Schools | Wishes And Pixie Dust

June 8, 2011
by wishesandpixiedust Leave a comment

Baby, It’s Hot Outside

We almost felt like we were Floridians yesterday; our high reached 97 degrees, with the heat index in the 100’s! While we are enjoying the weather (after all, this is what we are moving in to!), we do wish Mother Nature would tone it down a little, if nothing else but to save on our electric bill!

We received a shipment of boxes late Monday afternoon, and one of the boxes he brought was a huge TV/Large Picture box, which we requested for Ben’s marble vortex toy. At first we thought it might be a little too big, but then realized the toy and several odd-shaped items could fit in there as well, so we’re actually quite happy that the box was over sized.

We’ve been experiencing a series of “lasts”. We recognize that certain things we do will be the last time we do them, possibly forever (but who knows what the future holds?) We met with our insurance agent yesterday, to find out information regarding the steps we need to do to transfer our policies down to Florida. We have been with this particular agent since we first moved to Fond du Lac from Chicago, twelve years ago. We’re finding it’s hard to walk away from local businesses that we’ve patronized for so long. It’s not going to prevent us from moving, but it’s also producing sadness and a feeling of loss that really we did not anticipate. There are a lot of unique businesses that only exist either in this city or in the Midwest, that we will be walking away from.

One of these establishments is Friar Tucks, and we decided to take advantage of the kids still being in school, and do a last visit.

This is a small bar/restaurant that serves the absolute best one-third pound cheeseburgers. There are a couple other locations in Wisconsin, located in Oshkosh and Manitowoc, and our son Nick works as a cook at the seafood restaurant this same company owns.

This morning we will have another “last”– our son Ben’s 5th grade graduation. This is also a tough moment, as we have had children attending this particular elementary school for eight years. Ben is particularly having a hard time separating from this school, his friends and teachers, and especially his aide, who has been a constant in his life since Kindergarten. She entered his life at a time when the school district was moving away from 1:1 aides as “not being in the best interest of children who have autism”, and we are so thankful that she has been able to remain by Ben’s side in spite of that fact. We will post pictures later of the celebration!

We will stop posting updates on the “Wishes-And-Pixie-Dust” friend on Facebook effective July 22nd, so we encourage you to friend and follow us on Facebook and Twitter. We plan to post a lot of pictures along the way using Twitter, and will be able to post blog updates each night. We are Mark Vitek and Jen Vitek on Facebook, and @FondyMark and @jvitek on Twitter. We do encourage you to friend and follow both of us, because we won’t be posting the same updates on both accounts. It depends on who’s not driving!

Have a magical day!!

May 4, 2011
by wishesandpixiedust 3 Comments

Great News!

If you follow us on Facebook, you already know our great news: our apartment application was approved, and we will be living at The Gardens at Citrus Tower. Doesn’t the name just sound like someplace you want to live? Of course that’s not the reason we chose it! We feel very blessed to have completed the process so quickly, and we are relieved that we have a permanent address to call home once we arrive in Clermont. This will allow us to provide forwarding addresses before we leave, as well as set up the kids in school before school ends for the summer. It’s hard to believe the end of the school year is fast approaching, though we certainly are looking forward to what the summer brings us!

Tonight we attended an awards ceremony at Catie’s school for high grade point average achievement, and realized this would possibly be the last time we would see the inside of her school. At the elementary school where Ben attends, this will be our eighth (and final) year there. It’s hard to walk away from an institution that you have been going to regularly for eight years! We would have this feeling with or without the move, as Ben is in his last year, but it somehow seems amplified given the fact we are walking away from everything.

We’ve been experiencing a lot of “lasts”. We have tossed around the idea of composing a list of the things we want to do before we leave Wisconsin, similar to the Top 100 List we published for our Florida to-dos, but it possibly will not happen. It may be too depressing to see the things we never got a chance to do, and given the rising price of gas, it is very likely our summer entertainment budget will be minimal. Ben will have his camp trip at the end of May, and Catie will be going to Six Flags (Great America) before school ends, so the children will at least get a fun trip in each before our move. And of course, there’s Walt Disney World on the horizon! It is just going to be so AWESOME to be able to go there whenever we want.

We are slowly paring down our furniture. Our oldest son, Nick, will be staying in Wisconsin and renting an apartment, so he will be taking some pieces, but others we are putting on Craigslist and/or Freecycle. Right now our goal is to do one box each in the younger kids’ rooms, and they are doing a great job of donating a lot of their personal belongings. We are very proud. We started the decluttering process with the idea of keeping only the things we absolutely wanted, motivated primarily by the cost of the move. Now that we are locked into our price, we have found that our focus has not changed. We are still going through every item and deciding whether to keep or toss. We will get a small refund if we go under our estimated weight, but we really like the idea of being able to start over, and we want to do that with as little items as possible. We will have 2 walk-in closets, as well as other closets, but we are losing approximately 600 square feet than what we currently live in. It’s all good, we will be one less person with Nick staying in Wisconsin, so I don’t anticipate that we’ll feel crowded in.

