sans internet

Because photobooth works, even when the internet doesn't.

[This video is actually from yesterday. Still no internet.]

iphone does - the moving process

As demonstrated by the total silence here on the blog, I did not keep my camera out & busy during our moving process. So iphone photos for all!

A commemorative FaceTime photo 
to represent how we most often saw each other for the past few months.
LAME/MY LEAST FAVORITE/LET'S NEVER HAVE TO FACETIME AGAIN.

One happy girl who just got that phone call from her hubz that they were approved for their new home
+ our wonderful Norfolk home

A coffeehouse breakfast on a final morning of packing & cleaning
+ that polaroid has now been the last thing we pack in two apartments -- I think that makes it an official tradition

The packing elves that were sent to help fill boxes. Not super helpful but definitely super cute.

The moving truck (& Budget over U-Haul EVERY DAY, PLZ/THX) + Our final photo in front of our Norfolk door

ON THE ROAD SELFIE! + My view during our rainy drive to DC

I have promised photos of our "new place" when we moved into our Chesapeake AND Norfolk apartments, & didn't deliver either time. SO! Maybe by not promising photos this time, it will actually happen. Ehhh?? 

catching up!

Well, hello.

It's almost over, you guys. This insane adventure that started nearly four months ago has almost reached its conclusion, which means we have almost survived.

Story time!

So, catch you up on the past, oh, month? I didn't talk about it very often or in depth for both safety reasons & to spare you from too much of my whining, but living alone in our Norfolk apartment was basically the pits. I don't do well on my own (as discussed here) & am a pretty socially motivated person, so keeping myself busy May-July was pretty pivotal. I think I did fairly well, because the time seemed to fly by most of the time. Some days, the loneliness of my best friend, roommate & lifelong crush being out-of-state was overwhelming, but Facetime, texts, and phone calls throughout the day helped a little, & we never went longer than three weeks without at least a half day face-to-face visit.

Halfway through July, (right when my blogging hiatus started because I was too overwhelmed to write/think) the apartment hunt was at a total standstill, & Jared was being sent to NYC for another two week round of training. I was starting to blindly pack up our Norfolk apartment without a new floor plan in mind, & only the assumption that we would be downsizing. In an eleventh hour miracle, I happened upon a Craigslist ad that had only been up for 3 hours the day before Jared left for NYC, & he was able (by some serious grace!) able to go look at the apartment, deem it "good enough!" & turn in an application 6 hours before his train to New York left. In another stroke of grace, he was also sent back to DC the following weekend for 48 hours - Just long enough to get the lease signed.

As relief passed over me on the New Apartment front, anxiety was still building up as we tried to figure out the logistics of moving out of Norfolk. Where we struggled to fill our Norfolk apartment, we were going to be seriously downsizing. All I had seen of our new apartment were terrible, flip phone quality pictures on Craigslist (new level of marital trust = achieved), so I made an inventory of all our furniture on a Google doc, & one night over Facetime, we narrowed down what was being sold, stored or brought. From there, Jared researched & procured a storage unit & moving trucks from his hotel room in New York, & I started moving furniture, collecting boxes, getting parking permits for the trucks & organizing rooms. It was madness.

With the help of lots of family & friends, the storage unit was filled one weekend and the DC truck was packed the next. Jared took a train straight down to Norfolk from his training, & we went straight from the train station to our very empty apartment to pack up the final load of cleaning supplies & leave our keys on the counter. I was so sad when we left our Chesapeake apartment, even though we hated Chesapeake & knew that our move to Norfolk had so many good things in store for us. I think it was just emotional to leave our first home. I criiiied & cried. I cried when we locked the door for the last time. I cried when I wrote a little goodbye post to our apartment. NOT THIS TIME. Ha, it was probably the nearly four months of living alone that made me a little bitter, combined with knowing that leaving our Norfolk apartment meant I was that much closer to being in DC with Jared. There were no tears. No heavy hearts. Just pure elation that this weird phase of being apart was almost over. Home is so very much people, not places.

