I am here to make a case for what I believe to be the hardest hour of the day. 

I have a few contenders: There’s the morning commute to campus through multiple school zones, quickly followed by the fight for parking. How about the busy office hour after class on the day I return essay grades and people come to complain? The morning rush to get everyone to the bus stop on time? Or the minutes just before and just after bedtime, when the kids’ needs (bathroom, snack, water, random math questions) seem to hit their apex. 

But the hardest hour isn’t any of these. It’s the time from the moment my car pulls into the driveway until the moment my entire family of four is seated at the dinner table. 

My children are beautiful and precious at school pickup. They are angels the entire drive home. They tell me about their days. They sing songs. They help me spot fun Halloween decorations in the neighborhoods we pass through (we are all obsessed with this one house that has two 12’ skeletons). But the moment — the very SECOND — the garage door starts to lift up, they turn into screaming, feral maniacs. It’s as if when I hit that button on the remote opener, it activates a setting somewhere in their brains that signals the moment for complete and utter restraint collapse. 

Fighting over who has to go to the bathroom more urgently and who gets to use their bathroom first. Shutting the doors in each others faces. Coming into the house and stopping right in the middle of a doorway or hallway so that no one else can get by. Refusal to get their things from the car. Refusal to empty their things out of their backpacks. Then, finally, papers, binders, lunchboxes, water bottles, and shoes exploding just…everywhere. All over the floor. Accompanies by the dulcet tones of someone playing “Frère Jacques” on the electric keyboard with the volume dialed up to eleven. 

In a moment, I’ll walk into the room to spot one of them climbing up the other one’s back and screaming. While my husband is cooking dinner, I’ll be advising the children of better choices they could be making (choices that don’t involve physical fighting or destruction of property); herding them through their minimal chores (feeding the dog and cat); cleaning up spilled water from the dog’s bowl; getting at least one of them to change into their soccer uniform and load their cleats & ball into the car. 

And then comes the begging. The endless begging. Please tell me you know the begging? Or do your children actually come to the table when it’s time to eat? 

Why is this part the hardest part? Please just come to the table, people. You’ll feel better if you eat. 

Woof. 

And then there we are. 

Dinner. Piling back into the car for a game. Sitting in the crisp evening air and cheering for whichever child’s team is playing. We’re cool again. We’ve got cold Gatorade and a hot shower and maybe, if we’re lucky, a chapter from a book before bed. We’ve got hugs. We’ve got to do it all again tomorrow. 

We did it! We are here. No thanks to UHaul, who did not have the truck we reserved, nor in fact ANY truck for us to use. No thanks to the local moving crew we booked to load and unload the (now nonexistent) truck, who kept pushing back their arrival time hour after hour until we finally had to cancel them. Big thanks to our friends, who pulled through in the last minute and brought a pickup truck and towed a flat/open trailer full of furniture we loaded and unloaded ourselves.

We are home and I am never leaving. We don’t have our sofa, love seat, living room rug, or internet yet (those will all be here by Tuesday), but our bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, and reading room are all set up and ready to go. Let’s agree not to discuss the mess that is the guest bedroom at this time, okay? Okay.

Egon is finding his footing on the hardwood floors (he prefers carpet) (and also is in desperate need of a nail trim), so I let him explore on his wheels this morning. He has surveyed his domain and declared it fitting. His only problem is that, in the absence of a couch, he is suffering a distinct lack of couch snuggle time with his two humans. We were watching movies in bed last night (on DVD! So old school!) and he was not allowed in bed with us, so he just sat with his blankie outside the bedroom door, watching us to make sure we were still there. Poor guy. He will be much happier when the couch and rug arrive.

Flannery, not pictured, is doing her usual cat-settling-in-to-new-house routine of finding small enclosed spaces in which to hide, alternating with sad, lonely meowing. I think she slept all last night inside her litter box. Dear kitty, the box is to be used for other things, please and thank you.

Since we’ve got such a big, private yard in a quiet neighborhood, we are going to try letting her explore outside if she’s interested. Today she checked out the back porch for a few minutes before retreating back indoors. We’ll see how it goes.

