Kat Dart

Moving was not easy for our family. We have six of us plus five cats. There are four children in our family. Two of them are teens and two of them are still in elementary school.

I'm one of the teens- going from a middle school to high school. This move is different to me, mostly because of the school swap. In York, where I used to live, most of the kids who were my friends went to the West York school district. I like to work alone, so I chose a different route, which was cyber-schooling, throughout middle school. Cyber-school should not be confused with home school. I had teachers who sent me textbooks, and had online lessons using microphones and telephones. It was like a real school at home. I had half of two rooms in our house set up like a classroom.

This will be my first year in three years going back to a public school, and some of the normal questions are bugging me. What's it like? Will I get lost? How do you open up the locker lock?

I'm still having trouble opening my lock. I keep spinning the knob left when I should be spinning it right. And to me, that's a major problem. I need to be able to access my books! I need to be able to get it open in time to find my classroom since on day one I don't want to be late, and give myself a bad first impression with the teachers. They grade my reports.

I do feel somewhat ready to start school though as I got all my school supplies the other day. I got new pencils and notebooks just for me. My sisters also were made ready. I have three sisters, Elizabeth, who is the oldest, I'm next, then Miriam, and then Olivia.

Our new house in Brookfield, is amazing to me. I have gone through it only once, and it was then that I fell in love. My sisters and I all agreed immediately on whose bedroom was whose, so that was nice. No arguing, no 'I get this one because…' I really don't see why a bunch of people make a fuss on painting colors and what each room is. We were kind of like, 'okay, we get to choose our bedrooms, Mom can take over the other rooms and Dad can have whatever room he wants to put his 'man-stuff' in.'

A lot of children seem to think moving is scary because of new neighborhoods and new friends. It's more than that. It's an entire life change. I was living in York for almost 11 years. Emmitsburg is a lot different. In York, we had to drive everywhere except for the parks. We had everything set up and were adding onto our house. We knew where all of our friends lived, how to find our house, memorized our address, and we knew what our schools actually looked like!

Here, we walk down a hill to go to town. We have cows in a field behind us. We can walk to any jobs we get.

The fist time I came to Emmitsburg, it was to visit my 'Uncle' Ken, who we are close to, and to meet his daughter, Katelynn, in person after talking to her on Facebook for a while. I'm happy to say I already have a very cool friend in Emmitsburg.

When we first drove up the neighborhood, I was overwhelmed to say the least. It was so beautiful! It was better than the last house we looked at. Then we drove up in front of Uncle Ken's House. The house next door would be ours. My first reaction: was our house the one on the left or the right? Everyone laughed as we got out of the truck.

The tour of the house almost frightened me- it was bright yellow everywhere. That frightened me and then also I was frightened because right then it sunk in- we were moving! I mean, I knew we'd be moving since about last October. But all the time we were packing and renting different storage units and looking at houses, it was almost surreal to me. I was calm about the whole thing, excited to move because for whatever reason, I thought everything would be the same.

I suppose the best thing I learned about moving is to hire movers next time. It was a pain to get those boxes in the storage units. I also learned that I really loved my old house and it was my home. I still call it home. I haven't called my new house home yet. It's just the new house for now. But I look forward to calling Emmitsburg home.