1. There is not enough chocolate in my house. I am reduced to eating generic Nutella from a spoon.
2. We have been talking for a while now about rearranging the bedrooms. We've had three boys in one room since Stella arrived, and it is usually messy. Having two roommates means you can shift the blame -- "but he has more dirty underwear on the floor than I do!" I say, "Boys. Any dirty underwear on the floor at any time is too much dirty underwear on the floor. Never let your dirty underwear touch the ground. Like the American flag, only with coliform bacteria. The hamper is RIGHT THERE."
Will it ever sink in? One wonders.
3. The reason I'd been pruning toys and purging closets recently was that I'd come up with a Plan. We'd move into the room where the toys and kids' books lived. The middle child would move into Stella's room. The two youngest kids would move into our room with the toys, while the books went into the now-single-occupancy room inhabited by our 12yo. Happiness!
4. We'd been talking about how this would work but I forgot the cardinal rule of moving: rooms with no furniture always, always look bigger than they really are. I said, "Should we measure to make sure our bed will fit in this spot where we want it to go?" Elwood said, "It will be fine. This is a big room." I said, "Yeah, by 1923 standards it's big." I lay down in the floor to check the length. It seemed fine. I did not (<-foreshadowing) check the width.
5. Elwood is the family spatial-visual genius. This title was given him by my college roommates when he helped us load our moving van. He could see exactly where everything ought to go to maximize our use of space. They were in awe.
I assumed if he said we were good to go, then we were good to go.
6. I came down to find Elwood and Alex shoving the head of the bed against the windows in that room. (Unexpected benefit of having a 15yo who is as tall as his dad: I am off the hook for much of the furniture moving!) I said, "This is not right! We will freeze if our heads are next to the leaky 1923 windows!" Alas, that's the only way our bed fits in the room.
This departure from our planned configuration also means my dresser doesn't fit. (Not a big loss -- I've always hated it and will be happier with a Craigslist substitute. But in the short term it's a hassle.) And there are a bunch of details we didn't fully think through, like the total lack of storage space in the downstairs bathroom. It's not crazy for me to keep toiletries upstairs, but it's not what you'd call efficient either.
7. And that's why I'm eating fake Nutella from a spoon.
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7½ I wrote most of this post last night, before we spent our first night in our new room. I was bummed because our baby monitor died sometime in the last three years while it was living in the basement, and I was worried about not hearing Stella. Do you know, mother ears are something. I heard her easily in my sleep, despite being separated from her by a pretty good distance. The volume of her call was pretty low, but the content ("Mama! Mama!") jolted me right into consciousness. So that's good. Wish me luck with her transition to the bunkbed.
More quick takes at Jen's.
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