Moving Day

Last night I slept the sleep of the just, for about the first time in two weeks. No awakenings at 5am, running through a 'to do' list in my mind. No children climbing into the bed in the early hours - they, also exhausted, slept until nearly 8am.

The reason? We have finally completed the mammoth task of moving out of the house.

As I've mentioned before, we've been there ten years, and the amount of stuff we've collected has been phenomenal. It probably would have been easier to ship it all to America, but that would have been expensive and half the things useless there anyway. So we went for a complex three way option - take some stuff, leave some stuff for tenants, take the rest away to be stored. In theory this was a great idea - in practice, it was akin to organising a military campaign....

To add to this, two other fairly crucial pieces of the Moving Jigsaw also happened to fall into place on Moving Day; finding a tenant and receiving our visas.

Last Friday our house had yet to be let; on Saturday we had two offers. We had the luxury, therefore, of choice; the group of Sloaney, giggly girls, versus the group of young, earnest blokes from Up North. We went for the girls, purely because they could move in earlier and provide their own beds. I would have rather had a family, but sadly no families saw fit to view our house (the lure of Clapham's bars and restaurants being rather more attractive to so-called 'professional sharers'). So yesterday, as well as packing up, I was frantically emailing paperwork to the agent.....

Meanwhile the non-appearance of the visas had begun to stress us out massively. They hadn't arrived, as promised, within five working days, and were still M.I.A on the morning of Moving Day. This would have meant changing the delivery address for the courier (which, if anything like the rest of our dealings with the embassy, would have been like negotiating Middle East peace), plus, The Doctor needed his passport back to fly to Austria this weekend for a conference. However, just as we were really panicking, the courier turned up at 10am on Moving Day, causing me to whoop with relief (to the great surprise of the removal men).

Littleboy 2 did his best to make Moving Day even more delightful, adding such activities as stuffing two rolls of paper down the loo and blocking it, and throwing Christmas decorations down the stairs and smashing them. Littleboy 1 meanwhile was fascinated by the whole thing, wanting to help the removal men and actually helping the decorator to repaint the dining room.

What else? Oh, one of my oldest friends had her much longed-for baby last week, so in the midst of all the pre-moving chaos of Monday, I simply had to find time to race down to Docklands and pay her a visit. After all, if I don't, her daughter might be three by the time I get to see her. I am sure The Doctor secretly thinks this is Female Logic, but he magnaminously offered to drive me part of the way.....

Finally we realised that despite driving a huge vanload of stuff away from our house last week, there was no way the remaining belongings would fit in the car for the final journey to the family cottage where we are spending the next seven days. This necessitated the Littleboys and I taking the train, which, luckily, was from Paddington, enabling me to distract them by looking for bears etc. at the station. Meanwhile, The Doctor filled the car to the brim. It STILL didn't all fit, but luckily my father in law can bring the rest before we leave.

By the end of yesterday, I felt as if I'd aged about a million years. But today is a different story; we are all well-rested, calmer, feeling really quite excited about finally reaching New York next week. And after all, it all came together in the end. And there are celebratory gin and tonics to be had, plus the remains of the cava from our leaving do to be 'finished'....

That is, until remembering Littleboy 2's behaviour on our two taxi journeys yesterday, I start thinking about the plane journey....