Yep, we're still here

General apologies for the huge gaps between posts. This fall seems to be busier than most. Here are a few cute stories we missed sharing. Hopefully I can add some pictures tonight.

This morning in the car, Colleen was singing a song for her preschool Christmas show, over and over. Robert was annoyed and "asked" her to stop. I reminded him that just a couple weeks ago he was singing his Thanksgiving songs (pictured at performance) and how it annoyed Elizabeth at the time. I asked him if he remembered what I said to her. He said with a scowl, "That I was definitely allowed to practice singing. I hate it when you're right, Mom."

Colleen was complaining about the sun being in her eyes in the car. I said that we could bring her sunglasses next time. She said, "My sunglasses don't work. The sun is boiling my blood! Do something!" Evidently her old sunglasses didn't cover enough of her eyes and would let the sun through. So the next time we were at Target we found these huge bug-eye sunglasses. Now the sun doesn't boil her eyes anymore.

Besides working extremely hard at school and earning terrific grades to prove it, the past few weeks for Elizabeth have been about The Birthday. Twelve years old last Tuesday. Colleen told everyone at preschool - "yesterday she was eleven and today she is twelve." Her birth"day" was actually drawn out over a couple of weeks, starting with Nonna taking her and a friend, Jack, to a wonderful performance of The Wizard of Oz at Hopkins High School. She had a blast; there were actual flying monkeys. Then two books from Mom and Dad that she just couldn't wait 5 days until her birthday to read so she got them early. Then her actual birthday with a package from Nanny (beautiful Guardian Angel that now hangs over her bed) and cupcakes with the special-made cinnamon butter cream frosting. Then from the St. Paul Colemans she got "awesome" Smencils and cold hard cash to go toward her new desk chair (note to self: get E to Ikea!). I confess that I succumbed to the ease of using the Thanksgiving gathering for the official "Happy Birthday!" where she (and others I hope) enjoyed her favorite Pineapple Mallow Pie (thank you to Betty Crocker and to Nonna for the loan of Betty Crocker) and got the coveted Star Trek reboot DVD from Uncle Ryan. She and Robert watched it 3 times the next day. With all the extras and commentary, they watched it practically all day.

We took advantage of our Friday off to clear some more boxes from the living and dining room so more and more it looks like we live her permanently. It's a great feeling to get the number of boxes down to regular storage, not moving boxes. Our garage is ridiculously large and my next big project is to organize the storage in there.

On an unrelated note - hey, where's the snow? The weather is very un-Minnesota-like at the moment and we're getting nervous about Christmas. Robert asked me after Thanksgiving, "Is it possible that we won't have a white Christmas?!"

Settling in

It seems like every waking moment is taken up by one thing or another, whether it's working, singing or just getting the house in order. Cate and I have a list two memo pages long of things that the new house needs.

The girls' room was probably the first to be completed, due in no small part to the fact that Elizabeth, first of all, was capable of unpacking her stuff by herself and secondly, was very motivated to get her books out of the boxes they've been in for nearly a year and a half. Click on the photo for a bigger version and get a look at a slice of our backyard.

One of the first things I did when we got into the house was hang photos. Maybe that's not the usual top priority, but I wanted to get something of ours on the wall, since even in Sterling we didn't put a whole lot on the walls. Here there are nails in the walls all over the place already for us to take advantage of.

But all in all, we are enjoying living by ourselves and living at our own pace and to our own standards, even though we've raised those standards in the past year.

As for what's new: the kids are enjoying school and Cate is off to look at a preschool next week for Colleen. We've met neighbors on each side. No other 11-year-old girls, 7-year-old boys or 4-year-old girls yet, however. We've spent a couple of days just raking leaves, though it's hard to get too far when there's been about 25 rainy days since we moved in.

The fridge has been restocked -- multiple times now -- and the pantry and spice rack are pretty much back to normal. There must be, somewhere, one more kitchen box we have to unpack, unless we broke four bowls and lost eight spoons from our original set. I started to unpack a box a few weeks ago that was marked stemware, looked at the newspaper that it was wrapped in and thought, "that's odd, I thought The Washington Post didn't look like that anymore." (Yes, I think in italics when necessary.) On closer look, it was paper from the summer of 1996, and they were Patty's stemware. So they're back in the box.

Patty has been out to visit and the kids had a great time with her here for a little over a week. I'll let Cate write more about that sometime.

Snow, already?

Less than a week in the new house, and this morning I woke up to this in the backyard. Unbelievable for Oct. 10!

Surely some Minnesota native is going to come back with a know-it-all response, but I don't want to hear it.

Meanwhile, having a great time in our new house so far. We will post more, with pictures, at some future point, promise.

It's a very, very, very fine house

The basement has a TV, an electric piano and some toys.

The kitchen has a table and two chairs.

The living room has a rug, a chair and a table.

The refrigerator contains the remnants of a 12-pack of Diet Coke, two jars of pickles and a container of mustard.

But it's our house. Finally. Thank goodness. Back to the unpacking tomorrow.

Yo tub

"Guess what I saw? I saw a fire engine made of cake!"

"No way," Cate says, playing along, "you can't make a fire engine out of cake!"

"Yu huh! I saw it! I saw it on Yo Tub!"

Those of us who have been reading for more than a few months might more readily recognize this Web site as YouTube. But that was how Colleen described to Cate recently the results of her apparently random surfing.

Perhaps Elizabeth bookmarked it for her, or maybe she just somehow stumbled on it from another link or video. But it's become her favorite destination on the Web of late. She can watch baking and cooking shows literally for hours on end. Howdini has a bunch of videos demonstrating various cakes: panda cakes, mermaid cakes (with fruit rollups for fins), turtle cakes, rubber ducky cakes, blue jean cakes, butterfly cales, teddy bear cookies, guitar cakes (she loves the bright green icing), barn animal cupcakes, jungle cupcakes ... the list literally goes on.

She speaks fondly of the doll cake Nonna made for her fourth birthday, patterned after one that she made for Elizabeth for age 2. She is so ready for birthday No. 5, which won't come until next April of course. When that time comes, she may have a hard time deciding what cake she wants. But she knows how to make them all. How many 4-year-olds know what a crumb coat is?

Video below.