It’s been two months since moving out of our home.

Here we are in the second rental house, this time a two bedroom basement apartment. As far as accommodations go, it fits our family needs quite well. We have a washer/dryer on the same floor, which turns out to be a huge benefit. The limited size also allows for all shared space to be visible for monitoring kids. We’re back in our neighborhood, which is nice for feeling more at home and convenient for visiting the ongoing project that is the new house.

Nashi remains sad about leaving the old house. Very understandable and luckily doesn’t come up much unless we’re talking about the old house. Papaya doesn’t care. The moves have been hard on Nashi, in part because of the busyness and stress the parents can’t always contain. It’s been much better the past three weeks or so now that we’ve settled into the current space more and there’s a lot less apparent busyness around the move. The move, of course, including everything that goes into not only moving a family from place to place, but also buying and selling a house, and planning and executing on a big remodel.

I say “apparent busyness” because there continues to be tons of stuff going on in planning the remodel. Fortunately for the kids, most of that stuff is done online during the day or after they sleep so they don’t get much exposure to the chaos. Turns out when you update a house, you have to pick literally everything that goes into it. It was a miracle to have lined up a contractor to start immediately, so we’ve needed to keep up with necessary decision making to keeps things moving along. My goal was three months to completion. Now that it’s been a little over a month, I’d say we’re actually tracking pretty closely to that. My guess is it’ll end up going over by about two weeks.

In the mean time, we all need to remember to treat each other nicely:

Papaya likes it when Nashi rubs her back. Sometimes. Other times, she yells at poor Nashi when he’s trying to be sweet. Other times, he takes her toys away. But we’re surviving, and things feel way better now than they did a month ago and way better than a month before that.

Message to the kids: you don’t know this yet but this is all because we want you both to have a nice home that accommodates many fun activities as you grow and your interests change. You will have friends next door and many kids on the block to play with. The street on which you live will be calm and relatively safe. Because of your mother’s influence, your home will have a wonderful yard and garden and be free of unnecessarily toxic items. Because of your father’s influence, your home will have a detached garage with a little boxing gym inside that you may or may not use.