A Survivor's Guide to Moving with a Toddler

or: what to do when your new home tries to kill you

Moving house is rarely easy, even if we forget the pain of the last move (and, like childbirth or daytrading, we always do). You look around at your current place, think, you know, there’s not that much stuff! It’ll be a good excuse to get rid of some detritus that’s piled up over the last five years.

This is the first lie we tell ourselves. How much stuff do we accumulate over five years? Go to your Amazon order history—or just think of the mountain of boxes you’ve broken down to recycle. (If you’re more of a Costco or farmer’s market/thrift store person, the story is the same.) Give it two months and the simple fact is that the amount of stuff that’s been accreting in your home is an order of magnitude larger than what you think. However much you think you have, it’s wrong. The law of large numbers applies.

I suspect all of us have a lot of something. Purses, records, shoes, sweaters. Things we forget we have a lot of, because they are simply a part of our lives—an assumed, baked-in fixture of our firmament. Sometimes, these are easy to move. Other times, as in my case, they are not. I collect books. I don’t have nearly as many as my father does, but they still filled fifty-two boxes.

Have you ever tried lifting a box of books?

Let’s fast forward through the mortgage gauntlet and the endless signatures required to close. Honestly, it’s exhausting even for a lawyer. I sign things for a living, and by the end of the stack of paper, my right hand is cramping.

“Congratulations!”

The closing agent hands you the key and you foolishly think that you’ve made it. It’s ours.

Don’t fall for this: it is the set up to a joke to which you are the punchline. Nothing is easy in this world, and if it is, question it. You make your own luck, mostly by falling on your face enough times to learn what not to do—and moving is, every time, a prime opportunity for growth.

Audra and I drove to our new home, excited to walk in as its new owner, to survey our property and make final plans for where everything will go the next day during the move. We still had plenty of packing to do and needed to get back to our old place. It turns out your property owns you, too.

We stopped by my parents, who were watching McNugget and Clare, and walked to our new place, which is a few doors down the street. I unlocked the door and we walked in, each of the adults scattering to the areas most interesting to them. McNugget wandered, entranced by all of the light fixtures.

The next thing I recall is seeing Clare in the dining room, chewing on something green. I ran over and saw that it was a block of green rodent bait, a peanut-butter-tasting welcome note for the dog. I bent over, stuck my hand in her mouth and began extracting the bait. This is when Audra noticed what was happening and asked what I was doing.

Here’s where I made a mistake: I casually said, “Rat poison.”

She screamed. Clare panicked, clamped down, broke my skin—and got the poison into my bloodstream. As many of you know, I’m severely immunocompromised, so this meant a trip to the ER for me and a trip to the emergency vet for Clare.

Rather than spend Friday evening packing up final things and organizing for the movers coming at 9:00 am, I got antibiotics and Audra sat in the waiting area of the saddest place in any city as Clare ate activated charcoal and lost what remained in her stomach.

None of this went according to plan and I didn’t even mention the first trip a plumber had to make out to the new place to repair a leak found during the final walk through.

Audra and Clare got home around 11:30 p.m., and we had Papa John’s pizza for the first time in ages, because it was available. A word to the wise: don’t eat the saltiest pizza on earth the night before you get next to no sleep and spend the next day moving 23,000 steps. We laughed, because what else was there to do. The last thing I said before we turned out the light to steal a few poor hours of sleep was, “We need to be on our toes. The new place is trying to kill us.”

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Two days before the move, I got word that our rental truck wasn’t available where we’d reserved it. So I had my mom wake up three hours early to drive me thirty minutes to the only location with a large truck. Audra, McNugget, and Clare stayed behind to do a little packing before heading to the new place. Internet was to be installed at 8:00 a.m.

Part of my internal narrative was, This won’t be that bad. We’re only moving a mile and a half. As if that mattered—like I was going to walk the mile and a half and call it a day. The hard part isn’t driving from old to new; it’s loading and unloading.

Magical thinking is a real thing.

The internet guy showing up on time was one of the few things that went off without a hitch. We’ll ignore that he had to come back a few days later to set up a different plan, since the new house requires more bandwidth than the old one. (Honestly, that one’s on me.)

The movers, however, did not show up on time—and when they did, they were not a model of efficiency. I don’t know that I’ve seen two guys in their twenties smoke as much as these two did. Honestly, I’m pretty sure the smoking was just an excuse to move slower. Their dedication to breaks was impressive. While unloading at the new place, the talkative one started digging through my office gear. He saw my microphone and Focusrite and got animated.

“You have a podcast, bro?”

“I am a white man in my forties, Rich. Of course I have a fucking podcast.”

I’d booked them for six hours, which the owner assured me would be plenty. He also swore a twenty-six-foot truck could hold everything from a townhome. Three extra hours later—and with enough still left behind to require another round of movers next weekend—I can tell you: don’t trust anybody in this industry. It’s like wedding planning: they’ve got you by the balls and they know it.

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At this point, I’m just trying to keep my spirits up. I can usually find the humor in anything. The movers finally get out of Dodge at 5:30 p.m., with the talkative one promising he’ll give me a call about the pool table in the basement that I don’t want. He builds pool tables, you see, and he can probably “make something of that one.”

