Change of Address

Since I moved out of my parent’s house, I’ve moved around quite a bit. The longest I’ve stayed in the same place was my house in North Bend, outside Seattle, where I lived for five years. The second longest stay has been my apartment in Christianshavn, where I’ve lived since April, 2006, shortly after moving here. For most of that time I had the place to myself. Lisbeth moved in with me in March of last year, and then Ellen joined us in Febrary of this year. And although we could certainly have continued to live there, space was getting a bit tight.

This weekend we moved to a very new (and less central) apartment. The new neighborhood is called Ørestad, which I wrote about over two years ago here. Back then I thought it was the last place I’d find myself living, but… a lot has changed.

There are many reasons for the move. One was that Lisbeth was tired of looking out of our windows and seeing either a brick wall or a neighbors apartment. We certainly fixed that. We were also tired of hauling the baby and losts of baby stuff up and down the stairs. We solved that problem too (we have an elevator now). And there were more practical reasons too, like the fact that the ancient wood floor in the old place was constantly giving us splinters, and Ellen will be crawling soon.

We got more than we expected. We wanted a deck, and we got two. The apartment is on two levels — on the 7th and 8th floor (or 6th and 7th according to the European way of counting floors, which starts with floor zero, or the ground floor), and each has a deck. We also got to move in a month before we pay any rent.  The timing worked out well because my parents arrived for a visit on Monday, so we had help moving. (Not just help, but help dependent on us for a place to stay, which makes for very cooperative help indeed.)

Still, this move is a bit of a shock. This apartment is completely different than the old one, and it’s in a completely different neighborhood. We hadn’t even talked about moving until about a month ago, and this was only the third apartment that we looked at. It all happened very fast. Still, we really like it. And it seems that Ellen does too. Or she seems to like the view anyway. Twice now I’ve sat her in her chair looking out the window and she’s been quite entertained by what she saw.

But this week hasn’t all been about moving. We’ve had a lot of fun watching my parents get to see Ellen for the first time.