Kids,
As you’ll experience throughout your life, moving is a HUGE pain. I would likely think it more of a pain if Nana & Papa and Grandma & Grandpa hadn’t moved your mother and I several times throughout college. Moving to KC was easy because we were college students with basically nothing. It all fit in a single Uhaul. Moving to our homes on 150th street and then to 121st got exponentially more involved.
Moving 8,500 miles away would have not been possible without your mother. I’m positive that this will not surprise you all, and I want you to personally thank your mother for the effort she put in to make sure that Johnathon: you had your ketchup, Christopher: your goldfish, and Madelyn: well you couldn’t talk so we didn’t quite know what you needed to have a smooth landing. Sorry honey. Rest assured, mom packed many different items she thought you would enjoy – including fruit/vegetable squeezes for on the go snacking.
Moving an entire house is hard because of the quantity of objects that you have to move. The simple part of it is that you know you have to move it all so it’s like a fire sale, everything goes. For our move to Mumbai that was far from the truth. We had three categories that we needed to consider and plan out. Ship, Take, and Store.
Store
There are just things that we didn’t want to ship to India, but knew we wanted to keep. Much of this was the living room furniture, kitchen appliances, cutlery, and supplies. Nerd Moment: The electrical grid in India is 240V instead of the 120V we have in the US. Because of this, many of the appliances we had would not work…they would melt. So we couldn’t take them.
Apartments in India all came with wardrobes so items like bookshelves and dressers needed to be placed in storage. Luckily for us, with Brandon and Angie living in our house, we could just move these items down to the basement.
Also, since the temperature in India fluctuates between hot (75F) and hotter (~110F), winter cloths were not needed for every day use, but might be needed if we decided to travel anywhere cooler. This proved to be a challenge for packing, you don’t need much, but a few items. With this in mind, we went through the closets and pulled out all the winter gear. Most was boxed up and stored but a few items made their way to India.
Take
Based on advice from the school, we were told to not have you kids move to India until the last minute. Image 3 kids locked up in a hotel during monsoon with your mother. Love you all, but there would be casualties 😘❤️. We took the school’s advice and delayed the move for you 4. This decision required you to have enough cloths to get through the month of July, which would end up having to be packed in suitcases at the end of July and taken with us on the plane.
Ship
Lastly, everything else we needed, we shipped. Packaged up by movers, loaded onto a container and shipped to India. The transit duration would take 8-12 weeks. So nothing we needed soon after landing could go in this category.
One key category that was included in this group was items that would help everyone maintain some level of normal. This would give us time to find the local foods that everyone would enjoy and eat without issue. Since Johnathon and Christopher subsisted off of grilled cheese and Mac and cheese we were worried. We ended up shipping ketchup, goldfish, fruit snacks, etc… to allow for a slow transition to the local food.
Have I told you to thank your mother. All of this happened because of her, and believe me, it’s not easy to make the decisions of what to take and what to leave behind and which mode of transportation is best.
Love,
Mom & Dad
The Hotovec's 