Facing A Giant

Today, I came home to my man full of questions that I couldn’t realistically answer. “What are we going to use to pack our luggage in? Where do you want to put everything we’re going to take?”
I respond with, “How much are we going to be able to take? Who are we going to use for our shipper? Are we limited on what we can and can not ship?”

These are the questions we are facing, weeding through, trying to delve into this unknown world of moving to a foreign country. Truthfully, this is the very worst part about moving. We would love to just skip this part. Anyone want to come do this for us? We’ll just move and then be surprised at what comes when we open our shipment. :)

Back in April, I started with our school room. Sorting. Throwing out. Going down memory lane. It wasn’t really so bad. I can be sentimental at times. But I really did quite well working through all this. When my big kids were just pre-schoolers, they drew all the time. Really. If they weren’t outside playing, they were drawing. They do get it honest, since I’m an artist myself. They would go through reams of copy paper. At the end of the school year, I would sort through and save the best of their work. Clint impressed us early on with his drawing skills. He used to watch a movie, go somewhere, or play something like football outside and immediately return to the school room and draw a scene from a movie, something he saw wherever we had been, or a scene from the football game. I have a drawing he did back then of the boys playing football in Mickey’s football field. He drew one of them being tackled by the other. He even had the details of the numbers on his jersey wrapping around the shirt in perspective. We were impressed. I’ve had these notebooks with my favorites on the school room book shelves, collecting dust.

Clint drawing in the school room.

Clint drawing in the school room…shocker.

It took longer, but looking through some of these memories was good for me. But it was also hard. I love this room. I spent more hours together with all my kids in this room than anywhere else in the house, including the kitchen. I also put a lot of love into the designing and then constructing this room. I remember wanting windows on both sides to let as much light in as possible in it’s small 8' x 12' space. I designed the window seat flanked by the two book shelves so you could curl up with a good book on a sunny day. Then there’s the famous not-so-secret-anymore-door that Britt came up with to hide the stairway to the bathroom below, which was configured wrong in the blue prints. The door cleverly became a bookshelf in disguise…only it held real books. Britt wanted to have a book that you could pull that would unlock the door and make it slide open. However, we never did get that one figured out.  Before the shelves were built, we purchased wide planked wood flooring from Canada and had it shipped in for our flooring. We laid that and stained it. And then I used some of the scrap wood and some old porch posts for legs to build the school table. I inherited some old school chairs from my aunt. So I painted them each different colors and labeled the kids’ names on the back of their chairs. I found some fabric I loved at our store and made some valances and a cushion cover for the window seat. I thought through all these details as I sorted books and games and markers and crayons and pencils…and memories.

School…in the school room…imagine that.

More school

Pretty much, got through that room okay. But then there’s the girls’ room. The twins’ room. The little boys’ room. The kitchen. Two bathrooms. Our bedroom. The laundry room. And the dreaded basement. Anything but the basement. UGH! It’s truly amazing how much stuff you can accumulate in 20 years of marriage. It just so happens that I’m married to the king of don’t throw that away, you might need it someday. Well, I tend to keep certain things for the same reason. But I’m also married to the king of I need a roll of duct tape, know I have one, don't know where it is, so it’s just easier to go buy a new one. All this to say, neither one of us are looking forward to taking on this GIANT. For to us, that’s just what it is…a Giant.

Britt and Morgan on a Sunday Morning

looking up from the school room toward the girls’ room

So once again, you can pray with us as we take on this Giant of a task…packing and sorting through all we love and have accumulated over the past 20 years. And that we’ll all still love each other when we’re done!!