Whoa! Movin' on up! (North, to the Catskills!)

This has been one hairy weekend! Talk about a race against time... John, Jules, and I came upstate on Thursday, along with my (completely incredible, super-human) assistant Emily, and have been racing against the clock ever since. All day Friday we divided our collective attentions between packing up Fox Ridge (Emily and me), finishing up Julian's little room (John and me), and entertaining Jules (Emily, John's mom, and me). I feel like I was everywhere at once-- loading up boxes, installing a new ceiling, and simultaneously trekking through a field with a baby in a front pack. Obviously I couldn't have been everywhere at once, but Friday is such a far gone blur at this point that it's hard to remember the order of events...

We've pretty much finished moving out of Fox Ridge, and have now officially spent our first night in the new house. Things are a tad chaotic here, and even worse at Fox Ridge, but actually the state of both houses is far more civilized than I would have expected considering all of the things we're juggling at once. I'm pretty sure we can thank Emily almost entirely for the present state of calm in the house. Aside from being a dynamo packer and super-sonic organizer (Yay OCD!), she's also a gifted team player. Every time I was about to freak out while we were packing, she'd swoop in with a ray of sunshine and say something like, "This is really flying along! Can you believe how much is already packed?!", or "This is so exciting! I can't wait to start unpacking in the new house!!!" Ordinarily this kind of optimistic cheer brings out the homicidal maniac in me, but somehow, this was just the blast of positivity I needed to keep me on track and away from a huddled mass of hysteria. Who knew?

Evidently there is a time and a place for unbridled optimism.

We also have some major thanks going out to John's mom, who has spent much of the last two weekends with Jules while we've made this final HUGE push to finish the ground floor. Once we settled in today, I thought, "How THE HELL do people move with children in tow? It's a wonder they don't get packed along with everything else... There's a certain frenzy that arises at the end of the move... You've done all your strategizing and planning-- everything in its tidy little box, loaded into the truck in just the right order (or close to...) and the house is pretty much emptied of everything you should be bringing, and then you have to deal with the weird (aka useless) odds and ends that remain. It's all junk and you should probably just throw it away, but by that point, you're no longer capable of making clear or decisive choices, so you throw it all into a box marked "stuff" and you probably move it into your attic and never open it again. It's at that point that children can unwittingly get packed and loaded into the moving truck-- when you're blind with urgency and too tired to notice. Later you'll say, "Wait a minute... Something's amiss..." and realize that you've boxed up your children without batting an eye. Luckily, Jules was off playing with John's mom, so he dodged that bullet!

Tomorrow morning I'll try to get some photos of the farm up for you to see-- it's starting to shape up finally-- and we're whipping through the boxes, one at a time...

I keep telling myself, "Patience. Patience." As they say, Rome wasn't built in a day.

Gulp.