The next morning, in the pouring rain, we made our way up to DC with Jared's dad to move in. It stopped raining almost as soon as we arrived, just in time to be a balmy, steamy, disgusting rain forest level of humid while the guys unloaded the truck & we assembly lined our possessions into the front hall of our new building. No better way to meet the neighbors than in front of your mattress on the sidewalk, amiright?

I pretty much raced up the stairs to see our new home. Definitely tiny. Definitely going to need some creative floor planning. But it has so many features that we were hoping to find, & its laughable square footage is made up for by amenities such as a washer & dryer, a dishwasher & a garbage disposal. Seriously, you don't realize how much you love the ability to grind up the things that make their way down your kitchen sink until you don't have that option for two years. & after so much stress & so much worry about where we were going to live, it was perfect. Everything we need. MORE than what we need. & best of all, there's a Jared in it. It could have been a cardboard box. I just could not be happier to be back under the same roof as him. Almost.

Our first night in DC was pretty hilariously terrible. We didn't have a parking permit for street parking yet, so every 2-3 hours we were having to find a new spot for the car. No easy task, of course, landing the car at least 5 blocks away every single time we moved it. Jared got horribly sick from what I diagnosed to be a mixture of dehydration, heat exhaustion, stress & a really terrible faux-mexican lunch eaten way too quickly halfway through moving our furniture up 6 flights of stairs. I was leaving for Richmond at 6am the next morning, so we had to just keep moving, even with him feeling like he was going to literally lose his lunch at any minute.

The most defining part of the night was when we gathered up my parents' suitcases to take back down to the car. I had borrowed them for the move, but my parents are leaving town next weekend, & I had to return them before them. We had also borrowed their red cooler on wheels for our refrigerator items, which we really didn't have room to store until further notice in our tiny new place. A seriously out-of-it Jared said the car was "just a couple blocks over". I suggested we put the cooler inside one of the suitcases, because even though it won't close all of the way, we won't have to wheel three things to the car.

So, the scene is a very sick Jared pulling a large suitcase with a flopping, half-zipped top exposing a giant red cooler, followed by a very sweaty Kelsey pulling a suitcase without a handle, hitting her ankles every step. Imagine my surprise when instead of turning left onto the very quiet street of row houses, Jared turns right onto the very busy street of restaurants and bars, with everyone enjoying their fancy Friday night beverages on an outdoor patio. & us. With our suitcases. & cooler. & my neon pink flip flops. With a deep breath, I just marched, trying to avoid eye contact . Halfway to the car, I just started laughing, because that was it. That was our first night in DC. Forever in my memory as my poor Jared with his head between his knees, a cooler in a suitcase, & a walk of shame through Dupont. It was so terrible that it was comical (looking back). It was the longest day ever. It was the first page of a new chapter.

I did, in fact, manage to head to Richmond the next morning, & spent a week there with Amelia, working on a new project. I have since been in Chesapeake since this past Sunday, staying with my parents while finishing a final week at my part time job, training in my replacement. It's been a fitting two weeks of R&R, with work mixed in here & there. But tonight! Tonight, Jared will leave work & drive from DC to Chesapeake, VA. We'll spend one final half day here on Monday, saying our goodbyes, & then we'll drive off (together) into the distance (together) to finally make our new home in DC... (together).

& we could not be more excited to greet this new chapter. Together.

The view from our new family room - a parking garage deck & a pretty city sunrise.

now accepting cupcakes & wine

Whew, you guys.

Things are getting a little intense around here. There's going to be some (more-than-usual) radio silence around here as we get this apartment packed up & close out ohhhh so many teeny tiny details. I have reached the point that I'm constantly on the verge of hysterical tears/laughter, because you either cry or laugh when you have a week to pack up an apartment & there's no new apartment in sight to know what goes into storage & what goes on the proverbial moving truck. Can't. Breathe. Need. Paper bag. Also considering making one of those "Take Them A Meal" pages that churches do for new parents, only for me, by me. Bad idea? Yes?

