By Sarah Abruzzese
We move a lot. Since getting married six years ago we have lived in five different places. And while we absolutely love all of the experiences and wonderful friends we’ve made along the way, it is also without question really really hard. Here are some tips I’ve learned to make moving easier for families when children aren’t in school yet.
1. Sign up for everything you can from art to soccer to swim classes. For anyone who lives around water whether that be a pool an ocean or a lake, I highly recommend swim classes. We did them with our child starting super young and I just watched him swim the length of an olympic pool last week.
By Sarah Abruzzese
2. Don’t stay home even if you think you need to get your house settled, cleaned, organized or whatever. Create a weekly schedule even when you have nothing really to schedule. Take part in every free activity available and consider becoming a member at some attractions. Go to library story times and craft hours. Join Meet Up groups for moms with children. When we first moved to Southern California, we went to the local regional zoo weekly. My toddler petted everything from a tarantula to a rosy boa. And while we never met anyone we certainly spent some great hours there. They also had craft hours where he could do a craft while getting an age specific lecture about the animals. We became members at a half dozen places like the Aquarium of the Pacific where we visit routinely and by being members we completely cut down on the cost of visits. Over time we stopped going as frequently as other things filled our days.
3. Visit playgrounds. If you don’t like the playground near you, find one you do like. Don’t be afraid to talk to people. Playgrounds are a great place to source doctors and schools and local activities. When we were most recently in Northern California, I met two other mothers at the central playground. Both families just happened to have moved recently as well. I said we should hang out and do stuff together for those first few months and if we discovered we didn’t like each other we could easily move on but at least we wouldn’t be alone. We ended up moving away after six months, but those two amazing women turned out to be really cool and got me through being new. Our children were good friends too.
By Sarah Abruzzese
4. Find restaurants or other places that you can make visiting routine. We find a good weekend breakfast/brunch place to go to. We visit every weekend and quickly get to know the staff, which makes us feel like someone knows us. We then build on that ritual with other things like taking our dog on the same hike. While eventually it gets boring to go to the same place and do the same thing over and over again, it immediately provides us with a feeling of stability and being known. It is really important to pick a good place to eat and hike though!
5. Join a gym or a club that offers free childcare. On our last two moves, we joined gyms that offer several hours daily of free childcare as part of the membership. This enables me to workout and have some time to myself. Downtime was beyond hard to come by when we moved without known childcare and your child stops napping! The gyms we’ve joined are part of hotels. So in both cases there were restaurants, snack bars, pools, spas and nail salons in house. An added bonus of these gyms are that the employees had background checks and there are cameras in the childcare areas.
Sarah Abruzzese is a former journalist who has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post and other publications. She currently lives in California where she runs Hug Bug Shoes, her children’s shoe company. She writes in her spare time.