there are little bright spots as usual, and a moment on Friday that made me grateful. I will admit that I was nervous about the 6-year-old’s parent-teacher conference. I don’t want to write too much about specifics as my kids get older but longtime readers know that he is…spirited. This plays out in various predictable ways. There had been a disciplinary incident on Thursday night at one of his activities that had me quite upset.

Anyway…his first grade teacher, bless her, is a wonderful person who has her methods for dealing with 6-year-olds (for instance, she hands out sheets of scented stickers like they’re candy on Halloween). She told us that he was a joy to have in class, and such a sweet boy, and that he had told her he was nervous about the conference (!) but she said he shouldn’t be because he was doing a good job.

Cue me finally exhaling. I then remembered that he had told me he had put something for me in his desk.

So we all went to look and this little sticky note is what I found. He is a sweet little boy. I left him a note too!