Ch ch ch Changes, Part II

I apologize,I lovingly sat in my van while Max slept and finished this blog post on my phone and thought I'd posted it. Come to find out, I never did and all the pictures I'd posted, one at a time, are not on here. How annoying to do a "to be continued" and then not continue. Bless it.

I left off on my last post when Rob received an offer for a job, in a town 3.5 hours away, and we had a house they needed major work and very little time to find a house and fix ours and move.

Back to moving. We needed to move yesterday. And we had all that flooring that couldn't be returned in the garage. So, we went to work.

By some wonderfulness, the week after we found out we were moving, I had already taken a week off work to help my church with Vacation Bible School. I talked to the VBS director and told her about our situation and she was so understanding when I said "you remember how I told you I took the week off and could help all five days all day? Maybe I could do 3 half days?" Reason # 8,034,923 why we were sad to leave our church. My blessed Mom and Dad came for 4 days and helped me paint and pack and paint and pack and paint some more. We got a major amount of work done and I am so grateful to them. So, a week into knowing we were leaving, we had repainted the kitchen, master bedroom, master bath, and hallway ceiling and had filled a storage unit with 20 something boxes and donated 5 boxes of crap.

After Mom and Dad left, my sister and her husband came. My brother-in-law helped Rob lay floors in our kitchen, living room and hallway that weekend while Angie and I took the kids downtown and partied at the museum and had a trolly ride and a hotel stay. We attempted helping the boys, but 4 kids+exposed nails+copious amounts of dust=FAIL. So we left and they got much more done without us.

Can you tell which child took a nap and which two didn't?

By the time my sister left, our hearts were so full from all the help we had and our nerves had calmed considerably because of all the work that had already been done. We had three weeks left to find a home, put our home on the market and finish our house.

Everytime we discussed buying a new house, and started looking at houses online, I got crazy face and GI upset. I didn't want to have two mortgages and I didn't want to pick a house in 2 weeks that I would be stuck with if it turned out we didn't like it. We decided to rent until we sell our house. I took the kids alone to Fayetteville and went on an all day search for rentals. Houses, apartments, townhomes, duplexes. We saw it all. And nothing fit. Too expensive. Too small. No outside area for kids to play. Wrong school district. Too many college students. No parking. I felt really defeated and thought we'd never find a home. I thought I was going to have to go back to Little Rock and tell Rob we were going to have to live in a hotel. My sister drove in the area I liked, and texted me a phone number to a townhouse we had missed the day before. Maybe the landlord had put the sign up overnight, who knows. I called the number and somehow this townhouse had an extra room, and a dining room, a one car garage and was $100 cheaper per month that most of the places I had toured. He let me in to look and it was perfect. We had planned to get a storage unit to store lawnmowers, stuff from our attic for Christmas, ect. The one car garage would serve as a storage unit and we'd also save that $$$$. He also offered to give us a 9 month lease, rather than making us do a year. We were going to move in August right before school started and we didn't want to have to move the following August, in the heat, directly before school again.

I drove back to Little Rock feeling happy that we had a place and ready to kick it into high gear. I put in my notice immediately and was done working July 25. It was kind of sad how not sad I was. I mean, when I went prn, I did a whole blog post about it, but I didn't even tell a lot of people I was leaving until I was literally LEAVING the building.  I worked at that hospital for 13 years. It was the end of an era for me and on my last day, two of my favorites weren't even there, the doctor that makes my head spin had overbooked her day and we ran all day and I ended up staying late, alone, while everyone else went home. It was very anticlimactic and I didn't shed a tear. It was time to go. My time there was good but things were changing that I didn't really care for and if we were staying, I probably would have been seeking a new job, to be honest.  I have kept in touch with my old boss, who had retired a year before I left, and two of the nurses I worked with and one doctor. I hope to always keep in touch with them, they are good people.

Getting your house ready to put on the market is hard with littles. But, something happened inside me where I realized the reason why our house was in the shape it was, was because we had lived five years with babies and I didn't BELIEVE I could do it with kids home. It was time to start believing and just freakin DOING. Luckily, I was home and could put in full days of help and the kids were more than happy to zone out with the TV, Amazon Prime streaming, and ABC Mouse, and many other electronic babysitters. We still had to do our "last tour of Little Rock" so in between visiting our favorite stay at home stomping grounds,  I painted 1500 square feet of trim and every door in our house. At night and on weekends, Rob finished the floors in our bedrooms. I powerwashed the house and poolshed and took over mowing. In between we packed, packed some more and packed some more. Literally, where did all that shiz come from.

I can't pain without getting it all over myself

How I felt after 3 days straight of painting trim. Everything hurt (Oh, and I chopped my hair off)

 I started falling apart after a week. Sleeping on my coffee cup helped.

I did have some help

And I took some pics of my electronic babysitters 

 My parents took the kids a few days early to give Rob and I a couple days to be crazy cleaner/painter/mowers. The kids had one last swing on the swingset. It makes me cry to see theis pic. We left the swingset there.

 And one last swim in the pool.

I drove the kids to my parents and came back ready to do the final push needed to get the house ready. Thank goodness for this extra time with just us. We got Rylan's room moved out and discovered that the one room we thought the paint was ok, looked BAD with no furniture in it, so I repainted it. We fixed our fence, cleaned our pool, and began the worst packing of all: the garage. UGH, that place was a mess.

 And then we went on a date to the place where we had our wedding reception. Memories. In all seriousness, the food was MEH, and the wait staff was, meh, and well.....I'm good.

And then, this happened.