Thanks for following along! Please feel free to friend either one of us on Facebook if you have not already. We will only keep our Wishes and Pixie Dust profile on Facebook through our move (and settling in period), though our website will stay up indefinitely.

April 26, 2011
by wishesandpixiedust 3 Comments

Random Thoughts…

As we continue with our packing and moving forward with our dream of relocating to Florida, we thought this would be a good time to update you on different things related to our move.

Packing : The boxes are slowly being packed, and we continue making our weekly trips to Goodwill. We are up to 47 boxes packed. 🙂 We have all our holiday decorations and supplies in plastic totes, and we have decided to transfer them to moving boxes, for two reasons. One, it helps us to cull what we have, and two, it prevents probable breakage and ensures our holiday belongings will not be rolling inside a Mayflower moving truck! We have not yet decided if the totes will be moving with us, or if we will buy new ones in Florida.

We did not reach our goal of completely packing the downstairs by Easter, but we have made a considerable dent in it. Our oak video cabinets, secretary, and wooden fish stand are on Craigslist, but we have not had much success in obtaining a buyer. We will leave them on there for now, but will soon be reaching a point (because of space issues) where we will need to make the decision to donate the items and forego the cash we may have earned from the sale. Another option is a rummage sale, but we really do not feel it is worth our time and energies to pursue this, to possibly earn a few dollars.

Medical : We are making sure that all our medical appointments are scheduled in before we leave. We are really fond of the doctors that we are established with here locally, and it will be hard for us to make the adjustment to find new ones in Clermont, but we don’t want that to be a pressing issue at first. Vision and dental appointments have been taken care of, and the children will be obtaining physicals this summer before we leave. This is a requirement of the school district in Clermont. We are just waiting to finalize our housing plans in May, and then we will be able to obtain the appropriate form needed.

Soccer : Our daughter is gearing up to begin her soccer season: she will be able to attend all practices and games except for the final tournament, which we believe will be held on the Saturday after we leave. The schedule is not up yet, so we don’t know for sure. We will need to purchase new cleats and shin guards this year, but she loves soccer and plans to continue it in Clermont once we move, so it is a worthwhile expense. Due to our move, Mark decided not to coach her team this year, a decision we feel is best for all concerned.

It’s Getting Closer! We are getting more and more excited as our moving date draws closer. We are thankful that we have had time to sort through all our “stuff” and weed out the unimportant things. We feel that we are on a good time table– we are under three months but we have a lot accomplished. No, we did not meet our downstairs packing goal, but we are not far off from it. In the month of May we should be able to finalize our apartment choice, which is awesome!, and while June and July will be busy months, we will not be frantic and stressed out because there is so much to do. Jen plans to do some scrapbooking in May and June, as the craft room/sunroom will be the last room packed. We have discovered that staying organized is the key to a successful move. We have tried to anticipate all our potential expenses and needs, set up a time table and work a little bit every day doing something in preparation for the move. A box packed, or a file folder of papers shredded is one less thing that needs to be done in July. Every night we listen to one of Lou Mongello’s podcasts, which really inspires us to keep moving forward and realize our dream of living in warm, sunny Florida with Disney World just a short drive away.

Thanks for following along!

April 7, 2011
by wishesandpixiedust Leave a comment

Attitude Makes The Difference!

As I was browsing through Status Shuffle on Facebook last night, I came across this status: “Attitude is the difference between an ordeal or an adventure!” Even though I’m sure a move from Wisconsin to Florida was not the intent of whomever came up with that particular status, I realized that it really has become our philosophy.

Every single person who learns of our move says one thing: “take me with you!” Some express the sentiment that they could never do that themselves due to various commitments. Moving across several states can be considered a huge ordeal. There are so many considerations to think of: hiring movers, the packing, researching the area, the packing, finding a new home to live in, the packing, and settling the children in schools, just to name a few. Did we mention the packing? :=)

As we have mentioned previously, we choose to think of our move as an adventure. Things are falling into place nicely, but it’s not all a bed of roses. There are so many uncertainties, such as where will we live, what do we need to pack in the car with us, what if the movers lose some of our boxes? The packing itself is a huge proposition and not for the weak of heart. We have given away a lot of our belongings, some we will not miss, some it hurts to give away. Even though it’s just “stuff”, it’s funny how we can become so emotionally attached to things. Mayflower has estimated our box quantity as 102 packed boxes; it will be interesting to see how many boxes we end up with.

