Sarah and I talk all things travel planning, with a particular focus on packing. We share thoughts on carry-on vs. checking, our current luggage situations, our packing processes, and the merits of unpacking at the destination.

Then we pivot to a travel Q&A. Topics include international travel with highly selective eaters, ski school, and solo travel with young kids.

Please give the episode a listen! Are you traveling anywhere cool soon?

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….)

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….