Moving Week

This has been a week of deju vu...some from our local move 4 months ago, and some from our previous international move 2 years ago. Either way, I've had enough of moving for a while and want to settle in somewhere pretty soon. We are headed to a temporary furnished house in Perth at the moment while we try to sort out a lease on one of the houses we're interested in and either line up rental furniture or wait it out until our furniture moves and clears customs. Thank goodness for patient kids who think this is really exciting!

Ben took over one of my boxes for the air shipment. I decided to let him use his airplane seat (which he can't stop talking about because he knows we're going sometime this week) instead of being shipped this way, but mostly because we only got 5 small boxes and our checked baggage to last us for up to 8 weeks until we see our sea shipment. That's a tight squeeze for a family of 4.

We checked into a hotel on Sunday to move all of our necessities out of the way of the movers and to make sure the house was clean and everything was dry before it got packed. I heard a horror story of movers that packed someone's dirty cereal bowl with milk in their container and it was quite a sight 6 weeks later when they opened the box. The kids love the hotel! Except Alex hates the rollaway crib but he's getting used to it. He's having a great time on all the carpet, though.

Ben loves the free minibar with orange juice and the slippers. He's also quite taken with the combs that show up every day and the big shower.

There are so many new places to play!

We're right on Orchard Road so we get to enjoy the heart of Singapore's shopping district one last time. This is Ion Orchard that just opened last week and is pretty impressive, especially at night when the entire outside is a colored light show.

Ben has been so happy about riding the bus to school each day, but he's not sad to be leaving. Just last week he started protesting school so he ought to be pretty excited that today is his last day.

And this is what the house looks like at the moment. I'm able to get online because we're transferring our internet service to the new tenants and the modem stays, so it's been nice to be able to work out some details while I'm here with the movers all day.

Many, many thanks to Miss Lou Anne for playing with Ben the past two afternoons and keeping him out of this chaos! Plus, Ben was so happy to get to spend some time with his favorite person. And we're so fortunate to still have Lea to watch Alex at the hotel during the day so he can still nap and not walk around trying to eat everything the movers drop. It's hard trying to keep up with everyone spread out like this and still attend to all the moving details involved with leaving a country. It's a lot different than leaving the US the first time because we don't have a permanent address here or any family that can tie up the loose ends we may forget. In another way it's a bit easier because we don't have cars or a house to sell and we know some things to do in advance, like buy electrical adapters by the dozen. Regardless, hopefully we're taking care of all the important things and will all get to Perth in one piece with everything we need on Friday!