Moving Day

We took a last family picture at our old house...

...and then called in the troops to help us move. 

Not only did we hire a moving company to move the stuff, but Ashlin and Dallin were awesome and got 10 of their friends to come help.  And my brother in law Eric and his son Derrick came with their truck.  It was such a blessing, I don't know how we would have done it without them.  I ran out of steam and time to pack, so they just got these big bins and would go to old house and fill the bins, and come to new house and dump them out, and did that back and forth.  Ha ha, it was a little crazy. I saw a picture on facebook later of one of the teenage boys wearing a bunch of crazy stuff he found in my master bedroom closet.  It cracked me up.  I was so desperate I didn't even care that all these teenage boys were packing my master bedroom closet!  Who knows what they saw, ha ha. 

 I had scheduled movers to come on saturday, Oct 13th.  I called thursday to verify they were coming still saturday, and found out he had the date wrong and scheduled us for sunday.  >STRESS<  I said NOOOO!  Not only did we not want to work all day sunday, but the new people were moving in monday, so we needed more time to clean up afterwards.  So he said they could squeeze us in friday afternoon until night.  I was stressed, cuz I didn't have everything ready to move yet and now it was a day earlier.  UGH.  The movers got to our old house at 12:30pm on friday, and did not leave our new house until 1am that night.  CRAZY.  But we DID IT!  In 1 day we moved everything from  old house to new house.  We didn't end up having time to move anything over earlier, because the house was not complete.  We had to move in to a construction zone, because we had to be out of old house.  We didn't even know for sure if we would get the "Certificate of Occupancy" from the Town of Gilbert until 2 days before we moved.  There was still a chance we would have had to move our stuff in storage and not live at the house.  Bruce and I prayed and fasted wednesday that the inspector would pass the inspection so we could move directly to new home.  I cried when I found out he passed it and we didn't have to move twice, I was so thankful.

Then saturday Eric, Chrissy, Derrick & Zack came to help us more. 

Mostly Chrissy and my girls cleaned the old house...

(so so so thankful to them for helping so much)

 Sunday night, after we had made every last trip from the old house and finally had it emptied and cleaned we went back as a family for the last time.  I wanted to have one last Family Home Evening in that living room.  Lily officiated and stood on the hearth (like the kids took turns doing every week) and conducted family business.  Then I gave the lesson.  On our way there I had found a picture from a lesson manual on the floor, one side had a picture of children playing outside and the other side was a picture of Jesus.  I cried as I showed my kids what I found.  I felt like one side represented all of the wonderful family memories we had had at this home, and then on the other side I showed them the picture of Jesus and said that no matter what home we live in, no matter how big or small, the only true happiness comes from serving the Lord.  It was a really tender last family meeting in our old house.  It still makes me cry. We sang hymns and prayed there for the last time.

 Then our last family activity there was... 
hunting for lizards in the backyard.

The boys had been on a mission for the last many weeks of collecting lizards in our old backyard and taking them to the new house backyard.  They were afraid there weren't as many lizards at the new house. 

They brought many jars of lizards over.  We all had our different moving priorities... ha ha ha.