Moving with babies

We recently (one week ago) moved to a new house in a new city, with three cats, two babies, and a shitload of stuff that we definitely should have thrown away five years ago.

We bought the house in February, before the babies were born, and it was a somewhat hasty decision in that there wasn't a lot available in the town where we wanted to live, so I looked at three, got S to look at the best of the bunch, and we bought it. I was hugely pregnant and exhausted, and perhaps not as picky or analytical as I would have been at any other time of my life. Don't get me wrong, I'm thrilled with our new town and I like the house well enough, it's just that it's smaller than I thought and I'm having a hard time fitting all our stuff in, especially the kitchen. I can't figure out why. The house is larger, we have more storage, and on paper we should be able to fit all our crap I mean treasured possessions in with no trouble. Not the case, sadly. I keep finding odd things, like the shelves in the kitchen cupboards are fairly close together, so things like olive oil and pepper mills don't fit.

We hired a contractor to do some renovations before we moved in. There was a gap of two months from purchase to move, which should have been ample time for what we wanted done but as always, things did not go as planned and there are still a number of things to be done, adding to the chaos. I moved in with the cats and the babies on Saturday, with S and the contents of our house to follow on Tuesday. We are now living in a pile of boxes and chaos, with very little time to organize ourselves because Duckling and Pin are my main focus and I spend a lot of time looking after them. We've had three days of peace because of the long weekend, but the workmen are back tomorrow and the noise and dust start again. I'm dreading it.

A good thing about moving with three-month-old babies is that they don't seem to notice that they are in a new place. They have me, they have their dad, they still sleep wherever I put them down, and they seem quite happy with life in general. The cats are not so easy going, and were traumatized for a few days but now are entertaining themselves by leaping in the piles of packing paper and finding new places to hide and sleep. They are also getting along much better than before; they don't pick on each other and there are no midnight cat fights to contend with.

Once we get unpacked I think we will have a great life here, in our new beautiful community. It's smaller than our previous city, but has so much to do that I don't think we'll miss our old place at all.

If only we could find the cutlery.