This week has been…crazy. In just a few short days our family will be hopping on a plane to our new home in Ireland–which means we have spent the last few days running around like manic chickens with their heads chopped off. Just imagine moving with a dog and two children under the age of 3. Now imagine moving with those same young children half-way around the world. Now imagine preparing to move with two young children while your husband is in Ireland (and you are in Seattle)–oh, yeah, and you’re throwing a party for 75 of your closest friends and family this week to keep things REALLY interesting.

Crazy as this week has been, I’ve already learned a few things about moving with young children. Starting with:

1. Don’t move with young children.
Really, moving with young kids SUCKS. They don’t help, they get in the way when you’re trying to get stuff done, they require extra time and attention (of which you have neither), they have extra STUFF you have to move (which, of course, you don’t have room to move), and the stress of moving just throws them into a wild tailspin of anger and destruction. Have I convinced you to put your moving plans on hold yet? If not, you may continue reading.

2. Get help with your kids (read: pawn your children off on a willing grandparent/friend/babysitter/responsible dog).
If you decide to move with young children, you’ve got to get rid of the kids on moving day. Otherwise, moving day simply will not happen. Enlist help for at least the time that you will be doing the bulk of your packing and loading. You may be tempted to try to get a few more things done with your children “helping” you. Don’t. It’s a terrible idea. Just get them out of the house, get things done, and reunite with your beautiful children at the end of the day.

3. Set up a staging area.
Find a space in your house that you can use to store already-packed boxes. This could be your garage, a spare bedroom, a corner of the office, or the end of a hallway. As you pack a box, move it to the staging area so you’ll be able to keep everything contained (and make loading into the moving truck go that much quicker).

4. Pack non-essentials first.
Packing up a family is a daunting process. Start by filling one box (yes, just one box–one is a good number to start with, and you know you can actually do it) with non-essential items. This could be off-season clothing, your grandmother’s china (You weren’t planning on using that for Cheerios each morning, were you?), holiday items, or extra toys (now is a good time to start clearing the clutter!). After you pack your first box, the rest come more easily. Starting a couple of weeks before the big moving day, try to fill at least one box per day with non-essentials. Even if you only get a few boxes packed, it will be that much less that you have to do last-minute.

5. Talk up the move and your new house.
We’ve been talking about our “Ireland House” for months with our 2-year old. There are several things that we’ve done to help ease the transition for him. We look at photos on Google images of Ireland (since he’s never actually been there), we find Washington and Ireland on a globe and trace the path that we’ll travel, we point out airplanes in the sky and say, “we get to fly on an airplane to Ireland soon!”. Now that we (finally) have a house over in Ireland we also look at photos of our house and talk about the wonderful things we’ll see there (“Look, there’s our yard where we’ll throw the ball for Bota!”, “Oh, here’s a picture of your new room with your big boy bed!”, “Here’s the toilet you’ll use when you need to go potty.”). We try to make the new house sound as comfortable, inviting, and exciting as we can.

6. Color-code your belongings.
We bought 3 colors of low-stick painter’s tape so we could color-code everything in our house. Since we are moving from a reasonably large house to a small, furnished house there are a lot of things we had to put into storage. We used one color for items going to Ireland, another color for items going into storage, and a third color for items we were going to loan out to friends. You could also use the color-coding system for items to move/sell/store, items that are essential/non-essential/seasonal (so you’ll know what to unpack first), or color-code each room of your house. The possibilities are endless!

7. Be all stealth-like and pack your kids’ things when they aren’t looking.
I made the mistake of trying to pack one of David’s balls while he was in the same room. BAD, BAD IDEA. He freaked out and it took about 3o minutes to console him. Lesson learned. Any time you are packing your kids’ belongings, just do it when they aren’t around. They don’t understand that they WILL see these things again soon, so it’s quite traumatic for the little ones.

8. Hire a moving company.
Jon and I have moved 6 times in the last 8 years, but this is the first time we’ve ever had a professional moving company help us out (thanks to Jon’s business sending them out!). It was incredible having 2 guys show up with boxes, spend 6 hours packing our stuff, and then drive our stuff off to where it was supposed to be. I don’t know if we could actually afford to hire those guys on our own, so we usually “hire” our friends with the promise of free beer and pizza on moving day. Either way, get some help with the heavy lifting and the whole move will go a lot more smoothly.

9. Expect your child(ren) to act out. Plan accordingly.
Moving is stressful for anyone, and especially so for young children. They will get frustrated, angry, sad, confused, anxious. They may cry or act out more than usual. That’s to be expected. Just go with it, scrounge up some extra patience, and drink a nice glass of wine after you tuck the kids in at night.

10. Say goodbye.
We ended up bringing our kids with us on our final day of organizing and cleaning our “old” house (we also brought along Auntie and Uncle to help babysit them). I was a bit nervous about how David would react when he saw our empty house, but I think it was actually really good for him. He had fun running through the cleared out rooms, seeing our storage space (the garage) packed high with our belongings, and yelling down empty, echo-y hallways. Before we left that day, we walked through each room of the house and said goodbye: “Goodbye, old bedroom. Goodbye, blue curtains. Goodbye, tall stairs.” And that was it. We said goodbye and we left. He was happy waving at our house as we pulled out of the driveway and drove out of our neighborhood for the last time.

So far as I can tell, we’re actually less than halfway done with the move at this point. We still have to get to Ireland, adjust to life in a foreign culture, wait 6-8 weeks for our “stuff” to arrive on a cargo ship, unpack, and settle into our new “normal”. For this chapter of the move, though, we can finally close the book and call it done.

To be continued…