Skipping Town

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...

It's real now. No turning back. We sold our house in one day, without it ever going on the market. This is a huge relief, and also a forcing factor because now we really can't change our minds. Ha! Not that we were going to! But now we really really can't. We're locked in. We're leaving. We're leaving in one week. The kids are now forced to face that reality too. Their friends are away on vacations or leaving for vacations, so yesterday involved a lot of goodbyes and a lot of hysterical tears. I felt yesterday like I'd ruined a lot of tween lives. It is not a good feeling. WHAT ARE WE DOING? Per the contract of our marriage (ie only one of us is allowed to freak out at a time), Andrew is calm and steady, reassuring me that this is not a mistake, that this is something we'd been talking about for a long time, that we're going to be happy and the kids will be happy, and also here's a spreadsheet with conditional formatting about all the great thing...

Wow , you've probably been thinking the past couple of months. Those Littells are ON FIRE with cleaning out their house . And we have been! We've excavated every last space. Eight years of stuff. We were relentless. It's not easy for me to get rid of things but even I was ruthless, driven by quarantine to dive into this project and see it through. And yet. I haven’t been totally forthcoming on this blog. The thing is, even as we were cleaning in a kind of quarantine fit, as many people were, we were also having constant conversations addressing a single, urgent question: Is it time to move? Moving away from New Jersey, likely to Pittsburgh, was always the longish-term plan. There would be work hurdles, and school hurdles, and entrenched-in-familiar-routines hurdles, so it was never something we’d seriously considered. We knew we would consider it; we just didn’t know when. Sometimes we thought we’d start talking about it when Lucia was about to enter middle school, a point ...

Monday, Andrew drove into Pittsburgh to work at the Pittsburgh office for the day. After our Idlewild outing, we took it easy at home, just playing here. We visited Grandma and Florence at Beechwood. Afterward, Mom had promised L&G some new Shopkins, so we went to Target to pick some out. Later, L&G and Mom and I took a walk/scooter ride around the neighborhood in the evening. Tuesday, we all drove into Pittsburgh together to go to the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Such a wonderful place. Andrew got to stay with us for about an hour, before Ubering to the airport to catch his flight to CA. Mom, Dad, the girls, and I stayed at the museum. L&G like the dinosaurs and the gems, but more than anything else they love the Hall of North American Animals--beginning with the gruesome diorama of the lion attacking the camel and rider. They also love the bears eating salmon, and anything that depicts a predator attacking or planning to attack its prey. Greta really liked feelin...