Hellobee

Since Mr. Confetti and I have been together, we have moved seven times. Yep, you read that right. Seven. Times. Moving is no small feat. In our younger days, we moved from apartment to apartment, both juggling full time jobs, with Mr. C working upwards of 75 hours a week. We moved two weeks before I was due with our first child, hoping that after all that apartment hopping, this apartment would be the last of our moves before we bought a home. But with a three year old and a new baby, we were overwhelmed with the stress of city living and not yet in the right place financially to purchase a home we would love. Which meant we were moving to yet another rental. While sleep deprived and with even more baby and kid stuff. Yikes.

With seven moves under my belt, I think I have the moving part down to a science, and after the first move with kids not in utero, I’m confident that I have a few tricks up my sleeve to share, both for moving with kids and just moving in general.

On packing…

Be thoughtful as you pack. Moving is a great time to purge, so you aren’t hauling and paying movers to haul things you don’t still use or need. Whether you are donating, consigning or selling, the less you move, the better.

When packing, slow and steady wins the race. With two babes who never napped at the same time, I made a goal of packing 2-3 boxes a day. I quickly discovered that while packing your entire home is a huge task, it doesn’t take that long to pack one box. The baby could lay in the swing or hang out in a carrier for a box or two a day, I could often find a box that Colin could “help” with during Asher’s naps, and after bedtime, I could speed pack without the distraction of tending to little ones if I built the boxes before they were asleep (packing tape is LOUD!). We started with items we used least frequently, and in the last couple days, we hustled through the last of our dishes, remaining clothes and toiletries, which leads me to…

Pack your kid’s stuff LAST.  Like, as late in the process as humanly possible.  We were living in a box mountain, and yet Colin’s room (outside of his closet) remained virtually untouched until the morning the movers arrived. We premade and prelabeled a bunch of boxes, and then on moving day, filled them to the brim with bedding, clothing and toys.  This seemed to make the transition process much easier, since it was less drawn out.

Here is my secret Confetti family trick: use clean clothing to wrap your breakables. Rather than wasting money on packing paper or bubble wrap, use your clothes, starting first with out-of-season items, to wrap your dishes and kitchenware, frames and anything else breakable. It all needs to be moved anyway, so you aren’t wasting space in your boxes, which in turn means fewer boxes and less expensive moving costs.

Label, label, label. Be as specific as you can, both to help the movers unload efficiently and so that you know which boxes you’ll want to unpack first, in case your kids get in the way of a speedy unpacking process.

On moving day…

I know I’ve already mentioned movers, but seriously movers are worth their weight in gold. Mr. C and I aren’t made of money, but after our first couple of moves together, renting a truck and recruiting help from friends to do the moving ourselves, we accepted the fact that hiring movers to do the heavy lifting is absolutely worth the money. What many people don’t think about with movers is that if you’re moving locally and have a day or two of overlap between leases, you can have the movers only lift and move items that you can’t handle yourself. For nearly every move, we have moved our most fragile possessions, and until we moved with kids, we always moved most of our clothing, artwork, and breakables like dishes ourselves.

Speaking of help, on the day of, recruit friends, family or paid caregivers to watch your children. There is no such thing as too much help. We moved on Memorial Day, and all of our closest friends were out of town. With no local family, we recruited three babysitters: one for each child in the morning, since Asher needed naps and care in the house and Colin needed to get out of the house and not be underfoot with five movers hustling through our house, and another in the afternoon at the new house to lend a hand with the kids while we plowed through as much unpacking as we possibly could.  Toddlers love to “help” but until all the heavy lifting of the move is over, it’s best to keep littles out of harm’s way.

On moving day, have the movers load the children’s furniture and boxes last and unload them first. We were able to have both boys furniture and most of the stuff that belonged in their bedrooms completely set up before the movers were even finished unloading the rest of the truck, which meant that at nap time, we weren’t stuck thinking, “Oh no, where is C going to sleep?”

Kids make every non-kid related task seem to take twice as long, right? Unpack as much as you can on moving day.  While you might be exhausted and overwhelmed with the box mountain that is your life, after day one, it is much easier to procrastinate, since the most crucial items have already been sorted through. If friends offer to help, let them.

If you are looking to find a new sitter in your new neighborhood or city, set up a couple working interviews the week after your move with them serving as “mother’s helper” to play with your kids while you are within sight unpacking and can observe. If you don’t love them for the long term, at least you had some extra hands for an afternoon.

Specifically for the kids…

Do what you can to prepare them in advance, to the extent that you won’t freak them out. Toddlers have a very loose concept of time; Colin calls anything in the past “yesterday” and anything in the future “tomorrow.” As soon as we started packing boxes that would be stored where he would notice them, we explained that we would soon be moving to a new house. And every single day after, he would ask, “are we moving today?!” It was mentally exhausting for all of us, but we didn’t want to confuse him with the presence of boxes and no explanation.

We also prepared Colin by reading books about moving that he enjoyed and wanted to read every day. After reading a ton of reviews on Amazon, we picked The Berenstain Bears Moving Book and Boomer’s Big Day, and both books were a hit and super helpful for understanding the concept of moving.

Once your old house is empty, do a walk-through with children old enough to be aware of the emotional stress of moving. Asher and I followed the moving van to the new house while Colin and Mr. C walked through the empty old apartment so that Colin could see that we left nothing behind, and that it was just a shell of a space that we made a home. I think this has helped him ask when we would go back to the old house less.

When moving into a new rental, often I have found that in the beginning, I will nit-pick about things I don’t love until I have gotten used to them (doorbell that plays the entire Star Spangled Banner? Check. Less than ideal paint colors chosen by the landlords? Check.) While this isn’t a big deal pre-kids, this time around, we were careful only to sing the praises of the new house while the kids were awake. We pointed out the giant pros: Look, a new play room! A hose with a sprinkler! All this space to run! and allowed Colin to fall in love with the space. Since three-year-olds have virtually no concern about lack of overhead lighting in the bedrooms or the potential zillion dollars to be spent at Target, keeping talk positive kept the transition feeling positive.

Speaking of positive vibes in the new house, we set up some great new toys in the playroom to sweeten the moving experience for Colin (it helped that we moved the day after his birthday, so these were birthday gifts and not toys bought specifically for the move). He told both sets of grandparents via FaceTime that he was so excited about his new house and his new rollercoaster. Happiness is contagious, so we hoped the joy of the new toys would rub off on his feelings about the new house!

Encourage your kids to see the good in the new house, but help them process the emotions of leaving the old house. For us, I felt like there was no reason for Colin to feel anything but joy at all of his new and improved amenities in the new house. But in his three short years, the old house was all he knew and he really loved our old house. Occasionally, he would tell us that he wanted to go back to his old house. We would tell him that “it’s okay to feel sad sometimes and miss his old house.” Eventually, these requests simply fizzled out (“little by little, you’ll feel better again” – thank you, Daniel Tiger).

And one last fun tip: save a few of those moving boxes. They make great tools for imaginative play, and excellent canvases for toddler art projects!

Anyone else tackling a move with kids this summer?  Any other tips to share?