A Time for Change

I am keenly aware that I have been neglecting my blog for nearly five solid months now. However, it is not without reason. I will attempt to summarize our comings and goings so I can move forward with documenting our lives and, as always, my thoughts.

In late May, we suddenly discovered we would need to move. Late on Saturday night, the landlord put a note under our door informing us that he would be showing the apartment to prospective new tenants the following Monday. It was a huge surprise and very scary to face the prospect of moving. However, we quickly began seeing the advantages we might gain. We started looking into buying a house and even put an offer on one. However, things just never worked out, and eventually a perfect rental house fell into our laps. We both felt great about it an committed to move.

Moving is stressful enough, but we already had a busy summer planned. James had several research trips booked and I was planning to take the kids to Utah to visit my family for the entire month of July. That made moving in early August a frightening prospect. I quickly began spending every spare moment packing, organizing and planning. And, once we had somewhere to go, I began counting down the days until there would be no more neighbors upstairs, no more leaky faucets all the time, no more brown water, no more parking on the street in heavy traffic, no more people smoking outside our windows, etc., etc., etc. The closer the move got, the more excited I became, even if a great deal of packing stood between us and the moving truck.

To make life a little more complicated, the need to move was compounded by the discovery that we would be welcoming another little McKay sometime in January. It was a relief to know we would have more space. But, I was so tired and I really didn't feel well for most of the packing process. My afternoon nausea (no morning sickness here!) may be one reason I never quite felt good about any of the houses we looked at.

So, James criss-crossed the country, I tried to organize, and we all packed furiously, looking forward to the end of August as the prospective end of our insanity. I'm still not sure how we made it through the summer, but we all survived and life is feeling much more calm now. The entire first week we were in the house I just kept smiling. It was such a great upgrade for our family, and I was absolutely ecstatic to have the move behind us. Unpacking, with its lack of deadline, is daunting, but not nearly as stressful.

In between we had some pleasant visits with family, the kids had a wonderful time with their cousins, James completed the bulk of his dissertation research, I went to a work conference in Las Vegas (which was cooler than Madison at the time), and my first trimester passed in a whirl. I would never ever plan to do that to my family, but we made it through.

Since moving, we have managed to unpack everything (except one half-empty box still lurking in the toy room), James has been busy dissertating and TA-ing, Virginia has started preschool, and Thomas and I have continued on in our busy routines of developing furiously (him) and working almost ceaselessly (me). We even found time to take a little family vacation in October, our first real vacation. So, the fall has been spent enjoying a slightly more leisurely pace and enjoying time together as a family.

Of course, I should really try to record it all in greater detail. And it is my plan to post some pictures of these goings on. But for now, there is our life in a nutshell. A busy summer, a blissful fall, and now a winter that I fear will pass much more quickly than I'd like. And so it goes.