Notes from Moving House

Last week, we packed up and moved to a new house. If you follow me on Instagram, you’ll know that I arrived at the new house to find the yard an absolute riot of roses in full bloom, which I took as a sign that this was the right place for us. We’ve spent the last week settling in and learning how to feel at home in this new place. And also unpacking. It’s the first time I’ve moved in nearly 5 years, and the first time Dan and I have moved together, so I had forgotten what it’s like to be thrown into a new environment. Add to that the unique challenge of sorting out two houses while caring for an infant, and suffice to say, it’s been an interesting week.

Getting out of the Dirty Work

Because we have Elliot, one of us always has to be around to watch him when he’s not at daycare. We wisely scheduled our packers and movers to come on Thursday and Friday so we could take him to daycare, and then return to help with that. It was very smart. Unfortunately, there was enough left to be done over the weekend that we had to decide which one of us had to stay at the new house with Elliot and which went to the old house to scrub five years’ worth of grime out of the crevices that had been hidden by furniture. Because I have the milk, I got to stay at the new house and got out of all the cleaning. In case anyone thinks this was unfair, Dan decided on this arrangement before I had even thought about it.

Luckily, our former landlady was immensely understanding of the fact that we were moving out of a house that had been continually rented without totally turning over for years before we even moved in, and Dan didn’t need to spend too much time cleaning. Unfortunately, our mulberry tree decided to fruit and drop berries right on our front walk the week we moved, so the movers tracked mulberries everywhere, so he did have to clean that up. But he easily finished by Sunday evening, which left us most of Monday to decompress (before he left for a trip!).

You Live Among Boxes Now

Our new place is quite a bit smaller than our old place. Now, we didn’t have as much stuff as would normally fill a three-bedroom house, so moving to a two-bedroom wasn’t too difficult, and we were able to get rid of a lot of old things that we didn’t need, but it’s still a bit cramped since we haven’t fully unpacked. I’ve given us the reasonable goal of being unpacked before the end of June. The first room I unpacked was the office/tea room so that we have a nice place to sit in the mornings, with a relatively clear floor space for Elliot to play. Which is nice because our living room is currently the repository of empty boxes. Sophie has eked out a spot on the back of the sofa that isn’t covered in packing materials so she can rest and look out one of the many beautiful windows.

But for the most part, we are still living out of boxes and with boxes as our primary decor. We’ve cleared a sort of pathway through the boxes in the living room so we can walk from one end of the house to the other. And I still haven’t found the box that has my dirty laundry in it so I can have the clothes I wear most often. I was able to find one last work-appropriate dress this morning, hidden under a sweater in my drawer, but this weekend, finding and washing laundry will be necessary.

New Things and Old Things

I think the most exciting thing (for me) about the new house is that I have a more-or-less dedicated tea room. Yes, Dan’s desk is in the same room, but for the most part, our second bedroom is a space for me to enjoy tea, meditate, and do my yoga. Because we had to purge all the clutter that littered our old spare room, it’s going to be clear (as soon as we get rid of empty boxes!). We decided that it was best to put my tea things in a separate room so that we can close the door and keep Elliot out once he starts pulling himself up on the furniture. It also has an east-facing window, so it gets beautiful morning sun.

We also have a beautiful new kitchen, with more counter and cabinet space, a gas stove, and a dishwasher for the first time in years. Dan is particularly excited about that one, since he’s been on dish duty for the last five years. But I’m excited to start using my new kitchen. We’ve been eating takeout for the last week or so, so the first thing we’re going to do this weekend is sort out the kitchen so I can start cooking again.

But of course, the more things change, the more they remain the same. One of the things that saddened me a little was leaving all the neighborhood cats that I’d gotten to know over the years. So what do I see the day we get to the new house? A cat lounging behind our house! There are two cats that I’ve seen who like to lounge in our yard or sun themselves on the fence. I believe they live at the house behind us, since they look much too well-fed to be strays.

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So that’s where we’re at moving. It’s been an exciting and terrifying week, but the new place is starting to feel like home. I can’t wait to see what it looks like when we get everything unpacked and decorated!

Tea Review: Yunnan Sourcing Oolong Tea Subscription

It has been a while since I’ve done regular tea reviews on the blog, but I thought I’d share a bit of what I’ve been drinking. While I was pregnant, I got very into oolong teas, and that hasn’t changed as I’ve navigated motherhood. One of my favorite things about oolong is that it’s generally the easiest tea I’ve found to brew grandpa-style because the leaves are very big, and I don’t find most oolongs get particularly bitter or astringent if they sit for a while. So when my mom offered to pay for a tea subscription to go along with the gorgeous silver teapot she bought me for my birthday in March, I knew I would be going for oolong, despite the fact that it’s perhaps not the best suited for brewing in silver.

