It is also marking a special, personal day for me. We are moving across the country soon, and the past week I've been working like a dog packing and stowing things away, loading a 53' trailer with most of my earthly belongings. The goal was to have the truck roll away at 12:00 midnight on Friday, but we missed that by a couple hours. Friday I started as soon as I dropped the kids off at school and worked continuously until 2:00 am Saturday morning. Sixteen hours of mostly uninterrupted packing and loading, with the notable exception of my son's band teacher calling at 2 in the afternoon saying my son was complaining of "not being able to breath". The band class was practicing for a concert for the next day. My son was very excited to go on this band trip, which was a statewide contest two hours away, and part of the trip was to go to Frontier City, an amusement park in Oklahoma City. The combination of stage fright, excitement of the band trip, the pressures of the contest, the amusement park, the sadness of moving away from his home and friends, the deadline of the move, the exertion from working on packing, missing his mother, (who had already moved), his natural claustrophobia (sitting so close together on stage) and the general dirtyness of kicking up so much old dust in the house had taken it's toll on him. So I talked with him a bit in the school office of what he wanted to do. He wanted to continue with practice, and so I let him off the hook for working the rest of the night. I'd take him to his grandparent's home where the air was clean and open and let him relax there for the night with his sister, while I worked. I was a little worried about them, as the grandparent's had driven to Minnesota a day previous to attend a funeral for my son's great great grand-aunt. I was worried about them staying alone, unsupervised, but they are old enough to do it, he's 12 and his sister is 9. At that age I was babysitting, so I felt they could be alone for the night. I gave them explicit instructions and sent them dinner and made sure my cell phone number was available to them in case there was a problem, and I'd call them every so often to check up. They were fine, except my daughter had a hard time getting herself to bed. She had a routine that she had since she was a baby, and theis was the very first time that mommy or daddy didn't tuck her in. A little reassurance call calmed her down and she was able to do it.
At 2 am we finished loading the truck, and I was beat tired. I still had to take my son to the school at 5:30, three and a half hours away, so I knew I couldn't completely collapse. I went to Grandma's house and took a power nap, woke up groggy but able to drive him there. I discovered I still couldn't rest. Too much adrenaline and caffeine running through my system. I played a little facebook game, looked around the destructo-house, at all the styrofoam bits and unused boxes, piles of shredded checks and loose tools laying about and groaned. More to do, but I wasn't doing any more at that time. I had to stop and recuperate. I went to grandma's and watched some stupid tv program until I finally fell asleep on the couch. I was tired, I stunk from sweat and grime, my back hurt, and I was worried about the welfare of the kids, plus a hundred little loose ends I had forgotten. I woke, took a quick shower and hit the bed.
I'm rested now, for the most part. I'm
taking it easy, but still doing the work. There are still those hundreds of loose ends, but I thought I'd take a moment to blog some before I complete them all.It's finally happening. We're moving, and starting a new chapter. And I'm scared and excited, nostalgic and hopeful. Confused yet assured. It's still hard to describe. I'll probably write more in the next week or so about it.
(the picture is from the website that will buff out of failblog. That is NOT my truck)
