I”m writing this blog while perched on my toilet.

Nice image, huh?  If it’s any consolation, the lid is closed, and my pants are in place.  So, I’m not actually toileting. This is just the only place I could find to sit.

When we moved to Israel for medical school, we had no help from movers.  In retrospect, I can’t even imagine how we managed.  Every single, tiny detailed problem had to be taken care of by us.  There was nobody else.

This move (complicated by 3 more kids than our last international move) has professional movers doing all the major work for us.  Everything is paid for.  I’m sitting around blogging while they’re working.  The hardest part for me is that the only place I found to sit was on the toilet.

With some very occasional and sparse moments of stress, I can say that this move has been almost, just maybe…fun.  Fun?

It’s all about perspective, right?  The majority of our packing for Israel occurred in the 23 hours prior to our plane’s departure.  Seriously, our entire lives were barely even packed less than a day before we left the country for the first time.

So, we stayed up nearly the entire night, and left with over 20 boxes of junk – many still open and half-packed – that needed to be taken to the post office and mailed to us.  THAT idea cost us over 1000 bucks and tons of work for my hapless mother.  We didn’t get those boxes in Israel for nearly a half-year, so easily 80% of their contents were totally unnecessary.

Words fail me in describing the stress and expense of that move.  Probably the worst part, though, was that every single expense – down to the pack of gum we bought at the gas station on the way to the airport – was paid for on loans:

“Hello, sir.  That will be 38 cents.  Enjoy.  Oh, actually, you’ll pay about $12.50 for those 16 strips of minty chewing freshness since it’ll be about 40 years until you pay this off…assuming you don’t flunk out of med school or get killed by terrorists.  Did I mention to enjoy yourself?”