Iowa City, Here We Come!

We spent all of August packing our belongings into boxes and preparing to move ourselves across the country. I started saving boxes at school in May, but that's about when everyone else started saving them, too. We had to call around town to different stores to find boxes. The best boxes actually came from the liquor store. Taney felt really weird about going in to get them, and even weirder when people from the ward showed up and inquired about the boxes. He joked, "Well, It's been a long stressful week, we needed something to take the edge off."

Moving to Iowa was the right thing for us to do. I know Heavenly Father made it easy for us, or I would not have done it. My friend, Greg Jorgenson, from high school offered to haul our stuff across country in his semi truck for a nominal fee. It was cheaper than renting a U-haul without the gas and mileage. So, of coarse we took him up on that offer.

A week later my in-laws called and said they would come to Vegas, help us clean and pack and then drive our cars to Iowa while we fly. WOW! Not having to drive across the country with a 2 year old = AWESOME!

So we packed up the semi, with a little help from our friends. And we deep cleaned the apartment, with a little help from our ward. And we checked out of Montego Bay Apartments. We had Max go with the Howells while we packed and cleaned to keep him out of the way. We brought him back to the empty apartment. His walked in, looked around, and with shrugged shoulders and outstretched hands said, "Where's couch?" We tried to explain that all our things were on Greg's truck and we would see then at our new house in a week. He didn't really get it, but for several days he said, "Couch, Greg Truck."

Taney, Max and I flew to Peoria and spend a few days with Taney's sisters. We could not move in to the new place until the 1st...and Greg was also moving another family to Iowa on the first and their stuff had to come out of the truck before ours did. We had to wait until the 2nd. We came to Iowa City on the first and got the keys to our place, but then stayed with Alex and Sheena for the night.

Alex was able to convince the elders from his ward to come help us move. Luckily it was RIGHT before a district conference...so there were about 8 elders here helping. There was also a couple of guys from our ward, Taney's uncle Larry, Papa Kurth and the Girls. It went very quickly. I stayed in the apartment and moved boxes to the correct room so they could just move them in and stack them anywhere. It was a pretty good system. I don't know how people move with an Elder's Quorum.

It took us a few days, but we mostly have things unpacked. I tried to do Max's room first so he could have some kind of normalcy. HE struggled with the move. For several days, a week and a half, maybe, he asked to go home. But after many explanations I think he finally understands that this is our new home. He calls it the "new house." It warms my heart a little when we pull into the parking lot and he gets excited and says, "We're home, we're home, we're home." the same way he did at the old place, in Vegas.

Although things are mostly unpacked not everything has a place yet. It's starting to drive me crazy, but I have bought several organizational tools to help with that. We bought another book case for our bedroom, and some drying racks for our laundry (it does kind of suck not having laundry in our apartment anymore.).

I was surprised at how much more home-like it looked once I got pictures on the wall in the living room and all the books on the shelf. As soon as it's done I'll put up some pictures.

Max at 9 months

Maxwell is now 9 months old. How did that happen? No seriously. It feels like yesterday he was lying on my chest, unable to lift his head and sleep longer than a couple of hours.

He is very mobile the last few weeks. He crawls all over the apartment like a champion. He couldn't figure out crawling for a long time. He did the army crawl/scoot for a couple of weeks before he figured out the full crawl. He is also very good at cruising around on the edges of furniture. He has even figured out how to get from standing to crawling position without falling and hitting his head. Which is good, because I am fairly sure he had a concussion last week. He was crawling around at the church as I was cleaning up after a fundraiser. He made his way to a trash can and tried to stand up. He pulled it down on top of himself and hit his head on that hard floor.