I also survived! Moving to another state with kids
And finally, I hope to survive moving off this platform 🧙♀️ 🤝 👻
Tiny bit of housekeeping. First, if all goes according to plan, this is the last Evil Witches you will receive via Substack. I’m sick of the baggage. Your next issue should look very much the same but come via Ghost.
I chose Ghost as the new platform for two main reasons: 1.) Unlike Substack, they don’t take any part of the fees the paid subscribers pay, and, more importantly, on your end, you shouldn’t notice any real difference if all goes according to plan. Witches like Casey Johnston, Lindsey Stanberry and Kate McKean all have made the move and had positive things to say.
You shouldn’t have to do any kind of new logging-in process to see it once you get your first Ghostly Witches. If you have a paid subscription here, it will carry over. You will be able to comment like before. But I just wanted to give you a heads up in case you notice you’re not getting issues, and perhaps they go to spam.
To answer your possible questions, a.) I did this under my own steam (Ghost did not approach me or offer me anything) and b.) I won’t be offended if you still refer to Evil Witches as “a Substack” much the same way I don’t care when my kids’ classmates call me “Mrs. [My husband’s last name.]”
Some advice on moving with kids
A few weeks ago, I asked for tips from witches who have experienced moving with little kids on behalf of friend of the newsletter Edith Zimmerman. Here was some of the advice witches shared!
From Amelia Granger:
We recently moved from London (England) where my two kids were born and lived the earlier part of their lives, to the US - first to Portland, Maine, where my family is, and then a few months later down to Jersey City, NJ, when my husband and I found jobs in NYC. My youngest was two, and my older one was six through most of that moving odyssey.
Don’t be shy about asking parents in the playground for all their local recommendations for kids’ stuff: You could Google daycares, school, swim lessons and all of that stuff, but it’s no substitute for word of mouth. I would start chatting with other moms/dads at the playground and ask for their opinions on local activities, summer day camps, etc. When I said I was new in town, people were excited to tell me all the dirt.
Kids get excited about new bedroom stuff: I told my older son he could get the bunk beds with a slide once we moved to Jersey. He was incredibly excited about that, and it helped distract him from the pain of being uprooted again. We ended up finding one on FB Marketplace that was for sale in our new building, so we got to meet a neighbor with kids as an added bonus!
Sending letters and cards to friends back home can be a fun way to stay in touch and let kids talk about the people they miss - we just had my younger son do drawings (scribbles?) which we mailed to his friends, daycare, etc.
***
Replying as someone who just went through a cross-country move (California to Rhode Island with a 3.5 and 1-year-old) in April 2025!
Get rid of AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE. Any call for “does anyone have xyz” on a Facebook Moms group or Buy Nothing group? Do it. If you have the time/bandwidth to do a resale for cash, sure, but the most important thing is to get it GONE. (Is it emotionally difficult to see your beloved double stroller roll away from you? Yes! Did it need to go across the country? No!)
Contact daycares, schools, and pediatricians as soon as you have a moving date. My husband flew out solo ahead of time to tour the daycare/schools I had started talking to six months prior (as in, I reached out September 2024 for an April 2025 move date, he visited in January 2025). We were pulled off the pediatrician waitlist in April because I had called in February.
We planned our move to be after we had finished our 2024 taxes; since I had a baby in 2024, I didn’t want to mess around with having California mail my short-term disability/parental leave tax paperwork to another state. We finished our taxes in March and literally flew out a few weeks later.
I went with a big national moving company and used their referral for a car moving service; everything was very professional and handled well, including some accidental damage at move-out (they took full responsibility, documented it for us, and paid out the damage once we got our deposit-return statement from property management). It was expensive but it was worth it.
Also, our car moving company allowed us to leave the Good (Expensive) Car Seats in the car at no extra charge, so we only had to take our airplane/travel car seats on the flight.
Since we had an hour-ish drive from the airport to our new home, we did a direct afternoon/evening flight and made sure to book an airport hotel (with a shuttle!) ahead of time so we could crash instead of trying to haul the kids onto the last leg at night. Our flight was delayed, and so we arrived much later than we anticipated; our airport hotel was dealing with a lot of people with vouchers due to delays/canceled flights, but because we had a reservation, we sailed right in. They also had a pack & play waiting for us (call ahead if you need one), so we didn’t have to deal with setting it up.
Related to the “get rid of it” — if you can, order and ship stuff ahead of time. We moved in with my MIL, so she was able to receive (and open/set up) Amazon packages for us. I ordered the exact same diaper pail, exact same Baby Bjorn potty, bathroom step stool, etc., so they were ready when we arrived.
