Updates, part 1

So here's something hysterical - at the beginning of the year, I was contemplating trying to write here every day for the entire year. Heh. That's one of the problems with going to Michigan at the turn of every year - I put off New Year's resolutions until we get home, then we're all tired and discombobulated when we get home, and then suddenly it's February. That, of course, isn't why I flaked on any semblance of writing regularly - it has a lot more to do with my falling asleep on the couch every evening - but it doesn't help.

Anyway, lots of stuff is happening. For starters, we're moving. There are two main reasons: 1, we hate our landlord and 2, I do an insane amount of driving between Alec's preschool and Katherine's homeschool program. It's looking like Katherine is going back to summer camp this summer, so I'll be driving the same distance five days a week instead of two. And we managed to find a house that would take three miles off of a 9 mile drive, which is significant when it comes to city driving.

I also like the way the house is set up better, even if it's a bit smaller than our current house. Our current house is three stories with living room, dining room and kitchen on the first floor, bedrooms on the second and a family room and extra bedroom where the garage used to be on the ground floor. The drawback of this is that there's very little storage space, and while there's lots of living space on the ground floor, it's cut up in a way that makes it inconvenient to use. So instead, we shove all of junk down there and live on the upper two floors. I liked it a lot better in our last house, which was all of the significant rooms on the first floor and then a large family room in the basement, along with a utility hallway and the garage, which is where we shoved all of our junk, keeping it nicely out of sight (see, I don't care so much what we do with our crap so long as I don't have to look at it). We spent our most of our time in the family room, but the living room was there as a nice place to sit without toys all over the place.

The new house is a similar configuration, but larger. It has a large family room downstairs, along with an extra little room that I think would be a good place to set up school stuff, and a very large utility hallway big enough to serve as overflow toy storage and a place to set up messy art projects or ride tricycles on rainy days. The kitchen and our bedroom will be smaller than our current house, but I can live with that if the places where we spend the majority of our time is larger and if we have more storage space, which it does in spades. Another advantage is that we'd like to move James in with Alec, but currently Alec is in the smallest bedroom. It wouldn't be feasible or fair to have two kids in there when Katherine is alone in a bigger bedroom. Moving gives us an organic way of shifting her to the smallest bedroom (and she, in fact, highly conveniently declared entirely on her own that she wanted the bedroom we would have chosen for her).

So I anticipate we'll be pretty happy in the new house once we're in. Of course, we have to survive to that point, which is a dicey proposition. I'm theoretically looking forward to packing as a chance to do some purging, but mostly I dread the entire moving process. It's likely we'll be able to get some people from church to help this time, which is such a lovely prospect. I even have a friend from church that's going to come over and help pack, for which I'm so grateful. That still doesn't change the fact that moving is hell.