So I joined the Yunnan Sourcing Tea Club and got a subscription for their Oolong Tea Box. Now, after three months of the subscription, I decided to cancel, but that was mostly due to having to save space for my upcoming move (although a bit of it is that my tea tastes run very seasonally — in the future, I might write a post about my ideal tea subscription). But for three months, I enjoyed a monthly box of surprise oolong teas (yes, they post what each month’s box will be, but I didn’t usually look before I got my package).

Because I’m not reviewing specific months, I’m not going to focus on the specific teas I received. In the future, I might start filming tasting videos again and share some of them. But as a whole, the tea box was full of interesting teas, many of which were styles that I wouldn’t have tried on my own. I’d never really gotten into dan cong oolongs and at least one month featured them heavily. It also featured teas harvested within the last year, so it didn’t feel like I was getting overstock of teas that didn’t sell.

The amount was actually maybe a little more than I could get through, given that I didn’t always want to drink the teas from the boxes, but I think that if I ever wanted to exclusively drink teas from a subscription, this would be how I would do it. My original thought behind getting a subscription was just that — as a new mom, I didn’t spend as much time looking at interesting teas online, so having them picked out and sent to me worked well. But I was getting in excess of 100g of tea per month, which, given my immediate-postpartum consumption of just 2-3g of tea per day (grandpa-style), was more than enough to hold me. Now that I’ve gone back to regular gongfu sessions, I could probably get through 150g or so in a month.

Finally, I think one of the main complaints I hear about Yunnan Sourcing is that their selection is daunting. I get it. I pretty much only buy from them when I’m in the market for something pretty specific. But the upshot is that I don’t branch out quite as much. One of my favorite teas from them was a sample that Scott threw into an order. The tea subscription feels a lot like what would happen if you just asked Scott to send you something good each month.

So my bottom line is that if you’re a regular tea drinker, have a definitive favorite type of tea, and have decision fatigue, give the Yunnan Sourcing subscriptions a try. I imagine the “curated samplers” are similar in quality, for a one-off experience.

NB: While this subscription was given to me as a gift from a family member, I was not given any particular incentive to review it and all thoughts are my own.

Thoughts on Returning to “Normal” Life

It should come as no surprise to anyone that my life has changed in the last several months. For a while, I felt so irreversibly changed by the experience of having a child that I thought I wouldn’t return to this blog. But since returning to work, I find myself emerging from the haze of new motherhood and realizing that it’s time for me to find a way to merge my new life and identity with my old ones. Slowly, I’ve stopped seeing this as a complete change in identity and started re-incorporating my old loves with my new.

It was easy to see such a start transition. First of all, my nausea and food aversions ramped up gradually during pregnancy. Then, as soon as the baby came out, it was gone. I felt like a different person. Add that onto the perpetual hunger of breastfeeding and I was a bottomless pit, whereas for months I had had to avoid all kinds of things, simply because they didn’t play well with my pregnant body. There is also a mental difference. Beyond my postpartum depression, which I’ve discussed on my other blog, there is a certain ethereal sense of mental detachment that happens when your sleep schedule is so altered. I spent many weeks basically living my life around the clock, rather than having day and night. It was merely “upstairs” vs. “downstairs.”

And then there was the deep, unexpected sense of love that overwhelmed me from the first moment I saw Elliot. I knew I would love my baby, but I was unprepared by how all-consuming that feeling would be. I will leave it at that, mostly because I can’t find words to put to the feeling.

But then, after a couple months, something started to happen. I started to emerge. It began slowly, with a tea session. I spent some time to have a nice session with a new tea in nice tea ware while I was home with Elliot. And then, one of the early days that we sent him to daycare before I went back to work, I used my quiet free time to enjoy the backyard and have my tea outside, like I used to do each weekend. Finally, we got the news that my husband wouldn’t be taking a new job out of state, which meant that I would be staying in my job. I had spent so long trying to see myself as a stay-at-home mom because it seemed like we were probably going to move that I didn’t know how to cope with the idea that, yes, I was going back to work, and it would be for the foreseeable future.

I will be honest, I was not at all excited to go back to work.

But I had to. And the days of my leave counted down. I hugged Elliot a little tighter. The weekend before I returned to work was the hardest. And then that Monday came and I got up, did my morning routine, and got on the metro.

And I had a wonderful day at work. Being away from work has almost been like a reset. Motherhood has given me a limited willingness to put up with other people’s drama, so I take what I need and leave the rest, and it’s given me more clarity on my work. But even more importantly, it’s helped me see myself as something more than a mother. I’m not the “old” me, but I’m not entirely changed, either.

That has drawn me back to this space. I will still endeavor to keep the mostly specifically-baby-related updates on my other blog, but I am going to try to blend the two sides of this transition into one life, because I’m not one or the other. I’m both. I’m all of it. And it’s nice to be back.