We're on the market!

Our MLS listing officially went up on Tuesday as did our lawn sign. Very exciting. The couple of times I've had to drop by home to pick up something for the kids, I've seen people in our house (and then I circle around pretending not to be totally curious about the goings on in my house). Our agent said the broker tour this morning went well. I'm hopeful, excited, thankful.

Finding home

Most of our friends whom we see regularly know that this week the boys and I are homeless. Our house is staged and it became clear very fast that it would be easier to keep them out of the house all day instead of try to live in a staged house. For the short time that we are home with thme (i.e., bedtime, getting dressed in the morning), they have not destroyed the house. But we cleaning up after every shower, bath, brushing of teeth and meal, with few toys and no TV/DVD is a hassle we chose to avoid. So I've been out 8:30AM-6PM with the kids, napping in the car, meeting Tom for dinner, showering at the Y. Not meaning to trivialize the plight of truly homeless people, we've been homeless, just basically sleeping and washing up at our homeless shelter, our nicely staged and pristine homeless shelter.

The first two days of this week were hard because Tobey didn't have school. It's much easier to mentally prepare 12-6PM than for 8:30-6. I now realize the comfort in routine, the sense of "home" and normalcy in routine. I was glad to have Tobey back in school, to go to the Y, to be able to eat lunch at our park. Ironically I saw our school friends on both Monday and Tuesday, but while seeing them is always fun, seeing them on our days off of school was out of routine. It was a little more comforting seeing them today in our usual routine.

The minivan has certainly become our little mobile home. We take our afternoon nap there (me too). The back of the minivan holds my gym bag, the kids' toiletries, our towels. While I haven't yet just parked the van somewhere and let the kids kill some time putzing around in the van, because it's a van, I find some comfort that I could do it if I really needed to. A sedan is a form of transportation. The minivan is a second home.

We've certainly found our friends' houses home. We've gotten many a welcome from friends saying we can just hang out at their house this week, whether or not they are home. I haven't taken up every offer because we need to lean on our friends so much during this time that if I can suck it up and survive, I'll try. But I did take up one offer yesterday from Sharlene since it was a long non-school day. It was great to have a safe place to let the kids be free. It was great to just sit at a kitchen counter and chat. Sharlene was even gracious enough to let the boys take their baths at her house (and me too, but I only took the offer up for the boys). I may have to rethink naps in the car though because Eli's got a diaper rash that is hard to get rid of when he sits in his diaper while napping. I may need to take up Eileen on her nap offer.

I've also taken refuge at the YMCA. So far this week I've been to the Y not to work out but just to shower. Today I'm really taking advantage of the 90 min. childcare per day rule -- I brought Eli in for 35 min. this morning to shower, and now I'm back using the balance on both kids right now to get a little writing time before dinner. Even the childcare woman said, Eli's back? But without going through the whole story, I just sheepishly said, yeah.

I'm also starting to learn that home is in our family, regardless of where we have a house. Although Sharlene generously offered to feed us dinner while her kids had dinner, I didn't need to, because we got to meet Tom after 6 for dinner out as a family. When we conferenced with Tobey's teachers yesterday about his progress in preschool, I wondered if some of his recent mellowing out at school has something to do with the changing status of our home. It's going to be a lot like that in the coming months, especially with our x-country drive, a month of guest quarters, probably a rental home and hopefully soon, a permanent home. With all this change, wandering and improvisation to find a sense of home, I hope that the four of us find a strong sense of home in each other.

Commemoration

Now that work is done on our house and the stagers have already moved in their stuff (although not arranged it), I realize that we haven't commemorated anything as we start moving out of the house. There are a lot of "lasts" that just quietly happened without fanfare or recognition.

