and then we moved...

for the 9th time.

Paul got a job with another company and they wanted him to start right away...in California.
I frantically started packing and trying to find a place to live. I had near-daily panic attacks up until I found us a house to move to.

Our San Antonio house

The trip out here was horrendous. HORRENDOUS. If you are ever thinking that maybe a 4 day car trip with a 3 month old is a good idea-- FLY. I wish I had flown with the kids. Instead I got to drive the car with the kids. Alone. And it was so loud that I couldn't talk to anyone on the phone or anything.

I love Western landscapes. 

Little Miss Amelia clocked in over 18 hours of relentless, loud, nerve-shredding screaming. James, as usual, was the perfect road-tripper. He never complained or asked the dreaded, "are we there yet?" Even as Amelia would cry for hours on end, he would just stare out the window without uttering any sort of complaint.

We left early Saturday morning and drove all day until we reached the Holiday Inn in Las Cruces, New Mexico. We were all so ready to get out of the car. Google predicted the car ride would be around 8 hours but we knew that with a big truck and multiple stops for the kids that it would take a bit extra. It took us 12 hours. Not great time.

Such a tender moment. He loves her so much.

I was thinking ahead and brought some Easter baskets for Sunday. We hid James' in the hotel room and he was really surprised. Then we headed to see some friends in Arizona. Once again, what should have taken us six and a half hours ended up taking 11. We finally rolled in to my best friend's part of town and stopped off at a church building to park our huge moving truck and feed the baby. Went to start up the car and the battery was dead. I was just grateful that we were so close to our friends and could get a jump. I wish that we could have spent more time with them. That made me sad.

At this point we knew that what we had slated as the final day of driving would end up getting us close to our final destination, but there was no way we would make it in time to pick up keys, so we ended up staying over night in Bakersfield, just two hours away from our new home of Hanford, California. Monday was the hardest day by far. Amelia screamed all day. She rarely slept. My nerves were totally shot. James was so on edge he just started bawling for the last hour of our trip, which made me cry. I can handle one crying baby, but two? Ugh. So there we were, flying down the 99 just crying our eyes out. That's when Paul went ahead and booked us a room, ordered us a pizza and we all passed out.

How the kids felt about being out of the car in Bakersfield.

On Tuesday we slept in, ate breakfast and made the last leg of our journey. Miraculously, both kids slept through it. Probably from all that carrying on the day before.  We drove through the neighborhood and parked the truck at the house. I was feeling pretty proud of myself for picking a good neighborhood. It's so hard to blindly rent a place that you've only seen online. It's a good part of town and while we are only going to be here for a year and half, at least we aren't on the edge of the ghetto like in San Antonio.

The hotel had a pancake machine. 

Well, then we picked up the keys and went home to check out our new place. I realized that the lawn was looking pretty dead. That should have been a giveaway that the previous tenants were slobs. When we opened the door the smell of wet dog hit us pretty hard. It was terrible. The place appeared to be very dirty. There were holes in the walls, dirt and dust everywhere, the bathrooms smelled of urine. At this point, there was no going back, so we called up the rental place and told them that they needed to come smell the house, because it was really bad. They ordered some deodorizer treatments for the carpet (apparently they'd had it cleaned but then never let it air out). They told us that they paid a cleaning lady to clean the place and that it had been much worse. We went to Walmart and stocked up on cleaning supplies and I started mopping the walls down. That's when I realized that what I had originally thought to be dirty walls were actually poorly painted, mismatched colors. So the walls have these shadows from darker and lighter paint streaks. I mopped them thoroughly anyway to satisfy the OCD in me.  I will never understand people who treat property that isn't their own with such disrespect.

Playing soccer in the backyard in California

The Elder's Quorum came to unload the truck in the evening. This is around the time that I realized we had a spider infestation. So I started spraying bug poison everywhere, which actually made what seemed like a million spiders and random bugs flee into the house. Luckily they met a timely demise. I don't like bugs. After the Elder's Quorum left, I put the kids to bed and I went to bed. Paul went to the garage to look for something and apparently there were hundreds of roaches! He spent a good hour in the garage trying to spray and keep them away from the things we had in there.

So here we are nearly a week later. The boxes are mostly unpacked. We are getting another deodorizer treatment for the carpets, and the grass is coming back to life. I think that this house is totally worth the week's worth of deep cleaning and care that we put in. We are in a great neighborhood, and a wonderful ward. I'm really excited to be in a small town for a change. Brings me back to my Aguanga roots.