Moving Part III: Gone to Carolina

We're home!! New home, that is. Home sweet North Carolina.

I am very relieved thankful grateful happy to report that the moving truck made it from CA to NC with all our things mostly intact.

We had a small number of broken items... mostly fixable and nothing to cry over, though we will be reporting the broken items to the moving company. There was also some frustration over the timing of the truck's arrival. They had originally told us the truck would arrive on a Monday... and then that got changed to Friday... and it actually arrived on Saturday. Plus it was difficult to get in touch with the company because they were so slow in responding to calls and emails. I get the sense that this is all typical of cross-country movers, unfortunately. But I am brushin' that dirt off my shoulders because what's important is that we made it!

Unpacking has been almost-but-not-quite as horrible as packing was. Man, it is hard to get ANYTHING done around here with these BABIES all over us!! LOL. And although we made an effort to organize things by room when we were packing, things did not end up perfectly sorted... As my friend Jaime put it, "At first everything's all neat and organized... and by the end you're just, like, throwing everything in random boxes!" She nailed it.

We also kept running into roadblocks because of lack of storage furniture. We chose not to pack most of our shelves and storage units because we wanted different ones, but you can't unpack books if you don't have a bookshelf and you can't unpack clothes if you don't have a dresser!!

Slowly, painfully, in halting, partially completed steps, we have managed to accomplish most of the unpacking. The truck unloaded on Saturday night a week ago and sometime around last Wednesday it started to feel like an actual home instead of some kind of homegoods warehouse explosion.

My parents came up for a couple of days to help out while we are getting unpacked and organized. It's so nice that they are just a drive away! (A long drive, but not longer than a day of flying cross-country!)

James is starting work this week. We visited his new lab at Duke a few days ago and met some of his coworkers. Hoping all goes well for him as he starts work!

I am so ready to be *totally done* unpacking and organizing, but I am trying to let myself start to feel settled, even with all our books still in boxes and missing furniture that needs to be bought or built. Some things can wait until January!

Moving Part II: Made it Across the Country

We knew that it would take the movers a couple of weeks to get our furniture and boxes from one coast to the other, so we timed the move so that we could spend the in-between time in Georgia during Thanksgiving week.

We landed in Atlanta after an eventful, but thankfully safe travel day - there was a bomb threat on the flight before ours, a marriage proposal over the intercom on our first flight, snow in Denver and terrifying turbulence on our second flight, and then our luggage got jammed on its way to the baggage claim carousel at Hartsfield-Jackson! Plus, poor Henry had a hard time falling asleep on our second flight and he cried for something like an hour, which felt like an eternity!

The next morning, as we drove through metro Atlanta to visit some friends, I looked out the window at a very different landscape and felt, we're not in California anymore! It didn't feel sad. It felt like a huge sense of relief. We had made it this far. We had made it safely to the southeast. Not quite to our final destination, but still all the way across the country. It was a lot of work in a short amount of time to get us moved out of California after James got the job offer from Duke, but we did it and I was proud of us for it and grateful to have made it safely.

During our first few days in Georgia we spent some time with old friends, with Granny and Danpa, and we upgraded our family car to a fancy new minivan!

We spent Thanksgiving and the following weekend up in the North Georgia mountains with James' family. It was a full house: lots of people and lots of food! 

It has been a long time since we were in town for Thanksgiving with James' family. It was great to get to spend the holiday weekend with his siblings and all the kids. It will be so nice to be able to drive down for more family holidays like this!

After Thanksgiving weekend, we still had about a week to wait for the moving truck to make it to our new house. So after leaving my in-laws' home, we headed north, slowly making our way closer to our final destination, and have been staying with James' brother in South Carolina. 

The latest from the moving company is that our truck will arrive this weekend! So very soon we will be headed at last to our new home! It has been a nice break. Feels like we've been on vacation for two weeks. I'm excited and a little nervous to finally get to our house and start getting settled. There will be a lot to do... some furniture and appliances to buy, all the unpacking, and it's almost Christmas! I think the first thing I'll unpack will be the Christmas decorations... :)

Moving Part I: California Goodbyes

All has been quiet on the blog for the past couple of weeks. First we were totally consumed with packing and getting all of our stuff and ourselves moved out of our apartment in California. Then, we finally made it to Georgia and have spent the past week enjoying time with friends and family. We are in a nice lull in the process of moving. The work of packing up our home in California is behind us, and the job of unpacking in our new home in North Carolina is ahead of us.

In the short time that we had in between James signing his new job offer and the day the moving truck came, we managed to get together with some of our California friends and family to say our goodbyes.

