GO PACKERS!

While the Cabezas love for our Green Bay boys has not diminished in the slightest, my title refers not to our football team, but the role we played when attempting to gather and contain all the items that we hoped to bring with us to Quito.  It was a long process, but we're on the way, so we obviously got it done. (When I say on the way, I mean stuck in the Atlanta airport the day after I thought we would have already arrived in Quito....but that's a post for another day...)

I'll start by admitting that I had some grand plans for our packing and shipping items to Quito: three boxes of books, several pieces of artwork, a crockpot and food processor.  The more we learned from our school and other folks that had made the move to Quito, the more we realized that 'shipping' was not really an option.  If we wanted it to make it to Quito, we needed to carry it ourselves. (You'd think this would have made me abandon my bring just the 'important' or unread 3 boxes of books plan, but you'd be mistaken.  I'm a stubborn woman.)

Clothes.  I'll give you the cliff notes version: We laid out all that we wanted to bring, organized them by category, took an inventory of the number of items in each category and then forced each other to cut a certain number of items in each category.  Here are the results:

Audrey: 

19 categories for a total of 138 clothing pieces 

(7 categories included 5 pieces or less: robe, cocktail dress, jerseys, jeans, shorts, jackets and cotton dresses...yes my categories were as specific as 'cotton dresses')

Javier:

22 categories for a total of 118 clothing pieces

(14 categories with 5 pieces or less and one of his categories was 'boxers'... no, I did not count my underwear in my categories or pieces count)

This was the only thing that saved us:

HUGE thank you to Barb and Steve Staps for supplies us with some vacuum bags and Mame and Andy for giving us some of theirs as well! They very much saved the day.

We stressed about weight for an eternity instant and then decided we'd just have to pay whatever the fees were because we weren't going to ship anything and we needed some belongings.  Here are the four AMAZING duffle bags (we bought at an Army Surplus store!) all packed and ready to go!

I have to tell on my husband: I took this photo Wednesday thinking we were 100% packed and on Friday, minutes before we left, I casually asked 'Anything else to go in here?' knowing he would say 'No'....but instead he said 'Oh yeah, just these 3 blazers and a jacket' ....HA-what?!?!

I'm sure you're wondering if those bags contain 3 boxes worth of books???  The short answer is no :( When it came down to it, a lot of my grand planning didn't fit into our bags, but here are some extras we did end up with for our little Quito adventure:

Two cook books: Traditional Chile one and Uzel Family Cookbook

Games: Carcassone, Mancala, Phase 10, two decks of cards, Tenzi, Sobriety Test

three photo albums

one book of poems by Pablo Neruda 

6-7 educators books (classroom management, etc)

tons of printed pictures (ready to frame after we arrive)

a complete set of Spanish Vocab flashcards

Two UVA folders, notebooks, sticky notes, several pens and pencils (courtesy of the Oetgens!!)

a UVA flag

one print of Logan Circle that Jody gifted us last year (but only after I cried and said we wouldn't have anything to make Quito feel like home unless we brought some art or personal books)

one ipad (THANKS GUYS!)

one macbook air

one new Canon Camera

one kindle (thank goodness cause I wasn't able to bring ANY of those books in the boxes...)

3 sets of cute notecards

one Harry Potter book...in SPANISH (courtesy of Gail! what a GREAT gift!!)

and a partridge in a pear tree.

Okay, we probably forgot the partridge (and maybe several other items) but at least I'm feeling ready and prepared...for now.  I'm sure I'll do a post a few months into the trip titled The stuff we didn't bring and wish we had... and then another a few months after that one called Stuff we brought that we absolutely did NOT need to bring.... so stay tuned for those!