Home is where the heart is...except when you can’t remember which box you packed it in because every box looks exactly the same.

People say that moving is a stressful process. As someone who has moved only five times, I have no idea what they’re talking about. My last move was completely stress-free.

The moving process began when my family and I started to pack everything we owned into boxes. In the beginning, everything was fine; but slowly, a couple boxes turned into a mountain, and what was once our living room looked like a warzone of packing tape casualties. That was when the fun really began.

We stuffed as much as we could in each box, twisting, turning, and shoving in all sorts of items in any way that we could. At one point, I got close to filling a box, looked at the small pile beside it, and thought, “I can definitely fit that all in here.” Then, I had one leftover shoe. ONE.

“Really?” I thought. “Just one shoe? Why not two? What am I supposed to do now?!”

Meanwhile, my family had a cat, and she would insist on trying to help the family move. Literally, I would turn away from a box for only ONE SECOND, and I’d come back to see that brat cat sitting inside of that box, staring back at me with a grin because she knew she wasn’t helping. I would shoo her away while saying, “No cat, you cannot lay in the kitchen utensil box. You are NOT a kitchen utensil.”

Later, after completing a bunch of boxes, I suddenly froze.

“Oh snap.” Turning towards the massive pile of boxes I had just packed, I thought, “Where did I put my phone?” I quickly started digging in the few boxes that I had not sealed with packing tape, digging through the various types of bubble wrap and packing paper, but I couldn’t find it. Since I was about as tall as Danny De Vito’s legs, I gulped as I glanced over at the other 20 boxes that towered above me.

“Mom, call my phone,” I called out to my mother. She looked at me suspiciously from across the room and raised her eyebrow.

“Why?”

“No reason. Just do me a favor and call it.” She looked at me oddly, but dialed anyways. Faintly, I could hear my phone’s ringtone and began to tear open several boxes. Finally, I tore open the right box and saw my phone, ringing wildly, on top of my mother’s stainless-steel pans.

The second part of the moving process was bringing the boxes to our new place. Trust me--carrying one box may be easy, but carrying over 50 boxes BY HAND? That is the complete opposite of easy. As the obvious athletic child of the family, I just loved carrying all of the boxes, especially the heavy ones: the bigger, the better! After spending hours heaving, pushing, pulling, and drop kicking, I would see that I had moved a box a grand total of...three feet! Lifting boxes had me thinking, “Please, give me more. I live for this.” Needless to say, I got promoted to putting away items instead.

The most entertaining part of the moving process, by far, was actually moving in. I had convinced my family to let me help carry some of the lighter boxes and picked a box filled with plastic Christmas ornaments. On my way down the stairs, I had a brief moment where I defied gravity because one of the steps decided to momentarily disappear, and I had no choice except to let the box fly down the steps and land gracelessly at the bottom.

THUMP.

“What was that?” asked my mother from upstairs.

“Oh, it’s just your fine china!” I sarcastically replied. “It’s only has some cracks in it, so we’re all good!” I heard her laugh and I went to pick up the ornaments that now decorated the basement entrance.

Of course, trying to find anything after we had packed everything in identical boxes was eventful, to say the least. Everyone had their own priorities. Each of us were in a different part of the house trying to unpack and find our items. We may have not been in the same places together, but we could hear each other just fine. In fact, I remember that our communication skills were so remarkable that we worked so well as a team.

“Mom, is the wifi router in the TV box or the office box?”

“Office!”

“Where’s the blender? I feel the need to blend.”

“Have you seen my shoes? I need my heels.”

“Try the closet by your room.”

“Honey, where’s my supersuit?!”

“Shut up, Dad!”

When we finished officially unpacking and organizing, we were so proud of our accomplishment. We marveled at how wonderful our new home was, and decided we should celebrate our hard work. So, how exactly did we celebrate?

We took a long nap that was just short of a miniature coma.