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.

Hooray for a new school year

Yesterday was Day 7 for Elizabeth and Robert in their new schools. I picked Elizabeth up yesterday and asked her what she did in school and got a 20-minute explanation of a really cool project they did in their science class.

Beats the heck out of fifth grade. She's really fired up.