Preparing for a Move
So, we are at the tail end of moving houses right now … hence the lack of blogging. Up to our eyeballs in boxes … to the point where organization has no meaning (even though I thought I really tried!) and we are just throwing everything left in the old house into cars to move it to the new house.
I am glad that I thought ahead and tired to prepare the kids the best I could for the move, here’s what I did …
1. Moving is a FAMILY event … so both kids were aware of the whole process. Two summers ago they knew we were working on getting the house ready to be sold, last spring we they knew that the house was put on the market and people were coming to look at buying it, and we drove by and looked at houses as a family. I think that their involvement in the entire process helped make them as ready as we were to FINALLY move. (“Enough talking about moving, Momma. Let’s do it!”)
2. We read books about moving. Neither of my kids seemed distressed about the move … but we read these books that I sometimes read to my clients about moving. It set the tone to be able to discuss any concerns they had. Here are the great books we read …
“A Kiss Goodbye”, by Audrey Penn … a companion book to “The Kissing Hand”
“Alexander, Who is Not (Do you Hear Me? I Mean It!) Going to Move”, by Judith Viorst
3. We created a leaf project together and talked about change. See previous post: The Leaves of Change: Coffee-Filter Fall Leaves
4. We used a paper chain to count down the days until the move. I’ve used the same technique before to give the kids a concept of the length of time until a holiday, vacation, or a family visit. It’s a simple concept … I just count up the number of “sleeps” before the event, cut (or have the kids cut) a paper strip for each “sleep”, make each strip into a loop, and tape the loops together in a chain. Then, each day have the kids take off one loop from the chain, count up how many loops are left and how many days left to sleep in the current house before moving to the new house!!!
5. Both me and my husband decided it would be best to make the kids’ rooms our top priority to get ready. We made sure to get their rooms painted and put together first … that way they could have some sort or “new normal” from the first night we moved in.
6. Another thing I did … for myself (because the kids weren’t into it … but I can imagine that older kids would enjoy and get something out of it) … was to make a “Wordle”. If you haven’t done one of these they are great. Wonderful to create to capture a moment in time, a person, a relationship, an area of interest/study …
Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.
I won’t share mine because it has personal info (include our address … which is kinda central info for a move). But I highly recommend you check it out … and make one!
So … there are my thoughts, I’d love to hear from others about what you’ve done to prepare yourself and children for a move!
Laura Hutchison
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I just came across this blog on Pinterest and love it! We know that we will not be in our old little farmhouse forever so we have talked to our oldest (4) about new houses. I love the paper chain idea!
Some other things that we plan to do when the time comes nearer: let the kids walk through the new house and tell them where we will put the furniture etc. We will also get the kids involved in packing and unpacking. I believe that the more the kids are involved, the more it becomes “their” move instead of just mom and dad moving.
I moved around a few times while growing up and learned some good lessons. We are Christians so we also talk about going where God leads us as well as being grateful for the house he has blessed us with.