Moving House with a 3 year old

[CourgetteMuffin]

Any tips for before ,during or after the process of moving house with a toddler? Possibly having to move away from family and friends in Scotland to London for employment :(

Not many ideas sorry.
We moved with a three year old. I took her to view the house before hand so she could imagine her bedroom. (or you could show photos)
Priorty one after everything was clean was painting her bedroom (I only painted it white with one wall pink) so that it was HER bedroom, also I tried to set her bedroom up so her bed, wardrobe and stuff was set out in the same way as her last bedroom had been
I put a stairgate up at the top of the stairs so that if she got up for a wee in the night and thought she was in the old house, she was less likely to fall down the stairs, I was paranoid that this would happen. DD was fine, dh nearly killed himself falling over the stair gate whilst stumbling looking for the loo at three in the morning.

we did it recently with a 3 year old. We gave him lots of advance notice, took him to see the new house a couple of times (harder if hundreds of miles away!) and reinforced that we were ALL moving, including his nanny and nanny share buddy.
that said i'm sure we did most everything wrong - he went to stay with his grandmother for a week during the move, then spent exactly one night in the new house before I took him off on holiday for two weeks to see my family (without daddy).
when we returned everything was still in total disarry.
We had barely redecorated his room and have only now been doing it as and when we can.
sadly he sometimes asks to go to the old house. :(
mainly because he had friends living next door he misses.
but you know what - they adapt and will soon forget all about the old life.

We move around every couple of years. Next time we move we will be moving with a 2 year old. She will just be told that we are moving and that will be that. The only thing I will say is that you will need to contact your local HV or such like when you get to your new home because of pre-school sessions.

I have found moving fine with younger children, it's when they get older I seem to get the problems.

We've moved a number of times with a child who's now 3.6, and I think it has disrupted him a lot. He moans a lot about "our old house" and how he wants to "move back to London".

We've tried to compensate by staggering the transition (keeping old nursery place while he gets used to new house, etc.), but unfortunately it seems this is his nature.

Sorry for the depressing story, but sometimes it doesn't work, and you have to nurse the child through it with extra cuddles and attention and trying hard to get them used to a move.

We did it with 3 year old twins. I think in our case, contrary to what the last poaster said, it went through without a glitch - the hardest part was keeping the old house tidy for viewings!!

We were really open with them right from the start - they knew something was up when we had a tidy house (!) - but they were involved in seeing houses, going for walks in the new area etc. As others have suggested, we did their room as the first room - tried as best we could to make it exactly like their old room had been. Is there anything in the new house that would be exciting (e.g. the new house had an en suite bathroom which we hadn't had in the old house, so we made a big deal of the en suite being Mummy and Daddy's bathroom, and the family bathroom being "their own" bathroom - they told everyone they were getting a special children's bathroom). As long as they know that the important things remain constant - their routine will be much the same, their important toys / animals or whatever will still be there, Mummy and Daddy will be there etc, they are much more robust that you give them credit for. They took it all in their stride.

Oh yes, a good idea is to get the child a box to put their most treasured possessions (2 or 3) that they can take with them in the car when they move so they have them immediately when getting to the new home.

Thanks all for your comments. We still don't know if we will be moving (depends on dh getting a job). Of course we will muddle through as best we can if it has to happen.
Her routine will be totally changed as currently she goes to lots of little groups and classes with me but if we moved to England she would go straight in to nursery without me. She has lots of little friends in the neighbourhood that she genuinely likes and will miss as she's very sociable and of course her beloved grandparents along the road will just become occasional visitors. In fact the only continuity will be me and her toys. (Daddy will be out at work - a situation she won't remember)
I'm sure she will surprise me with her resilience but I do think it will shake her world (and mine...) upside down to begin with.