Making Progress

First, some pictures of the little guy:

I am happy to say that the last few days have been pretty productive, with the exception of Wednesday, when I felt nauseous off and on all day long. I've unpacked a LOT of boxes - a chunk of them are shown below in our living room.

Last night my friend Jenn came over for a break-the-boxes-down party - then stayed to help me unpack some more things in the basement, which was a huge help. Sometimes you just need a nice friend there to help keep you going. Jenn's presence was enough motivation to move quickly and get things out of boxes.

I've had so much help from other friends too who have brought over meals and other things. Carrie and Sharon have both taken Eli for a few hours this week so I could get some unpacking done in peace. It's so much easier to unpack by myself than with the little guy climbing on me!

I promise future pictures of the house will be much prettier than what you see above... I think I have about 15 more boxes left to unpack; and I have already opened/unpacked about 80! Crazy that we have SO MUCH JUNK... I cannot imagine doing this if I were further along in the pregnancy. I am so thankful that I can bend down and carry things without much trouble.

The Move is OVER!

Things I'm thankful for after this whole moving ordeal:

• Central air conditioning
• 2-car Garage
  
• Wonderful, friendly new neighbors
• Fenced-in back yard
• Eli's bedroom and the other two bedrooms are upstairs and QUIET - and have soft carpet
  
• Helpful friends and family
  
• Home phone and internet works again

Things that I could have lived without through this whole moving ordeal:

• CRANKY, unhelpful old neighbors
• Getting yelled at for parking the moving truck in the alley (at our condo)
  
• Home phone being turned off for two days/using up all of my cell minutes
• U-Haul being incompetent, not having the truck that we reserved and confirmed in advance...thus making Thursday night's move WAY stressful and long (we had to store half of our stuff in a friend's garage overnight)
  
• Staying up WAY too late every night last week and now feeling sick as a result (Ben too)
  

The little things that make me smile in our new place:

• the ice maker
• the washer/dryer
• my craft room in the basement
• having more space
• watching Eli attempt to go up and down the stairs
• having an eating nook off of the kitchen
• putting Eli to bed upstairs and not having to tiptoe while he's asleep
• not worrying about when I can use the garbage disposal
• and last but not least... no more annoying dog barking, running, and dropping things above my head!
  

I'll post pictures once we're more unpacked... it is slow-going and while we are starting to get things out of boxes, we're not going very fast since we're still so tired from all of this. Our neighbors have been SO friendly - the ones next door brought over cookies from my favorite bakery on the day we moved in. On Saturday, more neighbors came over and said hi/introduced themselves. We've also met the neighbors that share the alley with us and they are all super friendly and have young kids. We feel really lucky to be around so many nice people and to hopefully get settled in our new place soon!

Moving Countdown

All I can say - we have had two nights of power packing and I'm already completely, utterly sick of it. Last night I packed up most of the kitchen, but have a few random pieces still to pack up. Ben tackled the storage unit in our basement - that was a big job. This morning, Eli helped me work on packing the things in his closets, but every time I put something in a box, he would help by pulling it back out. :) I've had a few friends offer to watch him so I can get more packing done during the day, but I think he would go nuts right now if I dropped him off at someone's house and left. He really is not sure what to make of all of this mess and the changes to his little home.

I vowed to Ben last night - next time we are getting full-fledged movers. I don't care how much it costs - I don't ever want to pack all of this junk again. Either that, or we're never moving again. Both options are fine with me!

Many of our friends have moved multiple times and I honestly don't know how they have done it - this is just our second move in almost 8 years of marriage! We had a condo in Utah for 18 months and then lived here for 6 years. However, I'm afraid though that living here for so long (before Eli was born) helped us accumulate WAYYYYY too much stuff.

Two more nights of power packing left before we need to be done! Yikes. The biggest thing I'm thankful for this week though - the weather! It's been in the mid-70s and just perfect. No a/c needed and so unusual for August in Chicago. It's made such a difference in what I'm able to get done - I feel a million times better when it's not 90 degrees in our place.

No more beetles

So you know I was sleep-deprived the other night when I wrote that last post - because as my friend Stacy pointed out (nicely), I misspelled beetles in some places with the band spelling of the Beatles. :) I am such a spelling fanatic that it makes me cringe and laugh at the same time, but I won't change it. I'll just happily report that I haven't seen those yucky flying beetles since Wednesday night. And I don't want to wonder where they ended up - in my mind, they have disappeared to somewhere outside of my condo. No more tears over creepy bugs.

Instead, I took more pictures of my sweet little boy at the park yesterday.

I want to kiss those cheeks ALL the time. :)

I'm glad that tomorrow is Friday. I'll be on the hunt for something cute to wear to my 10-year high school reunion on Saturday (that I will be going SOLO too since Ben will still be out of town... stinker). I had ordered a dress online, but it arrived today and didn't look good. So hopefully I'll find something fun tomorrow (and if not, oh well).

In the meantime, over the last few nights, I've made lots of homemade cards, watched a lot of movies, and tried to ignore the fact that we are moving out in exactly one week. Ahhhh!!!

Crazy Week

It's been a crazy week, which explains my lack of posting. After much deliberation, Ben and I actually decided to put our condo up for sale (our orig. plan was to wait until next spring, but we changed our minds). We found a house that falls in the sort of-affordable range (for around here at least) and while it needs lots of work, it could be a really neat place. And the location is the best - it's a 3-minute walk to the train for Ben and the house faces a cute park - what more could you ask for??

So now the fun begins. We started boxing things up on Monday and had some friends from the ward come on Thursday to help Ben move junk into a storage unit, with the hope that this would clear our place of the clutter we've accumulated in the last six years. We filled at least 30 boxes, moved out two bookcases, a dresser, a trunk, and a few other things, and what a difference!

We had our first showing yesterday and have an open house planned for this afternoon. We're selling by owner and will keep you posted on what happens. My biggest nightmare is that the house we love will go under contract before we have a solid offer on our place (a problem b/c the house sellers aren't taking contingency offers, which really limits us since we need the money from our condo for the down payment on this house).

One funny thing - my mom came on Friday to help with Eli (but stayed much longer to help get our place ready... thank you!!). We have something called the Flip Fold, that I bought from the Container Store last year, but then never got around to learning how it worked (I am terrible at folding clothes nicely). Well, we opened it up and my mom flipped and folded ALL of our pants, shirts, etc. so they would look good in our closets. My clothes have never been folded so well!! And it's really easy to use - you'll have to check out the link to see the demo on the Flip Fold site.

Here are some pictures from this week:

Above and Below: Eli still adores his sheep rug from Gram! We have had some miserably hot and humid days this week (yesterday it was 93 percent humidity with tornado warnings), hence Eli wearing just the cute Beatles onesie :)

Below: Eli's favorite hiding spot - the radiator cover in the living room. He loves flipping up the panel (inside is where you open or close the radiator) and putting little treasures inside... whenever I can't find something, I check this spot - and it's usually there!

Below: A small portion of the boxes before we packed this week. Eli loved having an obstacle course and had fun peeking around them to see us.

Below: The living room after we got rid of the boxes, hallelujah!