Are you buying a new house, maybe moving to a new apartment? Before you can enjoy it, you will have to survive the tough rigors of moving. It is a stressful time for everyone in the family patience is appreciated by all parties involved. If you have kids be aware it is really stressful for them, you are taking away the stability of their world.
When I moved for the first time with my now ex wife we fought over everything during the move. What is worse is we did it in front of the kids. We would have been better off just mumbling under our breaths at one another and letting it go.
Our kids were 9 and 13 when we decided to pick up and move half way across the country to be closer to my inlaws. I had just been laid off from my job and that was enough stress for me but the job offered from my wifes uncle Jeff was enough to at least know I had work. My wife didn’t help with the stress as she wanted to bring everything but the kitchen sink with her. We even packed the 3 extra rolls of toilet paper from the bathroom.
One thing that I did right was explain to the kids that they would have friends right away as there was plenty of cousins where we were moving to. What made the move go a little better was I gav eeach kid a job to keep them occupied. We let each kid pack their own stuff which made them feel like they were helping.
Just by doing that it made them look forward to the move. It was also good because they didn’t get to see all the fighting that Ex-wife and I were really doing.
Once we were on the move I gave them the job of looking for license plates as we went along to see if they can find one from the new state we were going to. I told them once we found someone with a California license plate we can follow them to California because they know the way and we won’t get lost. Yes it actually worked quite well. The kids worked as a team and kept them from bickering about the long ride.
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