The Heartache of Moving

Somehow days, weeks and months have gone by since my last post and so much has happened since then.

When I wrote my last post we were happily living in Portland, Oregon and my daughter had just started a preschool that she absolutely adored. We were settling into our life in Portland, going on hikes, spending so much time in nature, making friends and learning our way around and in what seemed like less than a week the decision was made to move yet again- this time to California.

So here we are in LA County. We got here on November 1^st and my daughter and I are still in the midst of trying to adjust to this brand new life, our new surroundings, the lack of beautiful green trees and hiking/walking paths and missing our friends.

When we moved from Texas to Portland in November of 2013 the first few months were a struggle. I had a vision of keeping Annabelle at home for the rest of the school year since I’d be working from home, going on lots of play dates and getting out and about. She was so used to being at ‘school’ since I was working full time when she was born that she started asking to go to school. Eventually we settled into an amazing routine although we had slim pickings finding her a preschool in the middle of the school year and ended up switching her to a preschool-12^th grade school we loved in the fall.

This time I decided to do everything different than last time. We had a school picked out and ready to go when we got here and I even signed her up for the same activities she was doing in Portland before we left. Boy did that backfire. It took about 2 months of her crying every single day at drop off before the tears subsided and she even cried at her activities because it made her miss her Portland friends too much.

Our life here looks nothing like our life in Portland, all our routines have changed and we’re still trying to adjust. She still talks about being angry at daddy for moving us and she still talks about her friends from her old preschool and she’s even re-named one of her dolls to an old friends name. She doesn’t remember moving from Texas to Portland and surely one day this transition won’t feel as gigantic to her as it does now. This is my 13th move in the last 14 years, not including moving houses within the same city so in a way I’m used to the initial stage of settling down but watching my daughter go through the heartache is the worst kind of heartbreak I could ever imagine.

In the meantime we’re just chugging along, trying to get settled, getting used to the insane amount of traffic and the slowest traffic lights I’ve even experienced. Tears are becoming less frequent, we’ve finally started sleeping through the night about a week ago and we’ve found our favorite beach to visit on the weekends and we’re even discovering new activities we love.

I’m trying to get back into a writing groove with Annabelle’s new preschool schedule. So keep checking back as new posts will surely come!