Packing up our home of 8 years was a much harder, bigger, crazier task than was reasonable for the two of us in the time we gave ourselves. It was a nightmare and I'm so glad it's over! Somehow, and with a little bit of help, we managed to get it done and soon enough the moving truck was packed up and on its way. The silver lining on the whole horrible rushed packing experience was that the movers were really kind and patient. It took them 8 hours to load up the truck because there was so much boxing-up left to do, but they didn't give us a hard time about it. Calvin was at preschool for most of the day - his last day at his first preschool! - but Henry was basically underfoot, toddling around among the boxes in the living room. Thank goodness the movers didn't seem bothered by Henry at all, in fact they were really friendly to him. Lola Coring was a big help with Henry. She stayed with him and made sure he didn't sneak out of the living room or eat packing tape or anything like that :)

The moving truck left in the evening, and our plane to Atlanta left the following morning. Saying our rushed airport-morning goodbyes was a whole other kind of hard. We were able to see our friends who live around the corner, our cousins who live down the street, my aunt, and of course, my Lola Coring on the morning that we left for the airport. It was strange and bittersweet saying goodbye to people whom we have been so close to for the past several years. Trying to take a moment to push aside thoughts about when the car would be arriving to pick us up... which keys to leave with my aunt... whether we had enough diapers for the airplane... whether we had missed any items that needed to be packed... Trying to let all that go for brief moments in order to be present with these important friends and family, and be able to say and feel: I love you. I will miss you. Thank you for being such a big part of our lives.  

It is a bittersweet transition for our family. There are many people we will miss, and many things about our life in California that we will miss. But we are looking forward to the next part of our story, and as always, we are trying to be present in each part of this transition: focus on what there is to do, to enjoy, to be thankful for, in each step along the way.

Big News: A Big Move!

We've got big news around here...

EEEEEEEEK!! 

We are saying goodbye to Northern California and hello to North Carolina!

I'm so excited anxious nervous stressed happy hopeful grateful.

OK, I'm a mess. But I am pulling it together along with James, who, as you might imagine, is not a mess, and we are hiring movers and making phone calls and doing paperwork and getting ready to pack our worldly possessions into boxes in a moving truck! Whew! It's a lot, and it's happening fast. We will be saying our California goodbyes before Thanksgiving. 

James and I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2007 just weeks after our wedding. 

2007, just after we arrived in CA

Over the past 8 years, we've enjoyed California's beautiful mountains, beaches, and redwood forests. We've been spoiled by San Francisco's amazing restaurants, museums, and festivals. We've toasted many celebrations with California wines and brews (wine tasting in Napa might just be my favorite thing to do in NorCal!). We've been here to cheer on our San Francisco Giants to three World Series wins. We have made friendships that we hope will last a lifetime. We have loved being close to our west coast cousins, aunts, uncles, and of course, our Lola Coring. We arrived as newlyweds, and we will leave as a family of four. California will always be a special place for us, and an important part of our family's story.

Though there will be a lot of things that we'll miss about our home here by the bay, we are looking forward to new adventures awaiting us in North Carolina. 

James is excited about his new position at Duke University - back to the field of biomechanics and orthopedics which was the focus of his doctorate research at Stanford. North Carolina is beautiful and the Raleigh-Durham area where we'll be is really charming. We are looking forward to being closer to our parents and the rest of our east coast family, and we even have a few friends in Raleigh and Durham. 

We have been wanting to re-locate to the east coast for the past year or so, and we are thrilled and thankful to finally have the opportunity. It's bittersweet, of course, but we really believe that this move is the right thing for our family right now. 

So, cheers farewell to California! And cheers hello to North Carolina! 

Send us prayers, wish us luck!!

Halloween 2015: Jurassic World!

Hope everyone had a Happy Halloween!! We had some Halloween fun despite Henry still being under the weather. And our family costume pics turned out so much better than I had imagined! 

Calvin and Henry love dinosaurs, so James and I decided to do a little spin on their dinosaur costumes since the movie Jurassic World came out this past summer. James and I very rarely get to go to the movies, but we did manage to get out and see this one. The boys, of course, don't know anything about Jurassic World - they're too little for that one - so we explained our costumes to them by saying that we were "friends of dinosaurs." ;) James is dressed as Chris Pratt's character, Owen, the "dinosaur whisperer" who trains velociraptors in the movie. I'm supposed to be Bryce Dallas Howard's character, Claire, who is the operations manager of the dinosaur theme park and spends a lot of time on her cell phone, if you ask me. Calvin would tell you that he and Henry are T-rexes, but for the purposes of the Jurassic World theme, they could also be two of Owen's clever and cunning raptors. 

