Packing (and Packing, and Packing)

Sweeping the study

I'm going to allow myself to complain, just this once. Moving three kids and an apartment full of stuff right before the holidays is hard! We had our day of play yesterday, but our movers come tomorrow, so today Dennis and I had to hole up in the house and get our work done.

We'd told the kids our plan the night before, and apparently they remembered, because I awoke to the sound of one of the children gently clicking closed our bedroom door.  So, of course, my ears perked up, listening to whatever they were up to.

Cleaning. They were cleaning.  When I got up, Joey and Alex were sweeping together, and Ella was picking up toys.  Amazed, I told them that, since they'd saved me so much time, we could curl up and watch the end of Albert Finney's Scrooge (which, as we all know, is the all-time best Christmas movie, ever.  I let the kids start watching it for the first time last night, and they, of course, concur. Thank you very much.)

I like life.

But after our movie was over it really was time to get to work, and that's all Dennis and I did for the rest of the day. Happily, it really and truly snowed last night, enough to almost bury the grass, and certainly enough to keep the kids entertained through all the daylight hours.  As soon as we opened the blinds, Ella declared that she was going to stay outside all day long, and she very nearly did.  She started the most ambitious fort I've ever seen last night, importing snow from all over the yard to add to it, and she continued her project all day today, only stopping for hot cocoa breaks.

The boys spent their share of time outside as well, but, because I started with packing their room, they were initially more interested in watching me.  Alex was mainly concerned that his stuffed animals were packed comfortably and that all of his essential "special things" made it into the boxes.  After he'd seen to these things, he ran outside to join his sister.

"Where my books??"

Joey, however, had longer-lived concerns.  After he closely inspected his shockingly empty bookcase, he wandered over to his bed and noticed that I'd swept his bedside table clean of toys.  "Hey! W-w-where's my dinosaurs? I want my little knight dolly! I want my horsie! I want my Smurf!"

Now this I did not expect.  I expected to see Ella, trembly-lipped, rhapsodizing about our home here, and I expected to see Alex, worrying over whether his things would be okay, but Joey is always so scrappy, so tough.  I forgot that he, too, has his troubles regarding change.

So we went to the boxes, and we extracted his dinosaurs, his dolly, his horsie, and his Smurf, which he carefully arranged on his table, just so. That handled, he turned to me. "And my books? Where my books? My toys? Put them back!"

So we curled up and had a little talk, Joey and I. When I tried to explain to him that we were going home, he protested "No! I wanna stay home!" Of course: as far as he can remember, this is his home.  So I tried to spin it in a different way.  I pulled out the Berenstain Bear's Moving Day and read it with him, changing the words ever so slightly:

"Move!? cried Brother Bear. "That's right," said Papa. "The German is hard to understand here, and we want to live closer to Grandmas and Grandpas and all of our aunts and uncles."

Joey listened carefully, and then, after we read the book, he paged through it, pointing to a picture of Brother Bear. "That look like me," he said, thoughtfully.

I left him with a hug and his thoughts, and went to make lunch.  After paging through the book a few more times, he seemed to come to terms with our situation.  But Dinosaurs, and dolly, and horsie, and Smurf are all staying put for a few more days.

Fast-forwarding a little, we worked, and worked, and worked, and did our best to pack our things tightly and judiciously.  We lined our stuff up along the wall of the study, crossing our fingers that we'd gathered less than 93 cubic feet. I think it's going to be close.

Alex lost his first tooth!

But Alex had an entirely different set of worries tonight.  He's been wiggling his bottom tooth for weeks, now, and the permanent tooth has already grown in quite a bit. Tonight, he opened his mouth and showed me that it was dangling by the thinnest threads. "Can you pull it," he wanted to know. Easily.

But that meant Alex had the tooth fairy to contend with.  He's under the unshakeable impression that he'll be in big trouble if he happens to be awake when the tooth fairy shows up.  So he put his long-anticipated plan into action: he hid his tooth under his pillow, and then he went to sleep in my bed, instructing us to move him back only when he was unconscious.

Alex needn't have worried: somehow, that stealthy tooth fairy slipped in and left 50 Rappen under Alex's pillow before we even moved him.

Ella was proud of her brother, and gave him a big hug, but she also told me, confidentially, that she was a little jealous that Alex lost his tooth in Switzerland. "The money is worth more here...or do you think the tooth fairy will only leave 45 Rappen, because that's equal to 50 cents that I got when I lost my first tooth.  Because," (and here, you can insert a pointed look), "that would be fair, right?"