Moving

Moving is an arduous process.
Arduous - involving strenuous effort, difficult, tiring.
I looked up arduous just to make sure it meant what I thought it did and sure enough it describes quite accurately the moving process.
Moving from Florida to Idaho is a long way to go, but also I realized we might be moving more than once after we get to Idaho. I would like to buy a house, but we need to rent first.
So keeping that in mind I wanted to pack in a way that we would know what was in each box to be able to not only easily set aside the boxes we wouldn't need right away, but also so we could easily find anything that was still in a box.
So I did a numbering system.
Boxes starting in the 100's are books and stuff from the office.
Boxes in the 200's are bedroom and bathroom.
300's are kitchen and 400's are all things miscellaneous.
I had a paper with each category and stared 101 and wrote down the contents of the box and then 102 and so on. I have four sheets of paper that are my master list for what is in each box.
It was a lot of work, but I know I will be so glad I took the effort. In fact just seeing the boxes all stacked with the numbers on them felt awesome.
I used white, large sized, pre-sticky address labels, which were easy to stick on the boxes and makes it easy to distinguish the number from whatever was printed on the box. I am a very visual person and like to be able to quickly and easily distinguish important information.

My friend Liz came over and helped me and because I had the system in place she was easily able to label the boxes and write on the paper and I just had to focus on filling the boxes.

Last Thursday, after Jeremy passed his board exam (way to go, most exciting text message I have ever gotten, he passed and school is completely done) the kids and I got on a plane and flew into Vegas and then my sister-in-law drove us to Utah.
Ours was a short one day journey and my children traveled very well. Jeremy's brothers flew out to Florida and got there Friday. They packed the truck and on Saturday they started their cross-country journey.
They should get to Utah today, July 4th, but we won't take our stuff to Idaho until Monday when we can move it into the rental.
We were able to find an okay rental with a good backyard space and just two houses down from an awesome park. My kids love being outside and having lived the last three years with no yard space has been hard. So at the top of my list was finding a place with a yard my kids could spend lots of time in.
The place I found has a great yard, but we made some compromises like no master bath, just a shared hall bath, and no garage, just a car port.
When I went to the house to check it out it just felt so right and I just knew it was meant for us.
I'm excited for Monday when we get to move in and to feel the benefits of my organized packing, because a fair amount of our stuff is going to stay in boxes and only the essentials are coming out for now.

I also need to add a thank you to all my wonderful friends who helped me pack and clean and who watched my kids so they weren't bored. I have such wonderful friends and it makes me almost cry just thinking about all the wonderful people I'm leaving behind.
Thank you. Thank you. I love you. I miss you.