Skipping Town

  Hey there, blog. It’s been a minute.  Every season in our new house brings new familiarity--we don’t know how our house and yard look in each season, so it feels like we’re slowly getting to know our house, month by month. The leaves in our yard were spectacular. Now, our house looks pretty in the snow. We’re settling in. The house is learning about us, we’re learning about the house. We’re finding weird issues to resolve--an outside spotlight that has no identifiable lightswitch to turn it on; outlets that don’t work; radiators that don’t work; fireplaces that may or may not burn the house down should we attempt to light them. Nevertheless, I love the house more every day. Right now we have fresh wreaths on all the windows--it looks quintessentially Christmassy. We were so lucky to find this place.  I still don’t know how we managed to get here. The progression from ‘hey, maybe we should do something wild like move,’ to actually moving, is blurry. Did we, like, have a ...

Finally, Greta's birthday was yesterday. The two weeks she has to wait after Lucia's birthday always seems to last a hundred years. But today was her day. It was not as I'd planned, for many reasons, too numerous and complex to go into tonight, in a birthday post.  But it began as our birthdays always do, with a giant 9 balloon, flowers, and two presents at the table when Greta came down in the morning. She requested pancakes with chocolate-chip faces for breakfast. Then the school day began--the kids are doing virtual school for two weeks--and went fine. The kids are really self-sufficient with it and navigate the platforms with ease. They had an exciting morning break, where they opened presents from Gra and Pop-Pop (who'd split their gifts for the kids between the two birthdays).  While the girls were schooling, I was working on Greta's room revamp--another beautiful transformation, if I do say so myself. There's a reading nook, a canopy over her bed, and lot...

Lucia turned 11 today, a day she's been looking forward to for MONTHS. I know all kids get excited about their birthdays but Lucia always seems to be next-level excited. It's such a momentous day. Of course, we couldn't go anywhere this year--last year we went to the Statue of Liberty the weekend between the girls' birthdays--but we had a fantastic day right here. Mom and Dad came over yesterday and spent the night so they could be here for the whole birthday. There were giant number balloons and a bouquet of flowers waiting for Lucia in the morning, and two small presents: a new Mad Libs book and a blind-item thing called Mini Brands, which is a golden plastic ball containing five mini food items, like a tiny box of Shake n' Bake. She took chocolate Hostess cupcakes to school.  While the kids were at school, Mom, Dad, Andrew, and I got to work on her big gift, a "room revamp," which included a new reading nook and bedding. We closed the door so we could m...

Early last week, my parents called to see if they could stop by for a brief visit with my aunt and uncle and give them a tour of the house. They did; we exchanged a few items and chatted; they left. Later in the week, they called again, saying they were heading to the Strip District with friends and wanted to stop over to show them the house. They did; we chatted; they left. Yesterday, Andrew, the kids, and I drove to Connellsville in the morning and spent the day at my parents' house. Andrew and I went out to do some final kids' birthday shopping, while the girls visited my parents' friend with a new cotton candy maker, played dress-up, and practiced walking on stilts. We all had dinner together, and then we went home.  I know the world is totally upside down right now, but these casual visits--popping in! visiting for the day!--are my own life's version of being through the looking glass, in a good way. We knew in theory it would be this way, and here we are. It's...

With many/most of the boxes now unpacked, we're starting to settle into the routines of our new life. Last weekend, my parents came out for the day, as well as my sister and her fiance, and her fiance's parents, who also live in Pittsburgh. They all toured the house and then we sat on the porch and visited, and then everyone went home. It was planned last-minute and was exactly the kind of easy, spontaneous gathering we'd envisioned when we decided to make this move.  The kids love their school and come home every day bubbling over with news and stories about their classes and new friends. They have new friends in the neighborhood, too, and have even had a couple of (outdoor, masked) playdates. I've found the Target, the Trader Joe's, the Home Depot. The girls went to their new pediatrician's office for a flu shot. I found a vet for Farrah. We met with a contractor to plan our (hopefully imminent) basement reno. It's as normal a life as we could possibly hav...

I ask you: is there anything more invasive and disruptive than a move? Each day has been a blur of boxes, or unboxed piles of miscellany, or haphazardly shelved and stored items that may never return to the pleasingly organized state they'd once been in. The work is physically exhausting. This house is large, the boxes heavy, and there is a lot of brute hauling and pushing and relocating. Every day is like a demonic version of a cross-fit workout. (That comparison is Andrew's. I have no idea what a cross-fit workout entails, or even how to write out "cross-fit": Cross Fit, CrossFit, crossfit, Crossfit, Cross/Fit?) Over the past week and a half, I've laid hands on every single one of my belongings, from unmatchable lids of old sour cream containers to a pile of maternity clothes I've never been able to part with to my most treasured tiny things. I've never been this familiar with all the noise and clutter of my life. There are no mysteries to my home right ...

