Apartment Living in Phoenix

I once read a parenting article that suggested giving your kids five compliments for every correction. This way they would grow up with a healthy sense of self-worth and a stronger, more positive relationship with you, the parent. Thankfully, the same rules do not apply to my relationship with apartment living in Phoenix. It has been a pretty rough transition for me. I have cried myself to sleep almost every night this week, overcome with feelings of homesickness and despair. But I'm in a better place now (maybe due to the homemade ice cream shared with Tucson friends also living in our complex?) and I think I can try to be fair and at least come up with a few positive things to say in addition to the negative comments I was prepared to rant about. So without further ado...

How I really feel about THE MOVE:

1- Phoenix is DRY! Even coming from Tucson I feel this way. We are ten times thirstier and to make matters worse, the water here tastes like D-I-R-T! Thus, my poor children are suffering from constipation and regular bloody noses. We just might have to fork out some money and jump on the Crystal Light train.

2- The kitchen is the size of a walnut. Keith says it is really an issue of layout, not size, but either way it is awkward. The refrigerator door can't open all the way, due to a wall, and thus you cannot access the bottom drawer of the fridge. And when the dishwasher is open, it takes up all of the space in front of the sink so that doing the dishes is a rather frustrating exercise. There are tons of cabinets squished into the tiny room, but it doesn't make up for the lack of a pantry and our food is spilling out all over the counter, making dinner prep equally frustrating.

3- The "walk-in closet" is hardly accessible after the addition of clothing and with room for only one of our dressers, we are having to really pare down to the essentials. Which could be a good thing I guess. But I also find it irritating to have half of our stuff in storage. I guess I didn't pack well enough, because some of the boxes that ended up in the apartment have things we don't really need, and stuff I want is now buried in the depths of the storage unit.

4- The lap pool that was one of the selling features for this complex is only one lane and has steps at both ends making flip turns impossible. But it is right behind our apartment and so the kids and I visit it nearly every morning.

5- We are the completely wrong demographic for this place. It seems like everyone here is single, a smoker, and has a small dog. We keep opposite hours, walk through plumes of smoke whenever we leave the house, and scream at the sight of animals. I don't think our neighbors like us, but they haven't started banging on the walls yet.

6- We can hear everybody's business. The second night we were here, the couple upstairs had a knock-down, drag-out super big fight and I could hear every word. Thankfully my kids had fallen into such an exhausted sleep that they didn't hear a thing or they could have picked up a whole new vocabulary. This makes me feel really guilty every time my kids wake up at 5:30 am running and screaming, or whenever I do a load of laundry at 7am, but I guess we'll all get used to each other eventually.

7- Did you catch that we have a washer and dryer in our apartment? That makes me SO happy. Scrounging for quarters and lugging loads laundry down the stairs with three kids would have just about done me in, so I am so thankful for this. It almost makes up for the white wall-to-wall carpet everywhere in the apartment. Almost.

8- Our ward is fantastic. Everyone has been super friendly and I love to go on Sundays. And the best part is that my kids love it too. We didn't hear a single whimper from Addison when we dropped him off the first week and those of you in Central Ward know that is HUGE!

9- We are closer to the temple. We went on Saturday morning and we still had time to do stuff the rest of the day. It was really nice to just go without worrying about all the things we should be doing around the house (I guess it helps that we don't really have "house projects" or yard work anymore either).

10- The preschool is AWESOME! There are only three kids in Addison's class so he gets a lot of attention and has a ton of fun reading, painting, and playing house with the girls. This is probably the most validating part about moving here. Seeing him so excited to go and learn is wonderful. And again, no screaming. I was SO happy to not be the parent of the clinging, panicking kid that first day of school. I was even offering advice and telling the other mom it would be okay and her daughter wouldn't die without her! The best feeling in the world! The afternoon schedule and the fact that the school is a 25 minute drive away is messing with our nap time routine and creating two terribly cranking little girls, but I'm trying to over look that because I love the preschool so much.


But the best part of THE MOVE is that we get to see Keith every single day. Even though he is so busy with work and usually comes home exhausted it is great to get a hug when I need it and to watch him wrestle with the kids while I'm fixing dinner and to have some help with the every day things I was doing myself all summer. I am so grateful not to be a single mom anymore.

All in all, I'm glad the first week is under our belt. Now I believe that we can make this work.

PS- If any of you read the Lundstrom's Blog, this post really makes me look like a whiner because we're in the same apartment complex. But it's how I feel so while I won't change it, I will work on adjusting my attitude :)