***
We moved from Hawaii to Massachusetts when my son was 4, and my twins were 1. While I have mostly blacked out on the details during that time, perhaps out of PTSD (just kidding kind of). A few things I remember:
Clearly mark a few boxes of day-to-day essentials that you can open up right away when you get to your destination, so you can get a semblance of a routine while you take your time unpacking the rest. A box with a couple pans/pots/dishes/utensils, a couple boxes with clothes (warm weather clothes for you! We did an opposite climate switch and I realized when we reached the mainland none of my kids owned socks) and bedding, a box with a few favorite toys.
We rented an Airbnb for our last week in Hawaii just so we didn’t have to be immersed in the chaos 24/7. My twins had a nanny at the time so she stayed there with the kids while we could really drill down and pack without distraction. Packing and trying to find stuff while you are also packing it up is miserable enough! Maybe get one as you are unpacking, too?
My new job paid for the relocation, so we had the movers pack all the dishware for a small upgrade fee. Again, totally worth it, and they actually recommend it as the moving company doesn’t want to be responsible for breaking your stuff if you did a shitty job wrapping it all up
If you know where you are living when you get to your destination, label your boxes by the room they go in and just put them in that room as you unload - helpful for both movers and/or you if you are doing it yourself
I don’t know if you are driving, and my kids were too young for it at the time, but we did a lot of driving this summer, and these road trip scavenger hunt cards (rec’d by Busy Toddler) are really fun.
As you unpack in your new home, hold on to some of those really big boxes - they make awesome forts/houses/stuffy homes, etc., to distract the kids while you get settled.
***
We moved from the Boston area to Pittsburgh, PA, at the start of January 2020 (what a tiiiiiiime, but of course we didn’t know that), with a 3-year-old, 5-month-old, and 2 cats. Privilege alert: this was an employer-funded move.
Choices we made that I would 100% advise:
Offload as much mental load as possible. The employer that paid for our move gave us the choice to go through their contracted movers or to just give us the equivalent in cash. I’m pretty sure we would have come out $5k+ ahead if we just took the cash, but having all the decisions already made was a huge help.
If you can swing it, full-service / packing-service moving.
Divide and conquer. I took the kids and my sister and got on a plane -> hotel in New City; my partner stayed behind to oversee the movers. They wrapped, packed, and labeled everything. AMAZING. (Then he drove to New City with the cats, over two days.) An advance party in New City let us run around and stock up on all the first-day essentials (toilet paper, hand soap), drop off paperwork at new schools, and have a bit of a Hotel Room Adventure.
Bringing an extra adult was AMAZING. My sister didn’t yet have kids, and she was very happy to come with me and be Fun Aunt M. for three days until my partner caught up with us.
New City Buy Nothing group let us borrow some temporary needs until our household goods arrived; turns out lots of people have spare pack n plays, folding tables, booster seats, etc.
Books about moving that we read in the lead-up:
- the Daniel Tiger one (it’s fine).
- Big Ernie’s New Home - about a cat who is freaked out by a move with his human family, and the ~5yo human is explaining to the cat what is going on and how things are different but also the same.
(The other thing about that move that is not actually shareable advice is that we could not find a baby daycare spot, so we hired a nanny with the idea that she’d take care of the baby through summer, and we’d put the now-1-year-old in daycare that fall. Turns out hiring a nanny in January of 2020 was extremely fortuitous, since by April of 2020 it was basically impossible, and she ended up working for us all through the pandemic and for a good while afterward. I have never felt so much like I dodged a bullet!)
End credits
Thanks for reading Evil Witches, a newsletter for people who happen to be mothers. Special shout-out if you were one of the original readers of this newsletter when it was first on Wix. All the archives will still remain, d
Also, just a reminder if you like Evil Witches, please also check out the parenting podcast I co-host called “Not Right Now” which is very witchy even though it also involves a dad, my cohost Quinn Emmett. As a reminder, if you’re a paid subscriber to this newsletter, you get extra pod content—just email me if you want to be added to the list.
You can still reply to this email if you have questions, feedback, etc. Issues I’m working on still include the long-awaited Witches who Lift issue, more feedback from our grand survey, the Puke Bracket, plus I want to have a few conversations with you all about kid birthday party policies/tales and from where you horny ladies are getting your smut.
More to come!
One witchy thing
A every text from my kid:
Was that a gif from The State? Be still my Gen X heart....
Just want to say that this was extremely helpful! And that now I, too, have survived a cross-state move (NY to FL), mostly intact. Thank you!