From Washington.

In our “pursuit of happiness” we’ve decided to leave the city that has been our home, and YSD’s only home, for the last decade plus.

In front of DC’s most iconic monument

When we decided we were leaving, we wrote up a bucket list, and tried to hit some of our favorite, or yet-unseen sights in our soon-to-be former hometown.

Something about “man plans, god laughs” rings true. But we did manage to hit up a few of the spots on our list. And now we have a hit list for the next time we visit.

Our DC bucket list

As you can see, we didn’t make much progress.

But what we did accomplish was one of my #1 requests: visiting the top of the Washington Monument. A few snapshots from the top:

We also visited the Lincoln Cottage, a misnomer for this 10,000 square foot mansion that Lincoln spent a few summers during the civil war. We couldn’t take photographs inside, but it was certainly worth a visit for this history buff.

And then baseball interceded.

YSD joined a baseball tournament on our last weekend in DC as family, so we didn’t get to spend that weekend gallivanting at museums and soaking in the best monuments. And while we were happy that by winning one of his two games on Day 1, he made it to Day 2 of the tournament; Game #3 was a “L” and we were able to go home by noon, avoiding a very hot and humid afternoon on the fields.

Instead of a trophy, the kids got baseball cards and popsicles. And they couldn’t have been happier.

We spent our second-last day in DC cycling by the monuments and taking in the Fourth of July fireworks on the White House lawn.

Packing up.

The most difficult part of an adventure is deciding where to go. But the second most difficult part is packing. When the adventure is a cross-country move to a new city, leaving everything you’ve known for the past decade (or, for YSD, your entire life) behind, packing becomes particularly challenging.

And for me, perhaps a close third in the list of “difficult things about an adventure” is anticipating the packing. Spreadsheets, to do lists, “Alexa Remind Me To . . .’s”, there’s a lot that goes on before the adventure begins.

This journey being a rather momentous one, I thought I would eliminate the second-most-challenging part of an adventure by hiring someone to do it for me. Professional packers. I would not need to wrap up every dessert plate and ramekin — no sir. Someone else would do that for me. A revelation. Except, instead, I’ve spent weeks thinking “I should really start packing today” only to talk myself off a ledge and remember that I tried to outsource that stress.

Outsourcing—check.

Stress elimination—not so much.

Part of our strategy had been to leave YSD’s room last - keep life normal as much as possible. But after a friend “destroyed” some lego creations during a sleepover, resulting in one of many meltdowns, I suggested we pack up the lego for the journey. We don’t want for lego in our house. And when we spent a year “abroad” during the pandemic, disassembling and reassembling that year’s lego accumulation was a weeks’ long task. So this time we’re trying to move them intact. We’ll see how that goes!

A note from YSD:

My house is messy but organized. The house is normally tidy. It’s overwhelming to see everything in such a different way. It’s hard to see everything not tidy, today.

But packing day arrived, and went as smoothly as it could when all your worldly possessions are wrapped up and placed in precisely 79 cardboard boxes.

Hoping to avoid continuous screen-time, I encouraged YSD to draw on the boxes with multi-colored sharpies. In a moment demonstrating the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, YSD took it upon himself to draw the contents of every box on the outside. That way, we would know what was in it. The packers were quicker than he was, and he became increasingly anxious about the lack of hydrogliphics on each box.

But the boxes were packed and a spreadsheet listing their contents was nearly complete (albeit in far less detail than I had hoped - owing to my main role in keeping YSD out of the way).

Next up: The pod.