How quickly a memory creates...

We'll be leaving this house in a couple of weeks.  Forever.  A lot sooner than we anticipated when we moved in here eight months ago.

I'm busy trying to pack.  Panic mode packing really because MIL arrives on Monday to "help", and as I've said time and time again, bless her, I do need her help, and I am grateful for it, but the stress and anxiety both her visit and her help creates.... well!

But as I was doing the bed time chores tonight, for some reason I was hit by a barrage of memories.  Moments of reminiscince.  Things I never necessarily thought of as important.

Ciaran was never here in this house.  He was at the old house, he lived there while still in my middle.  But he was never, ever physically in this house.  And he will never ever be in any house I live in in the future.  That kind of thought adds to the loneliness I feel with being parted from him.  And the old adage that he is forever in my heart or that he is everywhere that I am, just doesn't help when we talk about the physical.

Toby was and is here.  This is where he has lived for most of his first year of life.  This is where I sat, at 3am, feeding him, with my feet safely tucked up on the couch for fear a mouse would run up my leg.  We were in a mouse plague and occasionally I would see one run across the floor.  Ugh. 

So this house holds many of Toby's special "firsts".  All the learning and growing that they do in the first 6-8 months... it's here in this room.

And so despite the bad memories here.  The ones that make me feel sick.  The bad outcomes of them sacking Shane and then going "oops, our bad".  All of that.  No, I'm not going to miss them.  I'm way too jaded to just get over things like that. 

So, that's why I was so surprised to be hit with the good memories all of a sudden.  Well, not just the good, but the... "this is the way it is" memories.