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.