As we were driving home from church the boys were talking about how far away our church building is from where we live.  (only 15 minutes, but to a boy that’s forever) and Go Go pointed out that Grandma and Grandpa Hymas are so close they can WALK to their church.  Mr. President then said,  “Wow, they must have paid extra for that!”

Though any of you who know my children will laugh at this, we do have a family rule called Peace at our house.  The boys know that loud yelling and fighting break the “Peace” in our home.  Yes, I know, we have a long way to go on that one.  But anyway, Go Go was once again yelling loudly at his big brother for a very small offense and so I tried to tell him that he was breaking the peace in our home by yelling so loud.  He looked at me blankly and said, “What peace?” 
Like I said, long way to go.

The whole Friend thing is new to me.  We had virtually no little kids in the neighborhood in Duvall for the boys to play with so they always played on their own in our backyard or we had to set up a play date.  Now there are children on all sides of us and the boys want to play all the time at the neighbors homes!  In fact I just had to turn down a little boy who came to play because the boys were already gone at another neighbor’s house!  I felt so sad for him! 
This is all very new to me!  And part of me is thrilled.  But part of me is sad.  They come home from school in the afternoon and I want to spend time with them, read to them, play games with them or just cuddle like we used to and there’s no time!  Between school and friends and homework where is my time with my children?  As many of you know this was one of my reasons for wanting to home school the kids.  I want the best part of their day to be with me, not the leftovers.  So I’m torn.  They so badly need to learn to play with others and gain those skills and be free to run around and be wild and yet I am struggling to find time with them!  We haven’t even started any sports or other activities yet!  It’s just a hard adjustment to go from having them all the time to having them hardly at all.  Some people would be thrilled at the prospect.  But I’m not there yet.  They will only be this little for a short time after all.  As they all sat around the little table eating snack together I had a “Please don’t ever grow up” moment. 

And as if my pain weren’t enough as the older boys run off to play….

Really it just breaks your heart!  Growing up is hard.  For mom especially.

Go Go just hugged me and said, “You’re the goodest mom I ever had.”

I finally found one that likes to vacuum.

Well I am now unpacked enough to find my computer!  Here are the fun details of our first week in Berkeley Heights.

We got the keys to the home on Thursday night and took the boys over so they could run around in a big empty house for a while and give the hotel tenants a break.  As we were driving to the house Rock and the boys were telling me about how they’d seen deer in the yards of homes here in Berkeley Heights earlier that day.  As we pulled into our driveway, lo and behold there stood 3 deer right in our yard!  We’ve seen many of our four legged friends since then. 

Friday morning the movers came AND the boys started school.  Let’s just say it was a very intense day.  We came away with hardly anything permanently broken and the boys had a great first day at school. 

First Day of School photo taken at… the hotel.

Unpacking has been an adventure.  And not really a fun one.  But the boys have had a blast crawling in and out of all the millions of empty boxes and piles and piles of packing paper. 

Sunday morning as we were climbing over, under and through boxes getting ready for church, we decided to run the very old dishwasher for the first time (because it took us till Sunday to find our dishes).  And….it broke.  Leaked water all over the kitchen floor.  Then when we tried to bathe the boys in their tub, we found that the drain and shower did not work right.  Then as we went to get the boys dressed in their Sunday clothes I found that my wonderful husband who had been trying to help out by putting away all the clothes had sort of well, dumped them into the drawers and every piece of clothing was wrinkled-including their Sunday clothes.  (Rock has now just informed me that HE did not dump the clothes in the drawers.  He told the boys to put their clothes away and THAT is how it happened.  I stand corrected.)  Ordinarily this wouldn’t have been a big deal because I would have just thrown them in the dryer.  But we did not have a dryer at that point.  Needless to say we were pretty late to church on Sunday, but we did make it, which I consider a small miracle.  And yes, the landlord is going to buy a new dishwasher and fix the tub.  The wrinkled clothes… well, that’s a work in progress.

Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday have been closer to normal, though trying to keep up with all of the stacks of papers coming home from school in a house that is upside down is becoming a full time circus act.  I will prevail, though.  Slowly but surely we are finding everything and finding a place for it.  Having a huge basement is very helpful. 

Rock enjoyed his first train ride into New York City on Monday and was only a block away from Wall Street where President Obama spouted his great wisdom on lessons learned from the economy failures. 

