Preparing Kids To Move

Moving is tough when there aren’t little people running around like crazy and who are very attached to their rooms!  When you DO have little people running around like crazy who are very attached to their rooms it’s a whole new ballgame when it comes to moving.  Behold, I bring you some tips:

1. If you can swing it, get a babysitter who can take them literally anywhere but where you are trying to move a zillion boxes in and out of the house.  Our house is near a pretty busy street, and the thought of a toddler toddling away between people coming and going out the door is a bit scary to me! So lock down some babysitting as a way to get the kids contained, even if it means a babysitter who keeps them in one part of the house for most of the day (they’re getting paid to lose their sanity a bit here).  
2. Get books from the library about moving a couple weeks before you do the move, so that by the time you’re ready to move they’re a) aware that it’s happening and b) you can return those library books and not have to pack them, or worse, lose them if you move with them or even worse, are moving so far away that you’ll have to mail them back to the lending library you got them from (horrors of shipping horrors).  Here are some ones I recommend: Mabel and Sam at Home; I’m Not Moving!; Bruce’s Big Move; Clare’s Goodbye; Homegrown House, and I Want to Go Home!
3. When you’re close to the last week before the move, once you do laundry, fold it and put it right in a box.
4. Stuffed animals make EXCELLENT padding for semi-fragile objects.  Finally, they can earn their keep.
5. Use color-coded dots for different rooms so that if you have a bunch of people helping you move, boxes can maybe sort of kinda possibly go where they’re supposed to go; once you get to the new place, put corresponding colored dots on the doors of the intended rooms.
6. Just assume you aren’t going to find where the ballet tights are packed in time for that week’s lesson and plan to skip.
7. Seriously where are those tights?
8. You just had them.
9. They were in her sock drawer, why aren’t they with the socks?
10. Oh, they were on her legs when you were doing that last load of laundry and got put into the most random of last-minute boxes.  Mystery solved.