Sure thing, bruh, give me a call.

Audra has spent the day running all over Pittsburgh trying to get baby gates that will work on the new stairs, getting rugs, running needed errands. When she gets back, we unload the car. She’s had it, and she hasn’t even seen where we are in the move itself. I’m promptly told that the new place is not safe for McNugget and it was exhausting trying to keep him safe that morning when the internet guy was there.

“We can take care of that in the morning. We just need to get him from my parents, feed him, and get him down for bed. He’ll sleep through the morning.”

Barely calmed by this, Audra and I walk to pick up the boy and the dog. Clare is, of course, on a special boiled chicken and rice diet thanks to the rat poison episode (remember?) and needs to go to the vet every day for five days. Somehow, in the middle of driving the 26’ truck from the rental place to the old house, I also managed to pick up chicken thighs and rice, boil the shit out of the chicken, and make enough rice for two days of meals.

I had forgotten all of this as we left my parents, and my dad ran out after me with the tupperware full of chicken and rice.

Right, of course.

Clare’s fine, but out of sorts. Nothing has been normal for a few days. McNugget is hungry and cranky. We feed him and get him to bed. When we’re putting him down, Audra spots outlets within reaching distance on both sides of the crib, so we pull it away from the wall and hope for the best.

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It hadn’t occurred to either of us to eat all day, and it’s 9:30 p.m. by the time one of us looks up to say, “Man, I’m hungry.” And we both are, but we’re stuck. We do nothing about it. We keep moving, unpacking boxes, desperately trying to baby-proof. One of the gates Audra bought works; the other, not so much.

She’s had it. “Why are we doing this?! This is a huge mistake. We can’t keep him safe here.”

I move several boxes in front of the steps going upstairs and say, “This gate will do for a day or two. We’ll find a solution.”

“Can we give it back?”

“Pretty sure that ink is dry and the money is wired. And the guy who lived here is dead.”

“Maybe the house killed him.” She laughed, finally—the laugh of someone who has accepted her fate, whatever it might be. A Type A control freak letting go of the wheel. I engulfed her in a bear hug, the wingspan of a 6’6” primate twisting around her. “God, you stink.”

“Time to baptize the new house. Gonna take a shower.”

My friends, choose your words wisely. Baptisms involve water—and I swear I invited what transpired. I showered. The water barely cleared lukewarm. After brushing my teeth and getting dressed, I went to the unfinished storage room, where the water heater and HVAC are, to turn up the temperature. I opened the door to find this:

There’s nothing quite like seeing water drip down right next to an exposed lightbulb, splattering the floor near 52 boxes of valuable books.

I sat down on the concrete, not yet ready to face telling Audra what I found. She called down to tell me she was giving Clare her 11 p.m. dose of medication. You don’t want to double up this pill. My ass is getting cold against the concrete and I notice the drip slowing. Eventually, it trickles to a stop.

Upstairs, I find Audra in bed.

“Where have you been?”

“Don’t use the en-suite bathroom until I can get the plumber back out here tomorrow.”

Her eyes flash at me.

“Why?” I show her the video. “We are so fucked.”

She pulled the covers up over her head.

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I wish I could say I did the smart thing and went to bed too, but then, I’m not that smart. I’ve heard it said that the cure for anxiety is action, and I think that’s generally true. Sometimes, though, there’s a more important problem to solve, such as exhaustion. So I puttered around, moving boxes to the right places and setting up Audra’s desk so she could work the next day. All the while, I forgot that McNugget would be waking up sometime between 6:00 and 7:00 a.m.

I finally fell into bed around 3:00 a.m., having started that cursed day at 5:10 a.m. When I heard McNugget laugh over the baby monitor, I wanted to cry.

I got dressed, took the monitor, and snuck out so Audra could sleep in a little bit. McNugget greeted me with a hoot and a jump when I opened the door. Well, the house hasn’t taken him yet! I thought, too soon.

We went downstairs and had breakfast, unpacked some toys and books, and had ourselves a very nice morning. When Audra emerged, it was about time for the boy’s morning nap. We put him down and I lowered the back seat of our SUV and made my way back to the old place to begin moving the shockingly large amount of leftover stuff.

I spent most of the day doing this, a moribund husk of a person tossing things in boxes and hauling them 1.5 miles down the road. At 5:45, I tell Audra it’s going to be my last load of the day. I had to stop. Physically, I could take no more. But I accidentally sent the Instacart grocery order to the old place, so one more trip it was.

As I was sitting at the light to leave the old neighborhood to head home, I got a call from Audra—and from the first sound of her voice, I knew something was wrong.

“I need you to come home now! McNugget…” She struggled to get words out. I hit the gas and told her I was on my way.

She was waiting for me in the driveway with the boy in her arms. I parked and jumped out, asked where Clare was. She looked at me as though I were speaking Dutch—coherent enough to make out some intention, but off just enough not to make sense. I ran into the new place, found Clare wandering around, getting into boxes, leashed her, and ran back to the car. I grabbed the bags of groceries and told Audra I was going to drop off the dog and the groceries at my parents.