I did wash & pack the flokati on Monday, which is basically like juggling cats while driving a moped on the highway (what does that even mean??) so *high five*

iphone does - the DC apartment hunt

Oh my gosh. It's Friday. Not only is it Friday, it's almost the end of June. HOW.

I took a little trip up to DC for 30 hours apartment searching, which was a fine excuse to see that husband of mine, peek into his new job & take the occasional detour on M St. On my drive up, I realized that I hadn't been into the city since we made the decision to move & OH MY GOSH WHAT IF I HATE IT. But I didn't. I loved it. Still. More? Whatever the level of love, I'm so ready to be a part of it.

 

We went to Arlington & back into the city & round the round-a-bouts 72 times attempting to get off on the correct street. We saw scary apartments & apartments we'd like in 12 years. We met dogs & potential neighbors. We ate salads because of my continued Whole30-ing (not an easy choice in such a delightfully foodie city, let me tell you) & drank a LOT of iced coffee. We probably used 96% of our data for the month thanks to Google maps & spent 30 minutes at a time walking hand in hand while both on the phone with various property managers.

At about 3pm, we got to the point that Jared just pulled the car over into what we were fairly certain was a legal parking spot & just started walking up & down streets that we'd like to live, calling any "For rent" number we could find. Every 30 minutes or so, I'd start getting panicky, & Jared would talk me down. Because no, Kelsey. We aren't going to have to live in our car. & I would look at him, my favorite human, & peace would swallow me. We've got this.

Jared's transition to DC has made time crawl, but at the very same time, this impending move has us racing against the clock. The dark cloud of where will we liiiiive??? has taken over my every thought, as demonstrated by these three paragraphs on that very subject. I lay in bed with my laptop till 1am every night, over-analyzing hundreds of Craigslist ads & rabbit trailing onto random realty websites. I've caught myself rationalizing way-too-expensive neighborhoods & considering way-too-teeny studios, only to swim back up to the surface, take a deep breath & remind myself that in a little over a month, me & that favorite human of mine will be in the same city, breathing the same air in the apartment that is perfect for us right now.

So, I've just got to trust. & be patient. & wait for the peace whale to swallow me whole, over & over again.

[I'm dangerously close to being behind by 3 outfit posts... Working on it. My camera is having an attitude problem, which is simultaneously frustrating & $$ scary. Lovely timing.]

bethunes on the move

I have been nearly bursting with this (non-baby-related) news & I'm so glad it's finally time to tell the world:

Jared got his dream job! We are moving to the District!

A few weeks ago, we decided it was time to take a leap & with every ounce of our beings said yes to DC. Yes to moving our things, yes to saying many goodbyes, yes to some long distance relationship-ing. With every yes that we said, excitement, anticipation, a little bit of wariness & a whole lot of "finally!" sank deeper into our hearts. I am just so proud of Jared - So thankful for him & amazed at how he is fearlessly forging this new path. Myyy man.

So, though it may only be four hours away, we are incredibly eager to meet our new city & welcome this new adventure together. Together. Our time away from each other has been nothing short of painful, & this has been the wackiest season of our marriage thus far. I'm fairly convinced we could be moving to the middle of nowhere, & I'd be thrilled, so long as it meant that I could hear Jared neurotically clipping his fingernails from the bathroom twice a week, wake up to him singing Italian arias in the shower & hold his hand during our evening walks. DC is a bonus - He is my home.

Our bags will be packed for good at the end of July, & there are certainly a lot of goodbyes to say to this city that we have lived & loved in. I started a Norfolk bucket list, so we'll see how that goes, but time is already going by so quickly. We just realized this weekend that it's not unrealistic to start packing up some of the less frequented corners of our apartment. Packing up... to move! To DC! 

Hopefully this explains some of the blog silence recently. Things are getting cray up in here, but I'm really happy that things are set in stone enough for me to talk about this now. Excitin'!