I have spent the better part of the last month packing, painting, having a hard time breathing due to the completely overwhelming amount of clutter, arguing with whoever is here about this house being a mess, browsing Pinterest way too late at night, feeling completely disheveled and counting down the sleeps with Ben until we finally have a little more room to live.
It has been a long month. I don't really handle clutter very well, so it has been interesting around here.
I actually lost Blake this morning.
And we were home.
Ben and I were sprinting through the place for what felt like a full minute, but was most likely about 10 seconds until I found Blake standing by the toilet holding the remote over his head.
That kid scares me. Not because he is bad...but because he, unlike me, is just not scared.
I think Ben was more excited that we found the remote than the fact that we found Blake, and I wanted to yell at someone for leaving the bathroom door open while the happy wanderer was awake, but with this apartment looking like it does right now, it's really hard to specifically call out anyone so I didn't even bother.
It's just a whole new level of chaos around here...and until today, I was really starting to have a hard time believing I was going to make it to next weekend.
But for some reason, this morning, when I decided to flip through my pictures on my phone as a way to put off packing another box or painting another road sign for the boys' new transportation themed toy room, I started to feel a little better about it all.
I mean, here I have been seeing the clutter and the growing list of shit I have still not accomplished over the last month and I haven't stopped to see the awesomeness of this whole process.
Painting this place back to white? My initial thoughts went something like, "I will never buy the cheapest paint in the store ever again because there is a reason it was so cheap and I'm fairly certain I will have paint stuck in my hair forever and maybe I should really reconsider even painting the new house at all because I honestly am over it all right about now and who decided that we really needed to move, anyway?"
And then I find these...
And I feel like an idiot for complaining.
Sure, he was able to quit when he was bored, and he didn't end up walking around with paint splattered on his eyebrows for two days without realizing it and it was totally socially acceptable for him to paint with no pants on...
But he was so excited to help and he was even more excited about the fact that his name was on the wall and he got to watch an entire episode of Good Luck Charlie in Mommy and Daddy's room while he was painting.
On two separate occasions yesterday, I actually found myself standing next to an empty box with a garbage bag in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other just staring at the mess and wondering how in the hell someone like me could have allowed so much stuff to accumulate here in the past 5 years. I am basically the opposite of a hoarder and I am known to sneak bags and bags of stuff to take to Goodwill out to my car late at night when all 3 of my boys are asleep and unable to complain about what I am about to give away. So where all of this crap came from, I wasn't really sure...and the fact that I couldn't figure out an organized way to sort through the stuff I could pack now and the stuff that we could not live without for 7 whole days was giving me anxiety for the better part of the day.
But when I came across these gems, I couldn't help but laugh.
I find every bit of these pictures entertaining.
You can't tell, but I actually have taken my OCD to a whole new level when labeling each box. I have notes on each box like we are hiring people to move us (which we are not) and like I won't be standing there playing referee with each box that gets touched.
There is even a box that I packed upside down and drew a million arrows on and wrote "Oops! Upside down!"
I'm sure somewhere in that stack of boxes, you can probably even find punctuation...and, at one point, it did take me a solid two minutes to get over the fact that I mislabeled one box and that it truly did make more sense to just scribble over the wrong words and write new ones instead of packing a whole new box.
(I wish that was a lie).
Blake cracks me up with the faces he was making at dinner, Ben couldn't be bothered to take his shorts off of the nail that they landed on when he flung them across the room when he was getting his pajamas on, we clearly were functioning on an unhealthy arsenal of caffeine and apple juice yesterday and the way I packed the box with the calendar that makes it look like Joe is in the box hiding from me is equally creepy and hilarious...and possibly an accurate depiction of where he wishes he could be right about now.
My perfectionism has caused me to slow up on painting those road signs that I mentioned earlier, even though Ben wakes up every morning and asks if I made his new signs he picked out yet.
He took this picture yesterday of all of his signs when I had them laying on the floor deciding which sign to tackle next. He often steals my phone and takes pictures of how he has set up cars or trains or anything he is proud of.
I guess he is proud of these...
And, thanks to Ben, I kind of am too!
We haven't had a dinner that I have put any effort into for a ridiculously long time. We have gotten fancy a few times and grilled, but even that has been a rare occasion this past month because I am just so tired of messes everywhere that I don't want a food mess at the end of the day.
I was starting to feel bad about that, but Ben seriously loves making sandwiches and he thinks it is fun to help make his own dinner and sit next to me on the couch eating on a TV tray.
And Joe has mastered the art of making his own Quiznos sub and insists on cutting his sandwiches as if he actually worked at Quiznos, now.
I guess that I should stop being so stressed about how much time I have spent packing, painting, living in clutter, serving up embarrassingly simple dinners and worrying about what is left to do and just enjoy the fact that all throughout this hectic month...I have had all of the entertainment and support I could ever need living among the temporary mess right along with me the whole entire time.
We only have to make it one...more...week.
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