Please forgive the dust bunnies in my hair. I’ve just clawed my way out from underneath a towering mound of boxes.

We are currently using these boxes as BLINDS.

The boxes here are heavy and plentiful and they’ve had me surrounded for weeks.

For a while, I wasn’t sure I’d ever dig my way out. But I’m starting to see glimmers of light peeking through the piles. I finally unearthed my jewelry box and my mouse pad.

Friends, there is hope.

In case you haven’t heard (I’ve been off the grid a while), we just moved from one house to another a whopping five minutes away. I swear, it might as well have been the moon.

The act of miraculously containing every single, solitary, dad-blasted thing in one’s possession (from mango chutney to pet rabbit) then lugging every last scrap of it bodily somewhere else then cleaning up the slovenly dust bowl left behind is soul-crushingly, ridiculously hard. I mean, it just is. (Props to you military families. Seriously.)

I’ve heard moving is like childbirth.

That’s probably a bit of an exaggeration. I mean, the new house doesn’t scream at all hours like my newborn did, and in the aftermath, I don’t have to do ungodly things with a squirt bottle. But I can definitely see the parallel.

Moving is painful and messy and exhausting and all your embarrassing bits are revealed (like when you move that armoire you haven’t touched in 14 years and find a shag carpet of lint underneath.) There’s all the back-breaking build-up, that huge push to the finish line, followed by a mind-numbing wave of the “What now’s?”

Here’s the room where random boxes go to die. It is now a fort. Making chicken salad out of…well…you know.

But now that we’re here and settling in and finding room for a metric ton of stuffed animals, it’s totally worth it.

We love it here. We love the way the sun lights up the dining nook. We love all the neighborhood girls who come over and spill bubbles on our porch floor and ride plasma cars down our hill. We love the sense of new life beginning. It’s palpable…like that new baby smell.

Maybe years from now, I’ll forget how painful it was to get here and I’ll be ready to do it all over again.

NOT BLOODY LIKELY.

Let’s just put it in the books right now; somebody’s gonna need to bury me in the backyard. I’m here now, and I’m not leaving.

I’ve thrown away my KitchenAid box to prove it.

Don’t mess. This girl has a power tool – and she knows how to use it. Sort of.

So let’s go ahead and make a pact. Until at least 2019, don’t even bother to ask, “Are you out of boxes yet?”  The answer will be NO.

The boxes are here to stay. And so am I.