Overall we are very pleased at the progress we have been making. Our original goal was to be done with the downstairs by April 18th. I don’t foresee that happening; the kitchen itself will probably take a couple weeks in itself, and we haven’t started there yet. We pack as we have time, but we are not in super packing mode yet. Our goal is to pack one box a day: some days this happens, some days not. We however feel very fortunate that we have had so much time to sort through things, discard what needs to be discarded, and put certain items on Ebay/Craigslist/Freecycle. It ensures that we will be taking only those items that are meaningful to us.

As we approach our 100th day out, we have been working on a special blog post. Be sure to come back and visit us to check it out!

March 19, 2011
by wishesandpixiedust Leave a comment

What a week!

Dear friends,

It seems that we were caught up in our daily life this past week and therefore didn’t put as much attention to our move as we would like. Even so, we did manage to get a blog post out, make a run to Goodwill and donate two pieces of furniture to two different recipients in our local Freecycle group. All in the name of progress.

I don’t believe we’ve formally shared this fact on our blog, but our youngest son Ben has autism. We wish to share this information to provide hope as well as information to other parents who may have a child with special needs, and are considering a long-distance move. When I refer to keeping things as normal as possible for as long as possible, he is the reason why. We are acutely aware that this major life change, while good, will be hard on him especially. Right now he is very excited to move to Florida; he has really embraced our dream, and it truly is a dream we all share: Mark and I would not consider moving if it proved to be a true hardship for either one of our children.

On Monday, I met with his teachers and staff for his annual IEP meeting. I have been very open with the school as far as our moving intentions, so they have been aware for a couple of months now that we are relocating. We are moving forward with his IEP as if we were staying here, and modifying his curriculum to meet those needs. Until we have our permanent residence, it is too difficult to guess what might happen in Florida. The special education teacher has put in several phone calls to Clermont Middle School, all of which have been not responded to at this point, and I admit, it’s a little disheartening. Our intent is to place Ben in public school, but I am also willing to homeschool/virtual school him if the public school district does not meet our needs.

Tuesday was our Ben’s 11th birthday. We celebrated by going to Chuck E Cheese for dinner, and then back home for an ice cream cake and presents.

Wednesday was “spend a lot of money on car repairs” day. :=) We currently have two vehicles, but we made the decision from the start that we would only be moving one. Unfortunately, the car we are selling decided to have a flat tire, so we replaced that on Wednesday. We also brought in our other car for a tune-up, as we had a $20 coupon to our favorite auto repair shop. $700 later, our car is in tip-top shape :=). We will be bringing it back in July to make sure there are no additional repairs that need to be completed. We are using the sale proceeds from our 1st car to pay off the loan on our 2nd car. We are excited to be able to begin our journey without car payments. We considered trading in both our cars for a newer and bigger vehicle; we have our eyes on a Hyundai Santa Fe, but as long as our car is in good condition, we’re going to wait and save up money for a bigger down payment and look at buying a new vehicle in a year.

Thursday was St. Patrick’s Day as well as Catie’s orchestra concert. The corned beef turned out delicious in the crockpot, and Catie played her violin beautifully.

Today (Friday) we sold a craft storage container for $5 on craigslist, did some decluttering in the sunroom, and our Mayflower rep brought over a huge stack of boxes for us. Right now the challenge is where to put the packed boxes. We are still four months away from our move, and while we live in a fairly big house, there really is little available room just to stack boxes. This is why we have started to donate/sell our furniture this early. Catie has her solo ensemble choral performance tomorrow, but we are hoping to find time to empty out the secretary and list it on craigslist. We are fortunate in that we have a small foyer by the front door, and this enables us to put our furniture or other belongings there while they await pick-up. The area in which the secretary is in will allow us to place quite a few packed boxes there.

We also went to the local book sale at the Fairgrounds: it’s our yearly tradition and we always spend at least $30 in books and magazines. This year we spent $0. Every book or magazine was looked at in the context of : “Do we really want this bad enough to move it?” And the answer every time was “no!”. It really wasn’t as enjoyable this year because of that. While this transition time in moving is necessary and worthwhile, we also long for the day when we are settled in Florida and able to relax into routines, and yes, acquire “stuff”. :=)

We appreciate your readership: please feel free to add us on Facebook if you haven’t as of yet, and we love to read your comments about our adventure :=) Some of our decisions have been made because of your feedback, so we do appreciate them all.

Enjoy your weekend!