• When my parents moved out of my childhood home, I went around with a video camera and narrated a tour of the house before it was completely emptied. Although we haven't been in this house but a fraction compared to my childhood one, I did wish we had made a similar tour of this house while it was still "ours" because I think Tobey will remember very little of this house and Eli will remember nothing. Funny how sometimes I think I made a childhood memory in my memory because of pictures so I was hoping the same for the kids. In the end, I'm not too upset over this because I'm sure we have enough pictures in this house to kind of piece together memories. It just would have been nice to have it all in one place.
• Last shower in our master bathroom. That the shower was so hard to clean that I couldn't wait for the regrouters to do their magic and make the shower new again. Ever since the work was done, we haven't showered...in that shower. ;-)
• Last time the kids play in the dirt out front. Just a couple days ago, the patch of dirt in our "parking strip" was a place of last resort for me, letting the kids just dig and play in that dirt with a couple of simple rakes for long stretches of time while we were banned from the inside of our house, while I worked in the garage or, before our moving days, read the paper on the driveway while getting some fresh air. It didn't even dawn on me that today's landscaping work would be the end of playing in the dirt because it's now covered with "gorilla hair". Now the parking strip is taboo, once a place of freedom for the kids is now a place that I'll yell, "Get out of there!" I wonder if the kids might have had their last playtime on the play structure, but I think there will be opportunities after we're in contract to still play on it and when we're not so nervous about the kids destroying the backyard.
• Last bake in the old oven. Definitely no love lost here. I hated that oven from the first days in the house when I realized that my standard baking sheets don't fit this small 24" oven. And it frustrated me even more when the knob broke off and I had to turn it on/off with a pair of pliers. But with no time to bid it good riddance, I was literally baking a pasta when Tom called and said the contractor would be at the house in 20 min. to remove it to make room for oven delivery later in the week. It was probably still warm when they removed it.
• The dishwasher I didn't miss until we got our new white cheapo one installed and I realized that not all dishwashers were made equal. I remember the Kurtz's (the previous owners) mentioning that the dishwasher was a good one and I thought they were just trying to make us feel like we got more value out of this house that we overbid for. But now that I've been to the other side, I realize we've really traded function for form. I'm already anal about how my dishes are arranged in the dishwasher and now I'm going to be pretty picky about our next dishwasher in Boston.
  
• Eli's last sleep in the crib. I kept pushing back on Tom's itch to take down the crib because I feared sleep issues once it got taken down (I also didn't realize that Eli can still barely fit in a pack and play). But finally a couple days ago it was clear that it was only the difference of a day or two and the crib just had to be taken apart and stored. What makes this "last" particularly poignant is that we probably won't bother to put the crib up in our temporary housing and by the time we find a permanent house, would Eli have been trained to sleep in a normal bed? So his last sleep in the crib wasn't just for this house, it might have been forever. And not just forever for Eli. But since we're unsure about having a third, it might have been forever for us as well. But alas, we're still taking it with us to Boston, since we are just as unsure about sticking with two as we are expanding to three (if that makes any sense).
  
• Work on the house started so gradually and feels like it has lasted so long that we didn't think to take any before and after pictures. Our kitchen literally looks like it has been bleached, with newly painted white cabinets, new white appliances and lightened grout lines. Our dingy hallway is now much brighter with painted white doors and new knobs. Our master bath was transformed from "original" to retro with regrout and a last minute fresh coat of paint. Only friends who frequented our house will notice some of these changes without pictures. And probably soon we might have even forgotten what a transformation all the work has accomplished unless we had systematic before and after pictures.
  

At least the one place that is still "as is" is the place I think my heart lies most in the house and that's Tobey's room. Not that I favor Tobey over Eli, it's just that we never made Eli a true bedroom. And maybe my heart just lies there now because it's the room in the house that has remained untouched (besides the requisite decluttering) and is still just as we made it. It signifies that these four walls were a home for a family, for a child. It's the only room right now where the kids can still be free and have the few toys that are not imprisoned in a box. It's the room where lately we've been doing all of our bedtime reading and Uno playing. Where we're still a family, instead of a moving machine. And it's the place where we still have time to commemorate this home as ours. And even though I've done my share of complaining about this house (too small, too old; even Tobey told Ms. Vanessa today that he didn't like his old house, probably catching a hint from me), it was still our first home as a family of four, the home that Eli came home from the hospital to, and our last home in California, at least for a long time.

Emptiness

At first I felt like I was packing away a lot of stuff in the house with no visible results. Of course that was a few weeks ago when I was packing "optional" stuff like kitchen stuff you use just once in a while or the bookshelf of books that we never read. But then things accelerated fast: move this furniture out for this contractor, clear our closet for that, and next thing you know,

We've got our first empty room.

Of all rooms to go first is the playroom. Followed by a close second of the dining room. I never got a chance to do a video tour of the house when it looked like ours because like this whole move, the packing kind of crept up on us. Our open house is not for another week but staging is Monday with photos and technically going on the market on Tuesday. So we're down to the wire now and the start of the empty rooms.