We’re not that exciting these days, just unpacking and putting away and more unpacking and more putting away. My dad went with me to the apartment today and cleaned our carpets while I did a bunch of other cleaning. Yawn, I know, but it needed to be done. I need about an hour in there tomorrow and that should be a closed chapter. It was really weird walking around the mostly empty apartment today. The last two places we moved out of made me cry and there is a certain sadness to leaving whatever it is you’ve grown used to, but I’m not necessarily crying-level sad over leaving the apartment itself. It is weird though.

Maddie is feeling the move the most, she could hardly contain herself when her stuff was being carried out by our moving companies. This is due to the fact that she has several friends on campus she enjoyed playing with at the playground. She’ll still get to do that, but it won’t be as easy as saying, “Can I go invite _______ to the playground?” and then just going out there. I can’t guarantee we’ll be over there as much as I think we will be and that’s sort of hard.

There’s a bit of a myth about moving onto a seminary campus – the whole concept of “instant” community as if you move in, add some water and poof – relationships everywhere! Being introverted makes relationships harder to develop, and somewhere inside me I had the notion that putting myself around a lot of people all the time would make that easier, but it wasn’t so. If anything, it may have made it harder because our home, which in the past was usually pretty open to having people over a lot, as were we, became a pretty serious refuge as there are people all around when you walk out. We didn’t have people over nearly as much as I thought we would before we moved there and I think it might have had something to do with our need to be alone which could only be met in the apartment.

I’m not sure what I thought would happen when we moved there – become instant extroverts? I for sure didn’t realize the differences between the campus extroverts and campus introverts would be so clearly drawn, nor that seeing that difference would make any difference. But it was and it did. Anyway, living there was tricky for us in many ways and we continue to be very grateful for our new spread. I’ll post some pictures once I have a more reliable connection.
Last semester was hard, which isn’t news to anyone who has followed along with us this year. Moving here feels like a reset button of sorts. I know it isn’t a magical fix-all to everything that didn’t go according to our expectations, but it feels like it has potential to be better, and sometimes feeling that potential is exactly what is needed.