Recently, my family decided to take the plunge and buy a small acreage in the country. Although this is my wife and mine's umpteenth move, this would the be the first move for our 2 kids. Not only were we moving houses, but we were moving from town to a pretty secluded spot. This lead to a lot of nerves on the kids part. in order to help them come around on the whole idea, we tried a few different things.
The first thing was to come up with a list of all the things they would be able to do their, that they couldn't do in our current place. This included planting all sorts of plants (my son wanted to plant strawberries and peppers, while my daughter wanted all sorts of flowers), flying kites, going for
tractor rides, etc. We wrote them down, and committed to doing as much of them as we could during the first month there.
The other thing we did was allow them to come up with names for whatever they wanted. So far the garden is "Crozier's Grocers", one of the shed is "The Cozy Cabin", and the acreage its self is now known as "Lazy
Owl Acres.
Finally, once we had moved, we unpacked all of their things first, so that they could start to feel settled and back to normal as quick as possible. This also had the side effect of them being occupied while my wife and I were busy unpacking the rest of the house.
So far we have been out "in the middle of no where" , as my son says, for about a week, and they have been settling in quite well. I'm interested if anyone else has dealt with big moves/changes with small kids, and ways you found to handle it.
8
