The best thing about moving with children is the stories that sprout.
Our move forced our kids to pack up their bedroom stuff. Not the furniture and not the clothes. But the toys and mementoes were their business.
Our 6-year-old son embraced the challenge. He dragged empty cardboard boxes into his room and managed to tape them closed himself. He wrote his name on the outside and added them to the mountain of boxes in the living room.
His system worked perfectly and his boxes were transferred to his bedroom in our new home.
I had noticed, a couple of weeks before, that he had gathered all the decorations from his sister’s birthday celebration and squirreled them away in his closet.
On moving day, when I wandered into his room with a knife to slice through the tape on his boxes, I discovered his happy little secret.
He’d filled his boxes with a cloud of inflated birthday balloons.
The story has lasted a lot longer than the balloons.