And the very best news of all?  We found a babysitter in the ward right here in Berkeley Heights and so we are going out for Rock’s birthday on Saturday without our children!  Weehoo!  What to do, what to do?  Empire State Building, or a concert in Central Park, or Little Italy?  Gosh, I just can’t decide! 

We start our days early going down to the hotel breakfast.  To get to breakfast we have to walk down a very long hallway past many a sleeping hotel room.  The temptation to run headlong down those hallways at top speed yelling is too strong most days for our three little Indians and we have said the words, “Walk” and “Whisper” more this week than ever before in our lives.  Maybe we’ll get a discount for our complimentary wake up calls.  Then there is the oh so fun elevator fight.  Who gets to push which button becomes such an argument with all out fists and tears that we have now outlawed elevator button pushing for anyone shorter than mom.  The sugary substances included on the breakfast menu send the entire family into sugar shock.    And at some point during the meal we have someone either crying, yelling, or catapulting their fruit loops across the room onto everyone around us.   We’ve decided every other day at the hotel breakfast is probably better for everyone’s health.

Yesterday we had all three boys bleeding at some point.  Blue Jeans got a hold of a glass cup and smashed it repeatedly on the window sill breaking it and slicing his little finger.  We heard a loud clanking noise from the bedroom, but didn’t get in there in time to save the cup or the finger.  Not twenty minutes later Go Go had a freak run in with an extremely sharp tv channel card and later that night a previous wound on Mr. President’s leg decided to start gushing again.  Note to self: bring more than 4 band aids when traveling with children.

We have had more hamburgers then ever before in our lives and the boys have watched more tv than ever before in theirs.   We had diarrhea at the park, poo in the pool, and one goose egg on the head.   At any given time while in the hotel room, we are trying to talk to our realtor on the phone while one boy is sitting upside down on the couch with his feet in the air, one boy is crying over something , and the other boy is making some kind of repetitive noise.  Are we having fun yet?

7 days down, 3 to go. 

In our house search we found several great homes that were the right size for us and in decent condition but they weren’t going to be available for us on Friday. Because we have to find a house so fast, we’ve only been able to really consider the vacant homes. This cut our inventory down by a lot leaving us with only a few to choose from. This one was a little more money then we were hoping to spend and bigger than we need, but it was available, clean, and the bathrooms were newer which is really hard to find. So here it is!

It’s got plenty of room for you all to come visit us! The kitchen is old, but clean and good sized compared to most we’ve seen. It also has a fenced yard which was really important for mom’s sanity. It’s also only a 2 minute drive to the train station for Rock. And just as a happy side note, I will be able to put candles in the windows at Christmas!!! (that had absolutely no bearing on this decision whatsoever)
Berkeley Heights is a beautiful little town. We’ve spent the last couple days driving all over it and went to a park there yesterday for a picnic. At the park Mr. Pres was talking to a little girl and when she asked him where he lived he said, “Well, we don’t have a house because we’re homeless.”
We went to church on Sunday there and were welcomed very warmly. It is actually a very big ward surprisingly enough, at least for NJ. It had a lot of kids and youth. It has a lot of transplants and so they tell us that it’s like a big family.
So far so good! We sign the lease papers on Thursday and hopefully we can get the boys into school by Friday-only 4 days late.

We hit the ground running and began looking for houses as soon as we woke up Thursday morning.  We have now survived-just barely-4 solid days of house hunting.  We chose to avoid the very very expensive storage option for our stuff and have to find a home before our truck gets here on Saturday.  Thus the mad rush to find a house.  We have seen a grand total of 26 homes.  Some were so frightening and smelled so horrible I could barely bring myself to walk inside them.  Some were beautiful in a not so beautiful place and some were not so beautiful (yuck!) in a very beautiful setting.  It’s been really hard to make the decision because of that!  Some had closets that were made into bathrooms so that should you want to, you could go to the bathroom AND use the sink to brush your teeth at the same time!  Most were either too old and yucky, too small, though new, or too big and expensive.  And NONE had garbage disposals!  Sigh.  I’m going to truly suffer here I can tell.  On a good note though, we are zeroing in on a  house in a beautiful town called Berkeley Heights about an hour west of NY.  The streets are lined with trees and the houses all have shutters on them- MY DREAM TOWN!  I’ll post more on that as we make progress there.

