Moving cross country with a toddler - A Cautionary Tale

It's Sunday night, August 2, 2015 and we just arrived in California on Tuesday so we have officially survived our first 5 days here. The first 3 or 4 days were about as rough as I think you can expect a cross-country move with a toddler to go. Throw in some jet lag and a super over-tired 2-year-old, and the unpacking of our new house stressed me out to the max.  I am not proud to admit I snapped at Rich more than my fair share of times in 4 days. He is pretty much a saint for putting up with me at this point.

On Tuesday we arrived at SFO and stayed in a hotel in Redwood City since our truck wouldn't arrive until Wednesday. Not a fun day. It was off to a good start - the flight went great, we got upgraded to 3 seats together in economy comfort, and Valerie was pretty well behaved since we had the kindle loaded with Dora and Sesame Street for her to watch. Once we arrived it was downhill from there. She melted down in the airport while we collected our luggage (poor thing, it was past her naptime) and then we went in circles trying to find the rental car pickup. She fell asleep in the stroller as we finally found our car and headed to the hotel, where she of course did not nap anymore.

Are you laughing at me?

Then Rich had to go meet the landlord so I took her to IHOP for a mid afternoon snack, where she chose the happy face chocolate chip kid's pancake and then refused to take a single bite of it. Some days, this child. We power struggled over the pancake for a bit, I ate some of it, and then finally she decided she wanted some after all. Thank. God. And then she pooped so we had to make a hasty exit back to the hotel for a clean diaper.

At this point, I thought, hooray! She pooped, so now we can go to the hotel pool and I don't need to worry about having a swim diaper on her. HAHA #fail. We made it to the pool and were having a lot of fun, until I noticed she seemed like she might be pooping again.  AHHH!!! I quickly grabbed her out of the water just in time. Pool time cut short, back to the hotel room again for a bath and rinsing poop out of her suit. At some point she also dumped a whole container of trail mix all over the floor in the hotel room. By this time I was beyond frustrated and ready to sell her on craigslist.

Luckily Rich returned to give me a sanity check. We decided to find a park and some dinner since it was imperative that we get the hell out of the hotel room until bedtime. We found a great park and got some swinging and sliding in (as well as some more whining and power struggling), and then we hit up the sandwich spot for dinner al fresco - and by dinner for Valerie I mean goldfish and milk. The sandwiches were excellent though. She was in extreme meltdown mode on and off by dinnertime so we couldn't linger on the patio and we headed back to the hotel for bedtime. We put her to bed at 8:30 and I was so exhausted myself I passed out immediately after that.

Thanks to jet lag I was up again at 4:30 am, but mostly just thrilled to have gotten 8 hours of sleep. We packed up and went back to IHOP for breakfast, which went MUCH better this time. We got Valerie the Rooty Jr with a waffle, sausage and blueberries, and she devoured it. I was so glad she got a good breakfast because we then had to go meet the moving truck at the house and begin 3 days of max-stress moving hell.

I shouldn't say max-stress - we actually had full service moving and unpacking so the movers unpacked all the boxes and removed all the boxes and packing paper, which was definitely clutch. However, we were still left with a house full of crap - EVERYWHERE.

We also had the challenge of a toddler demanding our attention while we busted our tails getting organized. We relied heavily on Netflix to entertain her but it could only do so much. Suffice it to say that cleaning and organizing your house with a 2-year-old underfoot can be compared to brushing your teeth while eating Oreos. Every time my back was turned, she would dump out all the bananagram tiles, or all her play food, or all her books, or color with pen all over herself and the white leather couch.

yep this happened

I can't stand having everything we own scattered around in total chaos; it makes me twitch, so we worked for 3 very long days to get everything organized and I'm now really pleased with how it's turned out. Our house in Cincinnati was about 1600 square feet, plus a basement, and our house here is 1300 square feet, with no basement. We did leave quite a bit of stuff behind for the year, but even still, it's a fairly significant downsize and it took some creativity to find storage for everything we brought, plus a pile of more things to donate that missed the first donation round pre-move. It always feels so good to get rid of stuff you don't need!  I love it. Although I am a pack rat by nature so sometimes it takes some internal struggle, combined with encouragement from my husband, to make the leap to get rid of stuff. I'm always glad after the fact though!  It feels so much lighter.

There's not much to say about Thursday and Friday except we were balls to the wall unpacking until we collapsed into bed still jet lagged each night.  By Saturday it was finally starting to look livable, we were adjusting to Pacific time, and life was looking up. We made it!!