Moving..

We are trying to both pack up for the upcoming move to outside Albany, NY (for Shannon's internship) and do a big purge/downsize of personal things and furniture. It is not very much fun, but it is turning out to be good. Cleansing really, to put photos that have sat in a box for over five years into an album. To sell the cookbooks we don't ever use. To recycle the old journals that are painful to read now. To sort through baby clothes and save some for potential future babies and/or to remember how little PJ once was. To have a yard sale and streamline our home. To store the gobs of yarn I've collected over the past four years. Gone is the VCR and video tapes. We'll either get a digital recorder if the budget allows, or just watch episodes we miss online. Gone is the big lovely highchair. We downsized to a booster. Hopefully going away are a bookshelf, a futon and two tables. We are still working hard.

Throwing out old journals which I mentioned above was probably the hardest for me. I didn't want to keep them because they are cringeworthy. They are evidence of awkward times that I am happy I survived, but don't need to process anymore. So much of them were just the same feelings repeated over and over, hashed out on paper by a girl who wasn't dealing very well. I wanted to burn them, but that's not so practical without a fireplace or grill, so I ended up recycling them. Less symbolic, but still meaningful. I ripped out the pages and put them on the curb.

PJ tries to "help" with packing because she is madly in love with helping right now, but usually she's just unpacking whatever you are trying to pack. All in all, she's been great while our apartment implodes around her. She might go on a post-it note spree or pull some papers out of binders every now and then, but we can't complain.