Yesterday was a very, very bad day. I began the day daunted by Box Mountain, but once I began unpacking--listening to an audio book in the quiet house--it was okay. I made progress. I didn't unpack ALL the boxes, but I unpacked many of them, and moved others to the right parts of the house.  Then the FedEx truck pulled up, and the downward spiral of my day began. We had a logistical hurdle with the closing documents: I was supposed to be in New Jersey to sign them, and we hadn't really thought to alert our lawyer about our change of plan, so there was a flurry of FedExing to get me the docs yesterday morning. I was instructed to receive the docs, get approximately five hundred of them notarized, and then immediately FedEx them back to New Jersey for morning delivery on Wednesday. Fine.  Off I went to UPS for the notarizing. The UPS cashier/notary laid out the docs, then took a phone call. While I patiently waited, I looked over the papers in front of me, and in that moment, in...

It's a week of endings and beginnings. I was supposed to be in New Jersey today, overseeing movers and officially bidding farewell to our house; but it was not to be. This has been a very poorly timed, convoluted, logistically complex move, and we'd made a complicated plan to pull it off--and you know the saying: Want to make God laugh? Make a plan.  Or something like that. And so it was. A death in our family meant my parents could no longer stay with the kids this week, which meant I could not go to New Jersey, which meant Andrew is now tying up the ends of our life himself.   Life happens. Endings and beginnings are rarely separate. Maybe never. The mess and misery of a move are temporary, inconsequential. Though it's a sad time for my family, it's also a time of new beginnings, and we're getting there, day by day.  The movers packed up our Maplewood house yesterday with Andrew overseeing, while I greeted--at long last!--our POD here in Pittsburgh. I was overjoye...

HELLO! We’ve been without WiFi this week, and I haven’t been able to post. A lot has happened. Rather, a lot HASN’T happened. I wrote a few updates this week even though I couldn’t post them, and they are below. Tuesday, 9/8/20 We spent last week with my parents, anticipating that we’d move into our new house on Saturday 9/5, when we’d greet our arriving POD and be reunited with at least some of our things. This was not to be. When I called PODS on Friday 9/4, nervous because I hadn’t yet received a call about a delivery time, I learned that our POD was still in New Jersey, and that there was no delivery date scheduled. There was a great deal of wailing and gnashing of teeth, but there was no way to compel PODS to magically transport a giant storage container overnight, so we were stuck. We decided to move in anyway and just...wing it. We borrowed cots, an inflatable mattress, folding chairs, and a card table from my parents, and on Saturday Andrew and I drove around Pittsburgh, pickin...

It’s been a week. After our emotional goodbye on Saturday, we drove to Pennsylvania and got ready to launch our new life. On Monday, we had a final walk-through of the house and signed the documents to make it ours. Is there any stranger feeling than being alone for the first time in a new house that you OWN? Once the realtors and title guy left, we looked around in amazement and glee. “Glee” wasn’t guaranteed. After all, we hadn’t seen the house since July and had been scared silly by the inspection report (TL/DR: “This is an old house. Hope you like projects. Good luck.”). The length and detail of this report nearly made us SELECT ALL / DELETE the whole new-life endeavor. But standing there, keys in hand, we loved it just as much as we had back when we made the offer in the first place. Whew. We met with a plumber on Monday, and on Wednesday I met with an environmental remediation guy we’d hired to remove the cat-toxic carpet in the (finished) basement and remediate the cat-toxic sme...

In a few hours, we'll drive away from 25 Hickory. Some thoughts. *** In 2012, on the cusp of our move from Brooklyn to New Jersey, I wrote a heartbroken goodbye letter to New York City. It was the end of a chapter, a long, topsy turvy chapter that shaped me and set me on the path of the rest of my life. Though I’d left before, for a four-year stint in Barcelona and California, I knew I’d go back, and I did , baby Lucia in tow. Then Greta came along. That’s when the city I loved almost broke me: two under two, in a small apartment with no yard, was a calculation that didn’t work. So we packed up and moved to the burbs, in what has now become a cliched migration from Brooklyn to Maplewood, a place that realtors, unfortunately, relentlessly market as “Brooklyn West.” And we were happy. We found a fixer-upper on one of Maplewood’s most beautiful streets, a house that was not done in any way but had the soul and the space we were looking for. We were the only offer, and we made a low o...