Ch-ch-ch-changes!

I’ll just ignore the fact that I’ve not written anything for months! Right now I’m sitting on a borrow air mattress in our very empty home. The home that we purchased 7 years ago when Ellie was 17 months old and I was 6 months pregnant with Noah. The home where I spent many days, weeks, months home alone with the kids because James was working 15-18 hour days, 7 days a week being a Military Training Instructor. The home where my kids all learned to walk and talk, where I built a sandbox and garden and set up inflatable pools to keep them busy and happy. I have many good memories of our family in this home. But we’ve definitely outgrown it and now we’ve sold it and we’re preparing to head to Alaska!

It’s funny though: our kids have had more fun with a completely empty house in the past couple days, than I think they’ve had with all their toys and things over the past couple months! They have a few blankets, pillows and a gallon-size Ziploc bag of Duplos to play with and yet it’s kept them laughing and running around and being silly for hours and hours. I haven’t heard them utter, “I’m bored” since the packers took all our household goods last week.

Everyday, it seems there is one more thing we add to our “to-do” list, whether it be here in San Antonio or for once we arrive to Wasilla. And it’s emotionally exhausting. Thankfully I don’t have to do it alone; James is an amazing husband and I love solving all our problems with him. Last night our two problems to work out were: being a one car family for three weeks (I’m not upset, I’m glad we sold our truck last night, but it’s still an adjustment) and how we’re going to get the five of us and our luggage and our two pets to the airport. We agreed on just getting two mini-van Taxi’s, which is going to end up costing us over $150, by the way, ugh.

James and I have always said how we'd love to unplug and raise our kids more how we were raised. Well it's truly about to happen and some of it is actually no choice of our own. In our new home we will have no Netflix, Roku or satellite television; we will get less Internet in our home than we currently get on our phones. I can’t believe I’m even the slightest bit upset, because we don’t watch that much t.v. but the thought of having to watch how much Internet we use each day just stresses me out a little bit. I’m happy that we’ll be spending more time away form the t.v. and computer, however I do think that it will take a little time for everyone to get used to it.

Oh and we have a septic tank which means we have no garbage disposal and when we called to set up our trash service, we discovered we're going to have to cut back the amount of trash to a quarter of what we throw out right now. I guess we'll be composting and recycling a lot more than we do now. I actually spent a couple hours researching worm composting! I know it won’t be hard per sey, to not throw food down the sink and to recycle our recyclables, but it’s just not something we’ve had to do before. I feel like this is going to be so much change all at once.

I think that the weather change is going to be a shock for the three kids (as well as me! Even though I claim to be a Minnesotan still, this San Antonio weather has messed me up a little over the past 7 years!) but I’m hoping that there will be so many new and fun things that they’ll not complain too much. I think they’ll be excited to run around in our big backyard. We currently live on less than a tenth of an acre and our new home is on two-thirds of an acre. I think they’ll love it!