moving with a child
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3 Easy Tips To Help You Survive Moving With A Child In Tow

moving with a child

By Audrey Sanchez of Two Dogs, One Cat, And A Baby

Moving is hard. It doesn’t matter if you’re stuffing your 2004 Volkswagen Jetta with the contents of your first apartment or if you’ve hired movers to load three bedrooms and two bathrooms worth of boxes into a twenty-six foot moving truck. It doesn’t matter if you’re trekking your stuff across a small city or moving nine hundred miles…or more. Any combination of your goods and belongings starting in one place and ending in another is hard.

Having recently survived a cross-country move with my marriage mostly intact, my child secure, and all of our belongings (essentially) unpacked, I feel an obligation to share the three most important lessons I learned throughout this process. You’re welcome in advance.

Don’t Do It

Just kidding.

…but seriously. Don’t do it.

If you can avoid moving while you have an infant, toddler, or child, avoid it. It’s terrible. It’s awful.
If given the choice of another intervention-free labor or moving with a baby, I’d give birth three more times. There is no Oxytocin after moving.

Throw Away All Of Your Shit

Again, I’m completely serious. Throw it away. Donate it. Burn it. I don’t care what you do with it. Just get rid of it. It makes moving much easier, and knowing you’re moving into a new house with a carefully curated selection of goods is refreshing. It just feels good. It’s basically the only redeeming part of moving.

Oh! And while I’m doling out advice, here’s a tip: the next time you’re about to buy something, ask yourself, “Am I willing to move this?” If the answer is no, don’t buy it.

Look Up A Marriage Counselor In Your Destination City

If you and your spouse successfully move across the country, baby in tow, you’re going to need to do some damage control. It’s incredibly difficult to act as a team when one of you is corralling a mischievous baby and the other is shoving DVDs in a box while lamenting the fact you don’t even own a DVD player (see tip #2). While you’re at it, don’t label your spouse’s box of closet junk “Stupid shit from spouse’s closet” (that piece of advice will likely save you an entire session).

Oh, and you’re definitely not in the clear until both of you have unpacked your respective boxes. Until then, referring to a room full of your spouse’s belongings as the “clutter cave” is not an effective strategy for getting it unpacked any more quickly. Hypothetically, of course.

In all seriousness, I’m beyond grateful we moved, even if the cost was a few weeks worth of patience and marital bliss…and money. Because the real cost of moving is insane. How, and why, is cardboard so expensive?!

But I guess I shouldn’t complain. We are privileged, and the fact that we have too many material objects is, in fact, a laughable problem — though I’m not joking about trashing/donating/selling/burning most of it.

This post originally appeared on Two Dogs, One Cat, And A Baby.

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About the Author

Audrey Sanchez is originally from a town in Kansas so small it has only one stop sign. Since then, she’s called Boulder, New Orleans, and most recently Kansas City home. Mother to toddler Ada, dogs Clyde and Fancy, and cat Hushpuppy, Audrey blogs about her interspecies parenting adventures at Two Dogs, One Cat, And A Baby. In addition to the chaos that her many critters bring, Audrey spends her time laundering cloth diapers, getting ready to go but never really making it to the gym, and fantasizing about REM cycles.