It’s 8:30 the night before the movers come. My house has been in a general state of chaos all day and I am totally exhausted. To be fair I shouldn’t complain because we don’t actually have to pack the house ourselves but it is amazing how much stuff, and by that I mean junk, a family of five can accumulate in two years. I have been trying to remember if it was this much work  when we left England and I don’t think so. I’m not sure if you just forget the details after a few years so you are willing to do it all over again or if we truly didn’t have as much stuff last time. I do think we just had less stuff and I have two theories as to why. First is just the lack of space. There was no space for too much extra stuff and that was with a garage packed to the brim. Second was our mindset. We went to England with the thought that it was temporary. We knew it was only for a few years so we lived that way. We didn’t replace many of the appliances we couldn’t bring from the US, we didn’t buy rugs or furniture for organising things. We always had the mentality of not investing in things because we wouldn’t be there long term. I think you can only live that way for so long. When we arrived in Australia we really thought we would be here closer to four years and we were tired of feeling temporary. We bought a nice coffee machine, we bought a new area rug to replace the old one, nothing too extravagant but we settled in. We made this our home, now just two years later we are off again and the clean out has been massive.

The kids have been good sports about the chaos and while Patrick is dreading 5 days in a hotel the little kids seem pretty excited. We’ll see how they feel once we are there. We got lucky and were able to find a hotel just 5 minutes from the house so it will be easy to run back and forth while the movers are here and then after to finish up the end of lease type things that need to be done. I’m not exactly looking forward to coming back to clean the oven but these things have to be done.

I just keep telling myself this time next week we will be at Oktoberfest soaking in our new city and I will finally be sampling this Augustiner I have heard so much about.