It's 14:40, do you know where your children are?

I do, and I'm damn glad they're not with me.

This has been the toughest part of this moving thing: not the transition from the US to the UK, but the transition from working full time to parenting full time. Both of my kids have gone to daycare since they were three or four months old. There was a fabulous daycare at Himself's office and the girls absolutely loved it. They would run gleefully down the hall when we dropped them off in the morning, and come home in the evening with stories of the fun things they'd done all day.

But here? We are a full-on stay-at-home Mama and kids these days. Devil will start school (!) in September, and Boo will start in a day nursery (the equivalent of full time daycare) at the same time, but until then its the three of us. Trying not to kill each other. Or rather, them bouncing off the walls with energy that used to be directed into stuff at daycare, and me trying to keep my shit together enough to keep them entertained and out of trouble. It's been really hard. Really, really hard. Hard enough for me to think "You know? I'm really not cut out for this." on more then one occasion.

However, it has gotten better. We've discovered the local playgrounds, both indoors and out. We have become veteran Tube riders - we're right on the District line which takes us to lots of good kid stuff very easily. We've found the local swimming pool, and we live a 10 min walk from a very large park with lots of trails to explore. We spend a lot of our time out and about. The upside of this is that I've lost 6 pounds since we moved simply from pushing close to 100 lbs of kids + stroller all over West London. The down side is that they aren't getting enough interaction with other kids and I'm getting hardly any down time for myself. Not a good combo.

So this morning Himself took them off in the rain to the museum. He just texted me to say they wouldn't be back for another hour at least. I've cleaned up my desk, done a couple loads of laundry, made the guest bed for my MIL who comes next week while he goes back to the States for a business trip, and I'm about to have lunch with my book. In peace and quiet.

Thank goodness.

We're here

I can only describe the last 36 hours as trying. The good news is that we are in London, safely ensconced with friends, with the keys to our new house in our possession. The kids were absolute troopers throughout (with minor meltdowns as called for (or not) by circumstances) and are now sleeping the sleep of the just and extremely jet lagged. The bad news is that we left our lodgings in Boston at 9:45 Friday morning, intending to be in Houston by 5:00 pm, and on our way to Heathrow by 8:00.

Hahahahahahahahahahaha! Or not. By noon yesterday, we had made it to...our gate in Boston. Our lovely US Airways flight was delayed by at least an hour and we actually pushed back from the gate 1.5 hrs post-departure, only to sit on the runway for another 45 min before taking off. They insisted it was weather, but we have our doubts. No matter, our flight from Philly to Houston was also delayed, by at least an hour and forty five minutes, so we were still ok, both for that flight and our flight to London.

Until we arrived in Philly at 3:00 pm and discovered that our flight to Houston had been cancelled.

And the next option was at 6:45 pm. Which is 5:45 pm Houston time. Given a 3+ hr flight,making our BA flight was not going to happen. But all that was made moot by the fact that the next flight that had room for all of us left at 5:30 the next morning.

Say it with me again: hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha! 

Thankfully we found the Philly airport play area, and the girls and I hung out for the next two hours while Ironman tried  to negotiate with British Airways to get on the 9:00 o'clock flight from Philly to London. When he finally returned from these negotiations, it turned out he had been on hold for all but about 20 of those 120 minutes with the corporate travel agency trying to get the flights fixed. But he had done it, economy instead of business class, but we'd still get to the UK when we were supposed to. No problem.

Until we got to the BA ticket desk at 7:45 and discovered that the corporate travel agency had rebooked his ticket. And only his ticket. 

Seriously. I'm pretty creative, but even I couldn't make this shit up.

The BA ticket staff, showing the first inkling of competence in this entire fiasco, then proceeded to transfer our four one-way business class tickets from the Houston flight to the Philly flight. No problem. You're done, on your way, enjoy your trip*. So, to recap: by the time we boarded our flight for London we had been in transit for the better part of 12 hours, with only 75 mins max of that being actual flying time. This has got to be some kind of record.

