Settling In

The boys are upstairs in the toy room playing with trucks.  The girls are outside riding bikes up and down the driveway.  Rachel is napping in the downstairs bedroom.  And I finally find myself without a long list of things that need to be done yesterday.

For a month now we have been moving at approximately 100 miles per hour.  Claude and I have kept very late nights trying to get through all that needed to be packed, cleaned, tied up, set up, unloaded, or put away.  In between the packing and unpacking stages we managed to drive our little family from Texas to Virginia without any major issues - not even a bout of motion sickness to report.  Praise the Lord!  :)

It has certainly been an exciting month.  And stressful.  Let's not leave that out!  I don't think I have ever felt more stress than I have during this move.

Now that the house is pretty much set up and our relocation is essentially complete, I have time to think and pray about re-establishing our routines and schedules.  Usually I love working on things like this, but today I'm not wanting to tackle the issue.  Hence the blog post.  ;)

While many things can remain the same, there is much that must change in order to fit our new normal.  The problem with making the changes is that I don't yet know what the new normal looks like.  I'm still figuring it out.  And the adjustments necessary to make a long-distance move work seem to never end.

For one thing, we find ourselves living in a semi-rural setting.  I say "semi" because we can see neighbors on both sides of us and across the street.  We are not truly isolated, but neither are we close to amenities like shopping, doctors, libraries, and the like.

We will have a lot of practice riding in the car since pretty much everything is 45 minutes from home.  I can't really complain about the driving, though, since most of it looks like this:

And once we get near to our house, it looks a little more like this:

We can drive 45 minutes and find ourselves at Walmart, Sam's Club, or church.  But we can also visit places like the Appomattox Court House National Historic Park where, just about 150 years ago, General Robert E. Lee surrendered to General U.S. Grant and the Civil War came to an end.  And it's "just down the road".

Other adjustments have mainly to do with how our household runs.  Laundry is changing some because we now have two different baskets for dirty laundry - one on the main floor and one upstairs.  Chores will change since we have a different setup than our previous home.  Even sleeping arrangements, and therefore bed times, have changed.  Our upstairs bedrooms are gigantic (a good "problem" to have) so we decided to have a bedroom for all five kids and a toy room.  And with that come more and more adjustments.

The funny thing about all of these changes is that I feel like we have never lived anywhere else than here.  It's surreal to think that just a few weeks ago we were Claude was dragging a very heavy washing machine up the front steps, into a house that was cold, dusty, and full of unpacked boxes.

Is it telling that the first thing that made this house feel like home was having that washing machine and dryer hooked up and running?  You know you do a lot of laundry when...  :)

Yesterday as the kids and I drove home from taking Gramma to the airport, I felt a sense of relief as I saw the sign with the name of our little town.  It may be new.  There may be dozens of adjustments to be made, but this is home and it feels great to be settling in.