Clueless But Hopeful Mama's Top Ten Tips for Moving Across the Country with a Preschooler and an Infant

(What's that you say? No one but me is crazy enough to do this? So these tips are useless to anyone but me, circa two months ago? Pshaw!)

1. Don't be so concerned about how hard it's going to be to move with an infant. Your 2 month old infant is basically a heavy, liquid-producing-and-consuming piece of luggage. She will make you a bit more tired, and require you to sit down and pay attention to her at somewhat regular intervals, but mostly, she'll smile a lot and sleep a lot.

2. Your three-year old? The one that whines, requires constant stimulation, and is prone to fits due to changes in her SNACK CHOICES let alone changes in everything and everyone in her known universe? That one? Yeah, that's the one you need to worry about.

3. When buying your house without seeing it in person (What's that you say? NO ONE but me does that??), it's best to avoid studying the pictures too much lest you spend the first few weeks in your new home with a bad case of vertigo from walking around inside what you KNOW to be a two dimensional scene.

4. Definitely go to your daughter's new preschool "social". Definitely don't spend most of it alternating between staring at your shoes and smiling strangely at people when they pass you by.

5. Join a mother's meet up group. Spend hours lurking in their online message boards. Try to imagine actually, uh, MEETING UP.

6. Don't feel too guilty for feeling just a wee bit relieved that you no longer live in the crazy wildfire zone (or The Big One zone, for that matter).

7. Get to know the neighbors. Try very hard to keep an open mind, even though you think the previous owners of your new house were almost definitely a-holes and you know which neighbors were friends with them and which weren't.

8. Decide to stop fighting the previous a-hole owners over the stuff that they were supposed to fix but BROKE WORSE by trying to fix themselves. Your life is too short and your current life is TOO STRESSFUL to add lawsuits to it.

9. Smudge your house tomorrow whenever the baby is asleep and the preschooler is at preschool to rid house of all the bad juju that must be in here.

10. Understand that one day, you will stop feeling like you are on some very strange, very stressful trip that will end with you back in Pasadena in your old house with your old life. This is your new life and it will only get better, richer, fuller once you really start ACTUALLY UNPACKING living it.