My parents were perplexed when I burst in. I handed the leash to my dad, told my mom I was leaving the groceries in their garage refrigerator, and muttered something about taking McNugget to the ER. Then I was gone, leaving them with more concern than answers.

When I got back to the car, McNugget was in his car seat, shrieking.

“What happened?”

“His face. His lip. He fell.”

Get in the car and go. Audra and I sat silent with the boy bleating in the back for a few minutes as I made our way out to the main road.

“Okay. Where do we need to go? Urgent Care? ER?”

“I don’t know.” She opened her phone. “All the urgent cares closed fifteen minutes ago. Children’s. Go to Children’s Hospital.”

I drove to Children’s Hospital. During the drive, I managed to get the story. Audra was tidying up the kitchen, waiting for me to return. McNugget was playing—like he had a hundred times before at the old place—with a metal colander. Somehow, he’d managed to get both feet and both hands into the colander and was rocking in it a bit when, all of a sudden, he pitched forward, face-first into the hardwood floor, with no hands to break his fall, as they were wedged in the colander.

Instant sturm und drang, wailing, and lots of blood. He wouldn’t let Audra look into his mouth, so it was difficult to get a sense of the damage.

I dropped the two of them off at the ER entrance and went to park. I don’t know what people are up to on Sunday nights, but the nearly full parking lot was not what I wanted or expected to find. It took me several minutes to find a parking spot, and when I did, I saw that I had received a text from Audra.

“Grape elevator. Find the cow.”

Was this a riddle? A typo-filled text? My brain could not compute what she was trying to convey. Maybe I’ve finally started hallucinating.

Up in the hospital proper, I walked up to a security guy and blushed before I could say anything. Then I laugh wildly. I’m going to get arrested. Then I heard myself say a sentence I didn’t know existed.

“I need the grape elevator and the cow.”

Put that on my gravestone. The security guy nodded and pointed me to a bank of purple elevators and whispered, “First time? It’s a children’s hospital. All the things have stupid names.”

I found Audra and McNugget sitting in a waiting room that has stupid cow faces everywhere. This place is a nightmare. The boy has calmed a little and I got my first good look at him. His eyes were focused, if tired. (We were now past his bedtime.) His upper lip was still bleeding and very fat. Then, the first bit of good news in ages.

“We went to the ER downstairs first. They took a quick look and sent us up here to urgent care. They didn’t see anything serious, and it’ll be faster up here.”

About ten minutes later, we’re called back. No serious damage. He’ll be fine. Motrin when we get home. Put him to bed.

Yes, ma’am.

On our drive home, I turned to Audra and told her, “I’m going to wrap you in bubble wrap. If we go four-for-four as a family with ER trips this weekend, I will lose what’s left of my goddamned mind.

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A legit Waterford Crystal chandelier, that we hate and will replace

We got home and put the boy to bed, two hours late. It could have been worse.

It could have been worse. This became our refrain that night. An hour after getting McNugget to bed, she asked whether I’d eaten anything that day. I couldn’t remember, but my stomach and general lassitude indicated that I hadn’t. She hadn’t eaten and asked what we had to eat. Only then did it occur to me that our dog and our groceries were at my parents’ house, and that my parents’ text about their grandson had gone unanswered.

My whole body wanted to give up when I stood to walk the hundred feet to my parents’ place. Instant, unthinking revolt. Haven’t you done enough damage for one weekend? Clare bowled me over when I walked in, knocking me straight back into the heavy door I just closed. My dad looked up from the Steelers game.

“He’s fine. Hurt his lip.”

I did my best to be polite and make some small talk. I love my parents, but I was beyond capacity for people-ing. I leashed up Clare, grabbed the groceries, and went home, put away the groceries and knew I wasn’t about to cook dinner.

Audra walked up beside me. “Papa Johns?”

I laughed so hard it hurt. I insisted on something a little higher brow, so we settled for wings from Buffalo Wild Wings. Only the best for the McGranns. We ate. It could have been worse.

After food, I began saying I was going to shower and realized I hadn’t called the plumber. So I sought out the card he left on Friday and gave him a call. Left a message.

Audra called from the kitchen, “I gave Clare her pill. Don’t give her another one for twelve hours!” Always the doctor.

We got ready for bed. I clean my face in the kitchen sink, wiping a coat or four of grime and splashing myself with cold water. It was the best I felt all day. We were all at home, the boy sleeping soundly, with a fat lip but otherwise healthy. Clare still had some charcoal on her beard, loving every ounce of boiled chicken and rice. I was yet again on a prophylactic antibiotic, with biceps tendinosis, and a body ready to collapse. And Audra was learning how to stop fearing loss of control and love the winging-it lifestyle.

It could have been worse.

We got into bed under the covers and laughed a little about the weekend. As I was about to turn out the light, Audra let escape a tiny gasp and a suppressed yelp.

“A mouse just ran across the floor and into the closet.”

I turned out the light. Tomorrow is a new day.