There should be plenty out there to amuse her, really. Our cutest neighbors so far are the hummingbirds, and we’ve already bought them a present. Isn’t it delightfully gaudy? It’s hanging on the back porch and can easily be seen from both the kitchen and bedroom. I watched it for a while this morning before getting out of bed, but didn’t spot any avian customers yet. We shall see.

More snippets soon.

We are now less than a week from our move-in date and I cannot wait to be in the new house. I hate moving and packing (though I do enjoy unpacking, organizing, and arranging), and this is one of the slowest moves ever. I fee like we’ve been moving for weeks already. I prefer packing everything during the days before a move and then moving everything all at once. What we’re doing, however, is the slow and painful process of moving a carload of small items at a time, putting them away, and then reusing the boxes to move more things. It’s agonizing.

Before we moved anything, however, we made a huge trip to Lowe’s for paint, a refrigerator, and some other supplies. After a half day taping and a full day painting, our living room and hallways were all this lovely color:

That’s Sherwin Williams “Morning Fog” you see there.

Unfortunately, it was not meant to be. The color had come out a little bit darker and bluer than we had intended. I still liked it and was fine with it, but my husband, the most picky and meticulous person I have ever met, simply could not take it.

The next morning found us back at Lowe’s buying “Olympus White,” a color two shades lighter on the strip (on the bottom in the above image). We brought it back and tried it and … it was too light. Back at Lowe’s, we then tried the color in between the two, “Latitude” (on the top in the above image). It was perfect. Over the rest of the day, we painted over everything we’d already done, taking it one crucial shade lighter to the pale gray (not slate blue!) we’d intended. I wanted to cry about the whole situation — a full day’s backbreaking work, all for NOTHING! — but it really does look better now.

When I say the work was backbreaking, I pretty much do mean that literally. I’d been having some minor SI-joint issues lately and after two days of painting, I could barely move without feeling like I was being kicked by a steel-toed boot directly in the butt. Not only was it painful, but imagine explaining this to your chiropractor. He couldn’t stop laughing at me.

My husband had to finish the rest of the painting himself, including the dining room and guest room (more “Latitude”), the kitchen accent wall (“Parakeet”), and the master bedroom (“Olympus White” and “Blue Jasmine”). He really didn’t complain at all about having to do the rest of it himself, even though I’m sure it was not necessarily fun. I spent the time resting my back and doing some light packing and such at home.

It’s been pretty fun for us to think about how we’ll set up the new place — everything from choosing paint colors to deciding where to hang our art to (finally) merging our big book collections is a fun project. I keep getting excited anew when we bring items from our current house over to the new one and they suddenly seem to look better and nicer in our new place than they ever have in our current one. Our old rug, for example, looks so much prettier in our light an airy new dining room than it ever did in our dark and shadowy current living room. A painting of CW’s which I’d always thought of as drab and dreary is suddenly light and exciting in the brightness of our new living room.

We generally like the same colors and styles, with minor differences of opinion here and there. For example, we both think this gorgeous rug from Anthropologie would be perfect in our living room. Sadly, it is both ridiculously expensive and unavailable anyway. Damn you, Anthropolgie.

The problem is that when it comes to picking the next best available rug, we have some differing tastes. More critically, we’ve been unable to agree on the size of the rug. I’m a huge proponent of the idea that at least the front legs of the furniture should sit on the rug, thereby having the rug tie the room together and ground everything. My husband, who loves our hardwood floors, wants the rug to float in the middle of the furniture, with only the coffee table on top of it and the edges freely uncovered by couches/chairs. He says with a larger rug like I’d prefer, we’d be covering up the wood floors too much and the rug would become tantamount to a carpet. I contend that a small, floating rug in the middle of No Man’s Land would look chintzy, cheap, and amateurish. Neither of us seems willing to compromise at this point, no matter how many interior design articles I show him. Please keep us in your thoughts during this difficult time.

The moving truck comes for our furniture on Saturday. Deep breaths.