Moved Out

Here's one time when I'd rather predict than promise or intend: it's likely I'll post tomorrow, as finally I've finished the move out of our house.

This was a difficult move, which, as you know, took a week longer than planned (by the revised plan!). My procedure in the past, when moving, had always been simply to box, move, and then unbox--indiscriminately. This time, as I said, a decision had to be made about everything, and there were six options: leave behind, take along, give away, sell, store, trash.

But the good thing about a protracted move is that we are hardly 'in boxes' now, as we've been able to set up rooms at the pace at which we've moved out.

Here's a picture of our new digs, which the youngest children call 'the Hotel'.

Joseph immediately became good buddies with six year-old N., who with his sister are the only other children living in the apartment complex.

I'll tell you a story which, to my mind, helps to confirm that our decision to move was a wise one. We have been wanting to start our youngest children on musical instruments. The Longy School of Music is immediately next door, and my wife went there today to inquire about lessons. She brought home a brochure with a picture on the cover of the face of a young boy playing violin in the Suzuki program at Longy.

Later in the day, when N. was visiting our apartment, he asked whether we recognized the boy on the picture of the brochure. Indeed, it was N. himself. We told him that our boys owned a violin (a 1/4 size instrument that we had bought last year, in anticipation of lessons). So N. excitedly ran home and brought back his violin. He then proceeded to show my boys how to hold the bow, position the instrument, and so on.

So, on our first day entirely moved out of our house, here I was, witnessing a six-year old neighbor showing my boys how to play the violin, as naturally as if he were teaching them how to play tag or toss a ball. I won't romanticize Cambridge, and I do recognize that this incident was extraordinary, by any reckoning--but, needless to say, it was not something that would have happened in the farm town of Lancaster.