Passports, Pools and The Purge

We focused on three things today: completing the application to renew my older son’s Aussie passport, listing our house here in Vegas for rent and the beginning of The Purge.

The first issue was obviously something of a mistake surprise. I was just booking the one way tickets for my hubby and oldest, when I went to get their passport numbers. I casually open my son’s passport to read the expiry date…5 days ago. Noice! Needless to say, I went into a bit of a tizz for a moment as I’d just bought the return tickets for myself and my youngest son (he has not yet got his Australian passport, so we had to buy return). Now I have to work out how to get my oldest his new passport quick so that we can *try* to fly home to Oz on similar days. **

It’s no big news that the housing market in the US isn’t tops at the moment. So to make our move happen so spontaneously, we are renting out our house. Let me tell you, if we lived in a make-anything-happen-with-the-wiggle-of-your-nose kind of Universe, I would transplant our house here directly to the Sunshine Coast. I love everything about it - especially the pool. But since that’s not gonna happen, we are renting this beauty out whilst we rent for a while in Sydney. Now I know that our neighbourhood has a good record of getting rentals snapped up quickly (the last one went in 2 days, the one before that in 3) so I was hopeful. I popped up a brief ad on Craigslist and within 2 hours there was a lady ringing my doorbell asking if she could have a quick peek. Wow, if this family ends up taking the place…that might be a record for the street!

Ah, one of my favourite parts of a move – The Purge. I find sorting through things and getting rid of unused or neglected items cathartic. And while it true that I do this on a mini scale every few months (especially with growing boys), the kind of purge that happens when contemplating a massive international move is on different scale altogether. Goodbye to many clothes, books, toys, bits and pieces that I always *meant* to use in a craft or for a gift somehow. Auf Wiedersehen to the old artificial Christmas tree, the dusty treadmill, the Nerf tee ball set (hey, we’re going to Oz, the boys will be learning cricket!). Adios to the small appliances that are easy & cheap to replace – the toaster, the kettle, the boys’ CD players. The most difficult purge of all for me? Shoes.

And damn if I don’t realise that it makes me sound like a character from SATC, but I only became particularly enamoured of shoes and handbags when pregnant the first time. So these sexy or cute or stylish or impractical bits of leather and cork and rubber really do mean something to me.

But The Purge calls for a no-holds-barred pragmatic approach, so if they strangle my pinkie toe, they’re out. If they no longer match a single outfit, they’re tossed onto the heap. Possibly the best part of this process is knowing that when I get rid of really well-cared for items, they’re going somewhere that people in need can make better use of them than I do.

Day 3 down…only 25 left to go

**Note: This idea of flying with our two boys separately is actually a bit genius. Each boy will get the undivided attention of the one parent, allowing us to play games, cater to their own whim and avoid the inevitable arguments that siblings have when they get tired, hungry or notice any apparent infraction by the other.