Moving

We got rid of Starling's highchair over the weekend. She hasn't really used it for a year or two (other than as a ladder for climbing up onto the counter). Still, it felt strange to have that little spot next to the table suddenly empty. "It's the end of an era," Abe commented.

And the highchair era isn't even the biggest ending around here!

Mette's second-grade class is doing an alphabet countdown to the last day of school. (D for dance-party day, F for favorite-book day, etc.) Already they are to the letter N. N! Only a handful of letters left and the school year will be over. (Their college siblings finished up another year and poured back into our home with boxes and bags of dorm and apartment trappings earlier this month.)

AND, as if no-more-highchairs and school-years-ending aren’t enough, we are moving! How's that for an ending? (Oh I don't really know if it's an ending, or even if it's a beginning really! It feels like a muddly limboing thing between both of those.) Still, we are leaving this home where we've spent over 14 years. 

None of the children in these pictures even existed (earthside anyway) when we arrived here! (Well, that's not quite true, Jesse had just managed a few short days on earth when we signed on the home.)

And the ones we did have with us were just a tiny passle of babies really. There were five of them--the oldest only eight years old. (And look at Abe, Daisy and Goldie now! 22, 21, and nearly 19!)

We've known, for several years, that Logan is where we are headed, but we've waffled and bounced around so many ideas about how to do it, and when to do it, and ways to handle the limbo stage between leaving this house and having a new house ready for us, that I don't know that any of us really believed we would finally go; and we are all in a bit of shock to have, so suddenly, decided to seize an opportunity, make the shift, and get up there. 

Removing all 12 of us, in one great chunk, from the sphere of people we circle about and weave among feels like we are blasting an unnatural hole in the fabric of mortality! There are so many ties that form in 14 years of living somewhere--especially while raising so many kids (whose existences dramatically extend our own connections). 

But Mike says we all have to take a page out of seven-year-old Mette's book (rather, a page out of her journal). 

Once she heard the news of our upcoming move, she went to her room and carefully filled out several pages in her journal with the information we'd given her about the tiny rental house and her new school. She wrote down goals for herself. And then made several large empty boxes with spaces for new best friends, a possible crush, etc.

"She's heading into this with the expectation of every one of those boxes eventually being filled," Mike pointed out. "And we should all do the same."

So, off we go, with hopes and expectations for all the empty boxes we are leaving in the lives of those we love here, and all the empty boxes for us in the place we are going ... to eventually be filled. (And, in the meantime, we will just literally fill about eight million boxes! Haha. I have packed one so far. ONE! First step, I guess.)