I have left out the rest of the trauma, which has resulted in our checking in for the flight, in which we move several thousand miles away for three years, but have no bags to check.

Yup. No bags. We actually don't know where they are at this point, although US Airways swears up and down that they will find them and get them to us in London.

I'm betting our sea freight (6-8 week shipping time) arrives before those bags do. Anyone want to give me odds?

However, we are here, we were gifted with a beautiful English spring day, and we are on our way. Hooray!

* I am thanking every God there is that Ironman purposely chose to put the passports in his carry on.  I was not so forward thinking about our UK cell phone. So if you're trying to call us, don't bother.

Bittersweet

Boy, am I glad that part is over. Our last day in Houston was a mishmash of saying goodbye to my colleagues (who are not included in the directive in #2 of the last post), meeting with Dev's teacher to go over her progress (excellant), getting the car detailed and sold, picking up dustbunnies the size of Boo's head so the house cleaners don't run screaming when they arrive, and basically saying good bye to the place I realize now I've lived longer then anywhere else since I moved away from home.

We moved to Houston at the very end of 2002, and swore up and down that we would be there for three years before moving on to cooler pastures. Six years later, we're leaving with much regret. We managed to make a wonderful life for ourselves, very different from what came before, but full of some wonderful friends and places that we will miss very much. We tell everyone we're coming back, but that's a hard thing to promise; our families are all back in the Northeast, and with the only grandchildren (for the next few months that is) on either side, there's a big draw to head back to New England when we're done overseas.

This is going to be a very grand adventure, there is no doubt. But I'm very glad that the leaving part of leaving home is now over with. We're in Maine, having attended a very special event today, and we'll be here for a few days before we head to Vermont to see the other set of grandparents. Then it's back to the Houston airport for four hours before we fly out to London. I think I'm ready.

The State of Our Nation

1. House is 95% packed, shipping container (holy crap big!) arrived on a truck this morning to be loaded with our sea freight, we are finding things we'd forgotten we had and everything is moving along.

2. My leave/grant/work status remains unresolved. I fully expect this condition to persist until, oh let's say, July.

3. We may have someone who will rent our house. This only partially makes up for the heartburn I am experiencing from #2 (is it career suicide to tell my institution to take a flying fuck leap? I suspect so...)

4. The girls have adjusted remarkably to our "new house" (a hotel), and are looking forward to seeing their grandparents. I can't take them to daycare anymore because it makes me cry.

5. Houston is gifting us with some remarkably fabulous weather for our last few days here. I'm holding tight to the knowledge that in mere days it will be 95 degrees with 90% humidity in order to make this more bearable.

6. I'm going to deck the next person who asks me if I'm excited about the move. Yes, I am theoretically excited, but the metric crapton of stuff to be done before we actually get on the plane to London (not to mention the Lurking Black Cloud of Doom that we might not actually make it there hovering over my head) is blocking out the excitement. Go away.

7. I like moving, I like moving, I like moving - this is my new mantra, but unfortunately it's not working so well.

Of the three posts on this blog, 2 are complaining. I can promise that this will not be the permanent tone. Really!

Oh for fuck's sake

Why am I still awake? It's almost 1 am here in Texas, and we have just completed our household inventory. I'm still unclear on what exactly is going with us and what is staying in storage. But so be it. Come Monday the movers will be here and it will be (mostly) all over.

I look around our house and realize we have a ton more stuff then we did when we moved here from our grad student digs in Tucson six years ago. But it probably isn't all that much stuff in reality - we can take as much as we care to, since we haven't filled up our shipping container allotment yet. And the house we're moving to is bigger then our current adobe. It's amazing how putting it all down in black and white (or pixels in our digital case) makes you realize exactly how much stuff you have. Yikes. No more back of the truck moves for us my friends. No more...