It's Started...

June twenty-first. The date resounds in my head just like the warning bell at my elementary school used to ring for a fire drill. As a child, each time I heard that awful buzzing alert, my heart would sink in wide-eyed fear that there was real danger, that maybe this time the bomb threat was real.

Drop everything. Form a line. Follow the teacher. Don't get lost (as if ending up with another teacher's class would make me prone to more danger). Know the correct corner of the playground to report to in case you're in the bathroom when the bell sounds.

I remember practicing several times a year--the teachers drilled into us the concept that being prepared was the key to everything being ok.

The alarm in my head now, though, is no drill. It started blaring a couple weeks ago when our contractor sent me a calendar of what would happen when in our new house. My eyes scrolled past painting and flooring down the page to the final line: "June 21: Turn over keys."

Since then, I haven't slept without waking up to an immediate sense that I'm not going to make it. After five years of waiting, the building process has gone too miraculously, God-orchestratedly FAST!!

April 20 marked exactly two months from the date we poured our slab. I expected to move into the house in late August. In other words, there are not nearly enough boxes lining my walls...and for this woman who over prepares for tests, my teaching load, Bible studies, and everything else in life, that means I'm on overload.

The twins think mommy is playing a wonderful game of hide and seek with do-not-touch objects placed ever so temptingly in multiple-sized cubes Wyatt thinks the empty boxes are train cars, boats, and make-believe presents...all of which I ruin each time I determine they're better served as a temporary home for books or some other much more boring object than a child's imagination could fill them with.

Everybody keeps telling me I don't have to move in overnight, that I'm only moving 1/2 mile across a hay field, so it's not that big a deal.

Perhaps it's the memory of two other major moves I've boxed and unboxed, mostly without my working husband's help. Or perhaps it's the realization that I have three children to seriously inhibit (and undo) my progress whereas before, I had only one not-yet-crawling infant.

Whatever it is, I'm frantically trying to unbuild our life within these walls, to box up those little pieces that make a house feel like a home.
I know, I know...I'll make it. If I can just remember to breathe. To thank God for the unbelievable smoothness of the build that has created this problem in the first place. To laugh. And to pick up some more boxes tomorrow.

Photos: Kira (the snotty cat) hides from the twins, safe inside a fortress of boxes. Living room curtains gone, washed, and ready to move.