Hellobee Boards

@MSBartlett: We' re actually moving from Georgia to Alaska! So it is truly a no joke move and it is not for the military. We've been packing for the last few months, making sure that everything is indexed. (I keep a word file of box contents and number the boxes on the outside. It is time intensive, but with a baby in tow, it is going to be nicer to selectively unpack rather than tear through 80 boxes looking for a cookie sheet.)
We're also using a moving company. You can opt for them to pack your stuff, but it is more expensive. They will do an in-house consultation and provide you with a quote. We had four different services survey our stuff for quotes. They will also generally move vehicles for a set fee. Depending on how far your move is, not driving may be well worth the extra cost.

The goal is to hop on a plane and have our stuff meet us there a few weeks later. We figure on buying a few temporary things (i.e. paper plates) but lugging much of the necessary baby gear along with us.

Yes, we did this. Moved 1,700 miles from where Farmer Man grew up and all his family lives (and some of mine) and where we lived a quarter mile down the road from his folks and his other married brother. It was a huge leap and faith and totally worth it, but there are long-term things to consider. A biggie for me is a lack of childcare. I have made a lot of good friends in the last 4 years and really am finding my niche here, but there's no one like family to call up and ask if you can drop the kids off for a few hours (and for free, no less). There's just no one like family when asking for help, PERIOD. I didn't ask for help from my friends when I should have with my second baby (the first baby after our move) and it sucked, was an extremely difficult postpartum period. With this third baby, I'm seriously considering flying one of my sisters out to help me for a month postpartum.
Anyways, I would never move back to where we came from and I really don't want to be anywhere else, but the distance and isolation can be tough. Weigh your priorities. For us, family is very important, it was extremely hard to make the decision to move so far away, but it came down to us deciding what kind of life we wanted to give our own children and that was nowhere near possible where we used to live. And I'm not talking about making the money to give them a better life, there was a host of things we want to give them that we couldn't even consider there.

Oh, lol, and I just realized I didn't really answer your question. When we actually moved, Deere Boy was 6 months old and we packed up a 20-foot snowmobile trailer and pulled all our junk out with us, taking 3 days to make the drive. He was a good baby and didn't mind riding in his seat all that way and when we got to our new house, I don't remember unpacking being a real struggle. We didn't really have that much stuff anyways, lol, and we were moving into a WAY bigger place than what we'd been living in before.