How To Move When You Are 7 Months Pregnant and Your Family Has the Flu

DONT!!!

Just kidding. If someone offers you an amazing rental house and your little (big) family is bursting at the seams where you currently live, you should definitely do it, and you should do it before you are caring for a newborn on very little sleep.

Four years ago, we moved into our current apartment with three little kiddos. Next Saturday, we will be moving into a rental house (yay!) with 5 kids AND I am currently 7 months pregnant.  Oh my goodness, please say a prayer for us to somehow pull this off. There is still so much to pack.  I feel like I have only made a small dent.  Our family has been taking turns with some sort of flu bug for the last week and a half and I am having a wee bit of anxiety that I will not be able to pack everything in time. I think I am going to just start focusing on packing up one entire room at a time, and leaving an open box of essential items for each room.

Bite size pieces. Work at it a little each day. To channel Dory from "Finding Nemo":  "Just keep packing, just keep packing." I've gotten the most generous offers from friends and family to come help me pack, but with the whole flu bug thing going on over here, I just can't in good conscience ask people to come over and catch the flu. Bleh.

Now, I don't care for a lot of television watching in my house, but after a sincere discussion with my husband at lunch today, where I admitted that I haven't been able to pack a single box all day because I have been snuggling and reading stories to sick kids on the couch, in between cooking, dishes, laundry, diaper changes, baths, etc.....he convinced me to let the kids watch some cartoons on Netflix so I can pack.  I felt guilty doing this, but he reminded me that I am not adopting a new parenting style where I ignore the kids all day and they become couch potatoes forever, I am just letting them watch a couple of shows each afternoon for a week of their lives, so we can move to a house where they will have a huge back yard and more rooms in which to run and play and be kids. It is a legitimate solution to a short term problem. And it really is only short term. We prob won't even have the TV hooked up to Netflix for a while after we move, so it won't be a temptation or even an option for them, and the kids can go back to being their normal, creative, active selves.

Okay, off to packing. In two weeks, we'll be on the other side of this and have all the time in the world to unpack and settle in to our new home. At least until the baby comes in September. Then it gets crazy all over again! But a good kind of crazy :-)

If anyone reads this post (ha!), please leave a comment with your best moving tips!

Sometimes...

Sometimes...

I give Declan a mullet....

Then I fast forward a few decades and give him the style he wanted. (But the mullet was actually kinda cool, right? Party in the back!)

Sometimes...we let the 2 year old floss her own teeth.

Sometimes....we give Brianna the tiniest of pig tails.

Sometimes...we search deep inside our hand-me-down couch for a missing item and instead we find 10 dog bones.

Sometimes....I let them play in the mud....then we do a big load of wash.

Sometimes....we get to peek at one of God's miracles.

Sometimes....we go hiking....but we take a wrong turn and accidentally hike on the give-yourself-a-heart-attack-mostly-stairstep-trail instead of the easy family friendly trail we had planned for.

Sometimes....we give Daddy a subscription to Dollar Shave Club for Father's Day.

Sometimes....we find some old homemade play dough in the pantry, which smells like pumpkin spice because we made it last fall, but is actually the perfect color and consistency for making the kids' first baking soda volcano.

Sometimes....Aiden makes the cutest sweetest birthday card for a cousin's party.  "I'm sorry that there isn't that many people.  I don't know how many people are going to the party so that's why I didn't draw that many people."

Sometimes....I sew with the baby in my lap.

Sometimes....I let the baby eat a muffin while in my lap while I'm sewing.  Just because she's so stinkin' cute. 

Sometimes....our 2 year old decides to take a nap under the coffee table. 

Sometimes....we all try on a pair of dollar store reading glasses.  Even if one of us has 20/20 vision and won't get to wear cute glasses for real until they are an old lady (me).

Sometimes....we get our swag on in the Walmart.  Just keepin' it fresh.

Sometimes....we have the best impromptu parking lot hockey games ever.  Even if we can't skate and prefer to wear rain boots (in July.)

And sometimes I disappear from blogland for awhile.  So, I hope you all enjoyed some cute and funny photos of what our family has been up to the last few months :-)