If you haven't seen the film, here are some stills from the movie from jurassicpark.wikia.com.

And here's our version: 

This backdrop at the zoo was perfect for these themed costume pics! And we really just kind of lucked out, we hadn't planned this out ahead of time. We had brought the boys to the zoo just as a Halloween treat, and Calvin was asking to go see the rainforest building. This dinosaur-swampy area is just outside the rainforest building and there happened to be a zoo docent sitting by this dinosaur swamp area taking her break and she was kind enough to snap a few photos for us! I still can't believe how great these turned out. You can tell that Henry was not really a happy camper, but a grumpy toddler makes a decent velociraptor, ha ha. He also would not wear his dinosaur head, even when he wasn't feeling sick, but we decided it was not worth worrying about!

It was a great day to be at the zoo! The big zoo Halloween party was actually the weekend before, so it was pretty quiet on Halloween. Of course we had to let Calvin ride the zoo train in his dinosaur costume and pretend he was riding the Dinosaur Train! 

Later that afternoon, James carved some special dinosaur jack-o-lanterns, as commissioned by Calvin. He did an awesome job! We call them Pumpkinceratops and Pumpkinsaurus Rex.

Poor sick Henry went to bed early with a fever, but Calvin got to go to a Halloween party at our friends' house and do a little trick-or-treating. 

And now it's November!! Can you believe it?? 

How did you spend your Halloween? Any other family theme costumes? 

Wellness Wednesday: A Sniffly, Feverish Fall

I was thinking about Halloween last year and the year before and I realized that October has not been a great month for health and wellness around here for the past couple of years! Last year, Henry had his surgery in early October, though he was all recovered by Halloween. The year before that, when Henry was just a teeny baby, James, Calvin & I all got the stomach flu the weekend before Halloween and it was just as awful as you can imagine!! **Shudder**

This year, we started the month off with runny noses - first Henry, then Calvin. So Henry missed some therapies because I never want to bring him to clinic with any kind of sick germs. He puts his mouth on everything, and in a place with lots of other special needs kids you never know what kind of medical/immunological stuff they've got going on. I don't want to make a medically fragile kid sick with my kid's germs! Since Henry and Calvin always seem to take turns being sick, the runny noses lasted at least two weeks. But happily the boys didn't have any other symptoms and seemed to be feeling fine. I let Calvin take his runny nose to school. At least he doesn't put stuff in his mouth anymore ;)

So first runny noses, and now fever! I mentioned on Instagram and Facebook that Calvin was sick all last week. He woke up Monday morning with a fever and the fever lasted 3 days, followed up by a hacking cough that lasted another 3 days. He missed a whole week of preschool. 

That whole week, Henry was fine but I had to cancel some of his therapy appointments again because I would have had to bring Calvin and all his germs along. Being stuck at home with Henry and sick Calvin was a total drag. We were cooped up in the house for a week and it made me feel kinda lazy and restless. It's partly my own fault. I should have taken them out for walks or found at least some way to get us out of the house!

By this past Monday morning, Calvin was all better, he'd been fine all day Sunday as well, and he and I were both really happy that he was going to be able to go back to school! Henry had a therapy appointment, I had errands to run, I was showered and dressed and genuinely looking forward to getting back to our usual busy schedule. And as I was standing in the line of parents to sign Calvin in at school, I had Henry in the Ergo and I leaned my head down and kissed his forehead... and it was HOT. Of course. Henry had caught Calvin's fever a whole week later. 

So here we are. Another sick kid lying around feeling pitiful. Canceling therapy appointments again. At least Calvin's in school, though. But why do they have to take turns getting sick??? I feel like I'd rather just get it over with and have them sick at the same time! Though, I realize that taking care of two kids feeling pitiful is probably really tough. 

Parents with little kids, does this happen to your family? Do your kids take turns getting sick or do they get sick at the same time? And does it drive you crazy like it does me???

At least I'm not sick. *Knocks on wood.* 

More Halloween Tot Play: Get Sticky, Slippery and Sparkly!

Halloween is almost here! Here are two more of our Spooky Play activities, plus a couple of Halloween crafts. 

Giant Sticky Web

I made this web out of masking tape and washi tape (after I ran out of masking tape). I put the tape sticky-side-out so that we could throw little "flies" at it and hopefully catch some. The "flies" were little crumpled up pieces of black construction paper and catalog pages from some kids clothing catalog that came in the mail. Calvin helped tear and crumple the paper "flies." It was actually pretty hard to get them on there by throwing! Maybe if I had stickier tape... or better aim!! Calvin preferred to stand next to it and stick the paper on. You can see all his "flies" in the bottom left corner!

