We’re in the “too much is happening to sit down and write about it” phase right now. New house, separate bedrooms for the kids, boxes everywhere.
Ella is handling the move extremely well. She spent a good bit of the afternoon playing in the front yard while the movers took stuff in, kicking the soccer ball, pushing around on her scooter, and periodically shouting commands to them: “That bookshelf goes in Dominic’s room!” “Don’t put that in the kitchen while Mr. David is painting!”
Later on we were reading a book on her bed in her new room in preparation for a nap that never ended up happening. “Isn’t it exciting to have this new room?” I exclaimed, expecting her to respond with the perky enthusiasm she has shown toward the whole move so far. But instead she thought for a moment, and then shook her head tentatively, all the while watching me for my response. “Sometimes it takes a little while to get used to new places and things,” I said. She nodded vigorously. “Maybe it will take me some time to get used to it … just like Dominic!”
Dominic was an apt object lesson in this case because his response to the move so far has been considerably rockier. Our first phase of box-packing a few weeks ago didn’t phase him much, but as we started upending everything to pack it away more recently he has definitely become anxious. Of course he can’t vocalize his specific concerns, but if you had to try to deduce them based on his actions, he is very worried that, in the process of moving all this stuff around to wherever the hell it is going, he, because he is small, will accidentally get left behind or stuffed in a box or otherwise overlooked and will never see us ever again. He has been putting the “cling” in “clingy,” and Suanna is catching the brunt of it. Some of the time it’s just that, what with all that’s going on, we let too long go for him without milk or a snack. But other times he just wants to hold on tight to someone to keep the world from spinning. Tonight I rocked him on my shoulder before bed he clung as tightly as if we were standing on a windy cliff, even after he was asleep. Finally, after a long time, his body relaxed and I was able to settle him into his crib.
New digs means new places to put the kids’ stuff. Should the tricycle go in the front or the back? We’re in the middle of a row of six townhouses so the decision carries some permanence. Should the toys go in the bedrooms, which are upstairs, or in the basement, where the TV and computer desk are? There’s a story about Calvin College, possibly true, that they didn’t put the walkways across the Commons right away, but waited to see where natural paths were made in the grass by the routes students chose to take going place to place, and then they put the pavement there. I plan to follow a similar plan with toy placement: they’ll all start up in the kids’ rooms, and after a period of observation as to how often they are brought downstairs, and how far, final toy placement decisions can be made.
Tomorrow: the sacred pilgrimage to IKEA, no doubt the first of several. My enthusiasm for the trip will be directly proportional to the number of hours Dominic stays asleep in his crib tonight.
