This is it

You know that Kenny Loggins song, "This is it?"

This is it
Your waiting is over
No room to run - no way to hide
No time for wondering
It's here - the moment is now...

Kinda my theme song today. Today is the day that we sell the first home we ever bought together. We worked quite late last night finishing up the cleaning and packing in the basement. Champs finished cleaning and packing the last of the stuff in the upstairs room my Mom lived in. I packed box after box on the main floor. Today we go to the closing and sign it all away to a very nice military man, his wife and their 5 children (only three of whom are young enough to live at home - it's not that big of a house!) Then we'll come back here and finish the cleaning.

Tomorrow we move into a tiny little duplex a couple of miles west of here that we are renting. The kitchen is miniscule and the bathroom even more so. It is old and smells old. Some life and a lot of Odo-ban will take care of that, though. It would feel like a step backward except it is our first positive step forward. More than a year ago now (sheesh - 18 months or something like that), we made the decision to move to IL to be with Champ's family. We want the family life and education that Sweet Girl will have there. We want to take her out of the area we live in where respect is a dead notion. And now, finally, it is beginning. We will stay at the duplex until Sweet Girl finishes kindergarten and then, assuming Champs has a good prognosis on his corneal transplant (it will be a year old on April 27, so we can hope the rejection is being quelled by now), we will begin our move.

I was saying to Champs yesterday that it is a good thing we don't love the house we're moving to. The things that irk us will keep us focused on our goals. In the meantime, though, we will make a life in this little overnight case of a house. I have to laugh; here it is, still early morning (no one else is up yet) and I've already added a shopping trip to my list of things to do today. Champs will roll his eyes when he hear this, but I have to go to Target. See, the master bedroom is so narrow that we can't put my dresser in it. We were planning on storing it downstairs, but it occurred to me that, with some rearranging, we can put it in Sweet Girl's room. Best for me, cause I'll still have a dresser and best for the guys who are moving everything. It's pretty big and it would be much easier for it to not have to go downstairs!

The challenge, though, is that it means we will have to put Sweet Girl's bed right up against the bathroom wall. That wall has an access panel to the tub. Now, that wouldn't freak out you or me, but to a 5-year-old, that's just a small door into her room that shouldn't be there. I know she won't like it. I had planned to put her dresser in front of the panel so she never had to know it was there. With her bed there, though, that is not an option. I was lying awake and realized that a white headboard and princess canopy (cheap at Target - I checked :-) will cover up the panel and make her love her new room. How smart is Mommy? (hey, I said "smart", not "sneaky". This is creative problem solving at its best, folks!)

I'm lucky, though, that Sweet Girl is going to her best friend's house overnight tonight. That way, she'll miss the bulk of the move and I can get her room situated (somewhat, anyway) before she comes home - including covering that panel.

So, add another thing to our amazingly overwhelmingly long to do list for today. Oh well, it will get done. It must. Our friends will be here to help us move tomorrow and we promised them a smooth move. If pure cussed organizational spirit can deliver, then that is what it will be.

So, this is it. Good and bad, happy and sad, give and take. Sounds like my marriage vows, actually. That being the case, I know we'll get through these next few days. We have God and each other and all the promises that stand behind both.

But man, am I going to miss my big, sunny kitchen!