Moving, hotels, and chaos.

Well, we moved out of our house over a week ago.  It was bittersweet, that's for sure.  That was the house where both our babies have grown up.  Our first house we bought together.  We put a lot of work into it, and it was a perfect little house for our family, so we were a little sad to be moving out.  But, although we were sad to move out, we are ecstatic to be moving on to the next chapter of our lives.... Mark being finished with his PhD (soon, YAY) and moving back to the US (close to my family, YAY).  So. so. excited. 

Now, the last few days in our house we had hardly any furniture.  Or toys.  Or fun stuff.  Riley was perfectly happy to run around, playing with the broom, and yelling and enjoying the echo that happens when you have hardwood floors and no furniture at all.

But mostly she loved putting every last remaining toy into the TV cabinet.  She was "helping" me clean, I guess.  Also found in there... packing tape, ear thermometer covers, fruit snacks, Jackson's pajamas, and a few screwdrivers.  As I said, she was helping.

After we moved out of our house, we stayed with Mark's parents for about 5 days.  Riley was in heaven.  New place, different toys, a DOG to play with, and of course, Nana and Grandad to entertain her.

They live pretty close to the beach, but unfortunately the weather was pretty awful while we were there so we didn't get a chance to go.  In fact, we did the opposite.  Convinced Riley it was a good idea to go puddle jumping.  That is, until we realized her gum boots had already been packed away and shipped to the US, so I tried to improvise with plastic bags.  Needless to say her feet got very wet and she was not impressed.

I personally have never really been an animal lover.  It's just not my thing.  But Riley is just absolutely obsessed with dogs.  She loves Nana and Grandad's dog Harvey.  He is pretty unamused by her, but she thinks he is just the greatest thing ever.  Especially when he hops up on the couch, she yells "Hey!  What's he doing up there!" and then hops up right next to him.

It has definitely been interesting, these past 10 days.  It's a really big change for these two kids... several moves, getting rid of their toys and books, watching their things get sold or packed up, schedules and routines totally messed up.  Jackson had a bit of a rough time sleep-wise at first, waking up a TON and needing to be rocked to sleep every single time, although he was pretty happy during the day so you might not have known how shocking he was at night...

And Riley?  Well, while we were at Mark's parents house she went to bed later than she's ever gone to bed, she was just absolutely wired!!  It hit like 5pm and she just got all kinds of energy, running around, yelling, having fun, just crazy!!  And of course, not sleeping in any later.  And it seems that we've been paying for that lack of sleep ever since, our little two year old has been TOUGH work these past few days... Cute, but tough work.

On Monday we moved in to the hotel we are going to be living in for almost 3 weeks.  It's... okay.  It's a 1.5 bedroom apartment-style room, which means Mark, Riley and I share a room and Jackson gets the 1/2 bedroom, which is really just a glorified closet, separated from the loudest toddler ever by just a sliding door. Jackson has actually been doing remarkably well with his sleeping, all things considered.  Riley does well at night, but it's a bit of a mission to get her to sleep during the day since she basically has to sleep in broad daylight.

We have just under 2 more weeks here.  It's going to be a long two weeks, most likely.  See, we are on the 4th floor, and yes there is an elevator, but there are a few sets of stairs before and efter the elevator, which makes getting up and down on my own with two babies rather tricky.  Also, we are in the city, which means parking is never guaranteed.  Soooo loading and unloading babies could potentially be quite a mission.  But, it's only 2 more weeks, then we're back at Mark's parents' house for a few days, and then WE FLY TO THE USA!!!

We're trying to take advantage of our last days in New Zealand, which is a bit tricky since Mark is also frantically trying to write his thesis.  But we did manage to take a quick trip to the zoo today, which was pretty fun.  Exhausting, but fun.  And of course, we asked Riley what her favorite part of the zoo was, and her answer? The playground.  (There was an animal shaped slide at the zoo).  Sigh.  I was quite a fan of the monkeys, I must say.  Look at the mama and baby monkey (bottom right mama is nursing her little baby monkey!).

Also, you might be wondering why some of the pictures look a bit... odd.  We have really crappy internet, which means uploading photos like I normally would is not an option, so I had to resize these photos, and long story short, they are very small files and overly sharpened, so they look a little weird and different than the original photo.  But oh well, you get the idea.  This is longest my internet has worked in ages so I'm just going to go with it.

USA... 17 days and counting!!!