Packing Surprises

When you sort through all your stuff after 4 years, you find some great surprises. Here are a few that have made all the packing not so bad. Speaking of packing, I always thought I'd move from Michigan having a moving company pack all of my things. Well, my dream has been shattered. Due to annoying financial considerations, we are doing most of the packing ourselves (meaning just me). I have to take a small amount of joy in the fact I don't have to pack the kitchen. But I did have to clean the fridge and the stove/oven. I hope the new house has a self-cleaning oven, because that's a dirty job!

Surprise #1
A gas receipt from our first few days in Michigan. Dated 8/13/04. Found in Kyle's bedside table drawer. Price per gallon: $1.99.

Surprise #2
Teacher appreciation notes from when I taught at Timpview High (circa 1999 - 2001). Here's a sample:

Dear Mrs. _______,
Thanks for making class fun and teaching us new things. I'm really thankful that you put up with my crap.

Thanks for Being a fun teacher. You've really made english exiting. Rachel PS -- sorry about the spelling errors.

Thanks for being a great English teacher. You are the only English class I have never failed. Justin

Thanks for being the only cool teacher in this school. My first period teacher is really mean. Then I go to your class and I forget about how much I don't like her. You are the best! Emy

Thanks for always being nice to me and getting on my case when I was out of line. PS - I am not sucking up.

I can't decide if I was a good or bad teacher from these notes, but they were totally fun to read. I'm glad I kept them, but they are now going to be recycled.

Surprise #3
I took some dried flowers out of a pitcher I had on a dresser upstairs. Out came a Target gift card. The card must have been in there from the time I bought the pitcher, which was shortly after we moved here. On a recent trip to Target, I used my $15.00 gift card. Still worked!

Surprise #4
Finding some of Jillian and Hayden's old artwork, Mother's Day cards, etc. I love to look at how they've changed and what they used to say.

Tip: I bought a big under-the-bed kind of storage box for each of them to save their artwork treasures. Now I feel like I can keep quite a bit of artwork, especially oversize pieces. We're going to go through the boxes when we move and pick out a few things to frame and put up in their new rooms. Jillian has a floral still-life she did in art this year that made it into the district art show. We might plan her whole room around that.

Well, better get back to it. We head out on Monday. As Hayden says "only 4 days left!" I have lots to blog about, but not a lot of time.

Amy