The boys have been very cooperative and good tempered about spending the last 4 days looking at houses.  For which we are very grateful!  But they are indeed bouncing off the walls when they are not strapped into the car. (So we keep them strapped in as much as possible)  Unfortunately, there are no straps in our temporary housing-a Residence Inn room with a kitchenette and two bedrooms with a living room area.   There’s only so much you can do with 3 small boys in a small hotel room.  So far they have passed the time jumping on the beds, setting up obstacle courses to jump over and onto the couch and they run from one bedroom to the other yelling like wild Indians.   I’m quite sure that the people above, below, and next door to us are ready to tear their hair out-I sure am.  🙂   I keep waiting for someone from the front desk to call and say they’ve had complaints.   But we are grinning and bearing it.  Ok, just bearing it.  I will be honest and say that patience is wearing very thin.  Hopefully we won’t all end up killing each other before this week is through. 

Stay tuned.

The Goodbye
Well, we managed to get moved out without incident. Ok, one broken chair but it was already partly broken anyway. Here’s the truck that took not only all our stuff away, but 3 other houses worth too. And our home all packed in boxes.

We said goodbye to our nice new (by New Jersey standards) home and after one last stop at Zazynias, our favorite restaurant, we said goodbye to Duvall.  We LOVED our time in Duvall and are leaving so many good memories and great friends.   Thank goodness for the internet.  Rock has a new slogan for Facebook.  “Facebook means never having to say Goodbye.”  We then headed to our hotel at the airport where we said goodbye to my parents. Sniff.  We will sure miss living that close to them. It’s been so nice to have family that close!

The Airplane
We got up early Wednesday morning and took the shuttle to the airport. When the driver of the shuttle asked us what airline we were flying Rock told him “Alaska”. Said Go Go incredulously, “We’re moving to ALASKA???!!!” I still don’t know how we managed to get 3 carseats, 4 BIG suitcases, and 3 big carry-ons up to the ticket counter, but we did. I’m sure we looked hilarious bumbling our way along the terminal. Believe it or not THAT was the hardest part of the whole trip! Blue Jeans did have a meltdown while waiting for the very slow check-in line. The only thing that would appease him was when I let him pull one of the carry-ons around. 

This become a hazard as he narrowly missed many an innocent traveler, but hey, I think most of them would take that over the screaming banshe.
We got settled onto the plane and before we had even taken off Blue Jeans had gone through our entire bag of tricks.  But we still got through the flight with no major incidents!  The boys were really pretty good.  Of course, the portable DVD player was very helpful. 

Auntie Bean, please notice the sunglasses.  Go Go would go NO WHERE without them.  Thanks so much. (grrr) If I hear, “Where are my sunglasses?!” one more time I’ll shoot myself!  It was a good source of humor for the flight attendants, though, I must say.  Blue Jeans of course would have none of the seatbelt.  He spent any time he had to be belted trying to take it off.  But luckily the flight attendants were understanding and the turbulence cooperative so he got to wiggle and wander between our seats a lot.

5 hours, 1 dirty diaper changed in an airplane bathroom (so fun!), 1 screaming fit (only) and lots of airplane snacks later, we landed in New Jersey.  Another fabulous quote from Go Go upon landing.  “Wow.  We were the MOST important people on this plane!”

Our next feat was to get the rental car which was a long walk and a bus ride away from the airport.  We decided not to try it with all our luggage and three boys who were bouncing off the walls by this point.  So the boys and I parked ourselves in the airport for 45 minutes while Rock went to get the car.  Like I said, the DVD player has become my very best friend.

Blue Jeans got bored with that after about 5 minutes and kept himself busy running from one thing to another.  Telephone booths, flirtatious female passengers and a hair pick in the holes of the seats kept him happy enough.

Finally we were able to check in to our hotel in Rutherford.  But we had some very hungry boys on our hands so we got to turn around and head back out.  We found the nearest Taco Bell which shall here after be known as the Explicit Lyrics Taco Bell.  I certainly hope not all fast food restaurants are like this here, but when the music on the radio being blasted in this Taco Bell was had me blushing, we couldn’t eat fast enough.  At last we were able to put the boys to bed about 11:00 (8 pm PST).  And that was the end of Day 1.  Stay tuned for more adventures from the great migration.