Hellobee

It’s been almost three months since the Starfish family moved from Chicago, Illinois to Lexington, Kentucky. Now that we are mostly settled in, I think it’s a fair time to reflect on and share that experience with you all. I will weave in some tips, many of which come to you as a result of my own missteps!

I vividly recall one of my lowest parenting moments during this period – I was serving the girls dinner after nearly a week of moving upheaval and was absolutely exhausted when one of my girls insisted that she needed to go potty. When I pulled her out of her highchair and took her to the downstairs bathroom, she insisted that we go upstairs to the particular potty that this child thought was the only vessel in the entire world that could possibly contain her pee at that moment. When I balked and told her to pee in the downstairs bathroom, she threw a major temper tantrum. We’re talking the works – we had screaming, we had a dramatic flop onto the floor, we had sweat and a face the color of a strawberry – it was a level 10 tantrum.

And then when my other one decided she had to also have a tantrum for an unknown toddler reason, I broke down. I called Mr. Starfish (who inconveniently was on his third business trip of the past four weeks, in the midst of our move) and started crying myself. Hard. Like the kind of crying where you can’t catch your breath and you are sort of hiccuping through huge waves of emotion. And not to be outdone by my toddlers, I also included a dramatic floor flop for good measure.

Somehow I managed to literally and figuratively pick myself up off the floor. And somehow I got those girls off to bed that night and we all survived. But my goodness, my point is that moving with toddlers is not something to be taken lightly!

And that whole story leads me to my first toddler moving tip: go easy on yourself, your spouse, and your kids. I do not typically have emotional breakdowns in front of my kids, but I sure did it while moving. We also ate a whole lot of fast food during the week when none of our moving boxes had arrived. My girls didn’t read as many books on a daily basis as I’d like. And I am pretty darn certain at least two baths and multiple teeth-brushing sessions were skipped. In the end, we were able to get back on track pretty quickly and easily. When I was in the midst of my own tantrum, Mr. Starfish quietly instructed me to walk over to the TV, turn on Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood, and take a break. Great advice if you ask me. Moving is overwhelming; take breaks and shortcuts when necessary. This is the time to let some stuff go.

The other thing that I really wished we had done was have Mr. Starfish take more time off work for the move. Because we moved due to my job change, I had plenty of time off work as I was transitioning roles. But not only was Mr. Starfish working throughout our move, but he also had back-to-back business trips during this period. Reflecting on this, we both agreed that he should have used his vacation time for our move rather than saving it up for a future trip that honestly likely won’t even happen now because I’ve just started a new job and don’t have enough vacation days banked myself.

Several of you are aware that we had the girls with a spectacular nanny since birth in Chicago. Saying goodbye to her was one of the hardest parts of our entire move, and I still miss her each and every day. The reason for our move was career-oriented, and the timing was entirely uncontrollable. But I will say that the move certainly heightened my awareness of our original nanny’s awesomeness and I can absolutely say without hesitation that if I could have delayed a move for a couple of years in order to keep her in our lives, I would have done it. I mention this because some of you may be considering a shorter-distance move (such as a move from the city to the suburbs) and if it were me based on this experience, I would certainly delay it if it means saying goodbye to a great nanny or childcare situation.

Speaking of nannies, we had to transition to a new one. I will have plenty more to say about this in a future post because things didn’t work out, but for now I will leave you with a lesson that I learned through the transition. Give your new nanny space and get out of the way. I really think I made a mistake in thinking that our new nanny needed tons of oversight and help getting to know the girls. So I stuck around the house. For days. This was an error and the day that I decided to just hand over the daytime role to her and left for some solo errands was the day things started to improve (somewhat, because as I said before, our first new nanny here in Lexington did not work out).

And now since I’ve gone on and on with all my mistakes made, perhaps I’ll try to scrounge up some things we did right.

• We leaned on family really hard, and when they offered a hand, we took it and we put them to work. We couldn’t have done it without them.
• We prioritized getting the girls’ room unpacked first. We recreated their old room as much as possible, with the same furniture, same wall decorations, same set-up of cribs and bookshelf. I had planned to even paint their room the exact same color but in the end, time got away from me and that didn’t happen. It’s still not a bad idea in my opinion.
• We took time out of unpacking to play tourist in our new city. This helped to increase our excitement, and the kids’ excitement, about our new surroundings.
• I had a two-week period to unpack our house before my new job started. I would absolutely negotiate for at least this much time going forward in order to get a house unpacked and feeling like home.

Breakfast in a half-unpacked kitchen.

• Expect a potty training regression if your kiddos are new to it. Our rockstar Chicago nanny warned me that this was likely coming and I’m so grateful that she did because when all of the potty-training progress we had made suddenly reversed, I was able to recognize that it was more-or-less normal and to keep pushing through. I’m glad I did.
• Give things time. We moved in mid-August and I mentally set Halloween as the date when we would feel settled. It turns out that this wasn’t too far off and if our first new nanny had worked out as anticipated, it would have been spot-on. But note that Halloween was almost two months after our move. I never expected that we would instantly click in our new surroundings and I think that was a good frame for me mentally.

In the end, we are really happy with our new house and our new town and we’re feeling good with our decision to move from Chicago. Having the advantage of full hindsight, we would make the same decision again. And now that we’re finally settled in Lexington and the move is behind us, we are looking forward to our first holiday season in horse country – giddy up!

All snuggled in to our new home.