Don't Try This at Home (wherever that is)

I suppose there never is a really good time to move, but we always seem to pick the worst possible times. Suffice to say that we've vowed several times in the last few weeks never to move with a newborn, (we've done it twice), never to move and take on a new pet at the same time, and not to move for a very long time. We've reached our 7th place of residence during our almost 9 years of marriage and we've decided that enough really is enough. I know people move more than we, and do crazier things with more kids - but this is as crazy as I care to get. Being experienced in "move" doesn't really help the pain (of, for example, the thirtieth time in one day, "where is that so-and-so? I thought for sure I packed it in such-an-such a box! I know I saw it laying around here somewhere!), it just makes you think that you'll be better equipped for the realities of this current move - which you are in a sense, but in another, you never can be.

we've been supremely dislocated - from big city and small town suddenly spit out onto a 7-acre piece of country with big trees and garden soil. we flop about with pink, gasping gills, breathless and stupidly try to do 9 years of dream in 2 weeks. we alternate between backing each other down in a corner to take slow breaths and save ourselves from drowning simultaneously in euphoria and despair.

I think of these years, with 2 of our 3 children under two, as the bottleneck years of parenting. time (or the wisdom of older, smarter parents) will tell the true tale, but the thought helps me get through the insanely plentious demands of shaping a gangley-legged lump of clay into the semblance of family. between pre-move, move and post-move there have been a zillion decisions crammed into 6 months and the kind of machine gun-rattle on the brain that creats statements from O such as "I really have no idea who you are anymore!"

all this and at the exact same time there is breathtaking cuteness in your kids, as they wring out and trample upon your sleep-deprived-emotion heart. as your futile attempts to keep your dog from frollicking in the overflowing sewage yet again. you stand in a foreign kitchen watching your daughters giggle with a kitten, their faces lighting up again and again with the intense bursts of light like the fourth of July fireworks and a voice whispers urgently in your brain "hold on! hold on to these moments! these delicate, delicate moments! oh, hold on!"

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