Gah! Moving

And insomniac again!

Thank you all for your kind words and advice. They help. Maybe more so because we've got a bit of a breather to think about our parenting strategies because Munchkin is Way the Hell Up North with my until Tuesday. 'Breather' in the sense of she's gone so that we can pack all of our earthly belongings for two days, move them all 500 feet up the street and then spend two days unpacking it all. Meantime, of course, we've also repainted the floors in the new house to great stinky effect, and are desperately coordinating last minute reno details: kitchen light not working anymore! who the hell can un-hook and then re-hook-up our gas range/oven? Will my electrician ever cough up the name of a reliable plumber so that we can get facilities for the washer put in / the tap fixed / the shower installed? We have no furnace! There are holes in the walls! The electricians left hand smudges all over the walls and plaster dust coats every surface. Did I mention my sister came to help us pack up a bit last weekend and gave me her nasty cold? And that I'm making two 800 km round trips Way the Hell Up North in a six day period?

So, yeahhhhhh, its 4:34 am and I'm blogging. Also blowing my nose.

Pynchon, at least, is a rock: he's got Thu / Fri off work and has been a whirl of activity since he got home from work on Wednesday. When he sets his mind to something, he's pretty much unstoppable. If I've spent the last several months organizing the details of our move (address changes, utilities, contractors, legal details, mortgage, packing supplies, childcare) he's a man of this particular moment, tying up carpets and taping boxes and taking bed frames apart and sealing dressers with giant rolls of cling film. He's noisily and busily efficient and I am running around doing simple errands because it's what I can manage on broken sleep and a head cold. Thank god I married such a practical, hard working man.

It is nice, though, to spend time together focused on one major task, time as a couple. Colluding in all the details of this major ordeal, moving into a new house. I keep reminding him of the last time we moved, from the apartment to the house, a couple of weeks before I got pregnant: remember we had to buy a drill? And all those trips to Canadian Tire for more painter's tape? And that awful thunderstorm? I remember the move before that, from Alberta to here, when we drove across the country together in a car full of CDs, days before he proposed to me on the threshold of our first home, that filty two bedroom apartment on the 11th floor, in the midst of yet another set of boxes, the chaos of one more move.

Moves have always, ultimately, been good for me. Try as I might, I can't think of one time where a move hasn't prompted an improvement in my happiness. Today, giggling as we bumped into each other, paint brushes in hand, hunched over the hundred year old pine floors in our new house, things felt right. I sure don't like packing up to leave this house, our first house, where I'm currently typing away at the breakfast bar that was such a selling feature for us--but then, I've never been good at goodbye, and what is packing up all those boxes but a protracted farewell to this home? But it's fun to work together like this again, to blast the stereo and run giggling through the rooms, beer in hand, at 9pm and not worry about waking a baby, to sleep in after a hard day's work, nice to make a set of new plans for as-yet-unconquered spaces, a lifetime of possibility opening up for us again.