Sticky Wall with Halloween Items

A sticky contact paper wall is fun anytime! This is one of the ways I attempted to keep Calvin busy while he was home from school with a cough. You just tape big sheets of contact paper sticky-side-out on a wall or door. I had Calvin help hold the paper up while I taped it onto the closet doors with painter's tape.

I made it Halloween-y with bats leftover from our Halloween cards (see the next activity), big googly eyes, big sparkly sequins, plastic spiders, and orange triangles cut from scrap paper. Later, we also made a spider web on the sticky wall using pieces of white string. 

Batty Halloween Cards

Spoiler alert to Calvin and Henry's grandparents and great-grands! As I'm writing, these cards are en route to you! 

I wish I could give credit to the mom-blogger I first saw this from, but once again I can't remember which one it was!! To whoever it was: Thanks for the great idea!!

I drew bats on some cardstock and cut them out, then taped them to black cards (also cut from cardstock) using painter's tape. Then I had the boys help me paint some white, yellow, and orange tempera paint over the bats, making sure to get beyond the edges of the bat shapes. After the paint dried, we added some glitter glue on top.

When they were completely dry, I peeled the bats off. The glitter glue did make this difficult. It would have been easier with just the paint. 

I added a piece of orange cardstock to the back of each card so that I could write a greeting. And now they're off in the mail! 

Pumpkin Painting

I thought I could contain this paint mess by spreading out some butcher paper on the floor. Silly me. 

Part of my Contain the Mess plan was to have Henry roll his pumpkin around in paint inside a shoebox rather than have him try a brush or just set him loose with plates of paint... As you can see he ended up loose with the plates of paint anyway!! 

The box thing worked at first. I drizzled a few colors of paint over his pumpkin in the box and let him roll it around. The problem started when I tried to take pictures... at which point Henry rolled the pumpkin out of the box and across the floor... and then chased it across the floor with his paint-covered hands... and found the other plates of paint Calvin was using.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure he ate some paint. 

Meanwhile, Calvin was being relatively civilized with his pumpkin painting. I had set out a few plates with different colored paints and a brush for each color. He did a little body painting, as he likes to do :) and he and I painted our pumpkins with the brushes. 

Glitter Pumpkins

I was both excited and afraid to do glitter pumpkins with Calvin. I decided I definitely wasn't brave enough to get Henry involved with glitter, so I gave him a little sheet of contact paper to play with instead.

I let Calvin choose 4 colors of glitter from a set of little tubes of fine glitter that I have from Michaels. He picked the green one, and three shades of purple! I was like, "Don't you want blue...? Or pink...? Something besides more purple?" And he was like, No. All the purples. 

So I poured a little of each color glitter into separate cups and I had a spoon for each one, though we didn't really need all the spoons. I put the pumpkins on plates to catch the glitter, and I taped brown paper over the table to catch whatever the plates didn't catch (glitter is sneaky). 

I painted each pumpkin with glue and we used the spoons to scoop and pour the glitter over the pumpkins. 

Here's where I have to admit that I became kind of a control freak about the project and I pretty much would not let Calvin spoon the glitter by himself. He could have done it, but it would have been more messy. And I probably should have let him go for it and dealt with the mess later. That is usually my M.O. But this time, my inner control freak got the best of me and we did most of the glitter scooping-and-pouring "hand over hand" style, meaning that he was holding the spoon and I was holding his hand and steering him. 

The finished glitter pumpkins are so pretty and sparkly! I feel a little guilty every time I look at them though! Maybe in the future I will be able to relax a bit more and let him have at it with the glitter. Also, I think glitter might be a good outdoor craft project next time. 

Anybody have tips for letting your toddlers use glitter without having a nervous breakdown?? Or tips for cleaning up glitter??

Did your family decorate or carve pumpkins this year? We haven't carved our big ones yet. Last year we carved them too soon and they rotted before Halloween! But I am enjoying our little painted and glitter pumpkins on the mantel. 

Happy Haunting ;)

TBT: Halloween Countdown 2014

Baby Harry Potter and Hedwig are here to tell you... It's almost Halloween! Again!

And though it's not quite a week 'til Halloween yet, it is Thursday so for your #TBT from me, here are last year's Halloween Countdown posts! In case you're interested in some inspiration for Halloween-themed play :)

Click on the pics! Each one will take you to the post for that activity. 

If you do happen to do any of these crafts or activities and share them, tag me on Instagram @dianapancakes, because I'd love to see it! And if you have your own favorite Halloween activities, do share!