We Like to Move It, Move It!

Our family has loved the silliness of the Madagascar movies and the infamous King Julien who loves the ridiculous. He is a ridiculous king who is all about his own awesomeness and dance parties where they all like to "move it, move it." December has been a crazy month of "move it" for us. We have not yet had any dance parties, there is still one more day so who knows?

Moving Apartments: In my life time I have lived in many different homes. In Idaho my family moved around in Blackfoot and outlying areas several times. The move I remember most was from the Rose area to the Moreland area. My mom spent many weeks working on the house before we moved there and we moved over a period of time using the pickup trucks that we always had for farm work. My dad and brothers did most of the heavy lifting, which always included the family piano. Since Sean and I have been married we have moved to six different homes in Utah, Massachusetts and Missouri. My favorite move was from Utah to Massachusetts when Sean's company paid for movers coming in and packing up the house for us!

At the first of December we completed our first and hopefully only move in Singapore. The experience of leasing an apartment in Singapore is so different from anything I have done before. Here are a couple highlights:

First of all, when you lease an apartment you can choose anything from unfurnished to fully furnished. When we first arrived here our predecessors had been in the apartment for a year. They told us that the apartment was "fully furnished" but yet there were numerous things that they had purchased or that belonged to the church. We were clear on some things but unsure on others so some time was spent sorting that out.
When you lease in Singapore you use an agent to support you and the owner of the property also has an agent, much like buying a house in the US. Our agent helped us negotiate what things would be left in the new apartment we rented and which things would be removed. The previous renter had left behind numerous things including dishes, a hair dryer, cleaning supplies and other miscellaneous items. It turns out that is common to do and when we moved we mostly just took what we wanted and left behind things that we didn't want. We also had a list of things that belonged in the apartment that we couldn't take, but that was much less of a list than we expected. Our agent let us know that if it wasn't listed on the lease we could take it!
When we moved out, part of our responsibility was to hire professional cleaners to come in and clean the apartment and drapes. The same happened in the place where we moved, and it was fabulous to move into a perfectly clean place. That was a really nice perk since I don't know when we would have time to clean anyways!
In our new apartment building we had to pay a large deposit to move in just in case we or those helping us damaged the elevator. Further we also had to pay to have the elevator walls covered in padding on the moving day.

All of this was quite an adventure, but we managed to "move it."

Moving Brower Family: It was an amazing last couple of weeks having my mom, sisters, older brother, brother-in-law, and three nephews visit us in Singapore. It was a really tender mercy for me to have my mom able to make a trip here, and I appreciate all of the family members who made that possible. My mom might be 80 years old, but she still can keep moving it and managed to keep up with a lot of walking around Singapore as we took her on many adventures. One day she hit almost 20,000 steps. Singapore is a place of moving it and you really can't get around here if you don't walk .... er, move it!

Moving to 2025: That's the next big move coming for us this week. We will all be moving our calendars to a new year and thinking about all those changes we want to make in the coming year. We will have big changes in four short months as we finish our mission, and we don't know yet what that will all mean. Sean tells people that we need to decide what we are going to be when we grow up. We do think about it sometimes and then say we will figure it out when we get there. Some things just come in surprises in spite of our best laid plans, but we know we can trust in God and that He will help us in our next steps!

Finally, on New Years Day we are also moving it to Thailand for a few days. We look forward to meeting with missionaries and mission leaders that we have served with over the past year. We are also very excited about spending time in the beautiful Bangkok Thailand Temple. Tune in next time for the report!

Happy New Year everyone!

Photos