Randoms

So, we have pictures on the walls in the living room/kitchen (but nowhere else). I spent a pleasant 45 minutes after the kids went to bed last night polishing my dishwasher and mopping my new floor (it's weird to love cleaning so much; I know this). Our grass is growing in like cute little green peach fuzz (in fact, sitting on the deck right now, I run the risk of being totally soaked whenever the sprinklers decide to come on, but that is a risk I am willing to take for some chirping birds and crickets and rising sun).

We're settling in.

The kids are good for the most part. Jack is totally fine, sleeps late, runs downstairs to play by himself. Harry, though, is awake by 5:43 everyday and is scared to be in another room from us, let alone another floor of the house.

This house is loud, too, and our new appliances make all sorts of strange grunting and rooting and beeping noises, which freak him out.

Ben conquered a tiny ant problem we noticed the day we moved in.

Come to think of it, Jack has peed his pants a lot.

Both kids love the park and being able to play outside whenever they want, and they watch maybe 20 minutes of TV a day, as opposed to hours and hours and hours like they used to.

We finally stopped eating at restaurants for every meal (seriously, we ate out so much I never want Chipotle or Noodles or Panera again) and actually went to the grocery store and bought real food again.

Weeds and the Big C started, and we managed to watch them even with our one DVR and one digital box.

I think we're going to like it here.

OMG. Moving.

The good news is that all this laundry is clean. The bad news is that I don't know where the hell to put it.

The movers also kept asking me where to put stuff. My default answer was "Storage room?" followed by "Guest room closet?"

This is what my kitchen looked like after a whole day of unpacking boxes of dishes, appliances, food storage containers, wine glasses, pots and pans, assorted kitchen bullshit like a bag of frozen peas that are still all the hell over everywhere because they ROLL:


We had some minor problems. The water heater, for example, was accidentally unplugged. Since I usually wash all of my clothes on cold anyway, I didn't notice this until, um, bath time. Since both of the kinds were filthy and naked, they had cold sponge baths, which went over HUGE as you can imagine. In the afternoon, when I was doing dishes, I noticed that the water was cold, but I thought maybe I just accidentally turned on the cold water. Would have been nice to figure out the hot water thing then.

The guy who hung our basement TV assured us that the cable company could hide the wires in the wall when they came out to hook up cable. But they couldn't. So the TV guy has to come back next week. And in order to schedule this appointment, Ben had to go to the store and talk to a human after I spent a million hours on the phone with robo customer service. Also, the cable company screwed up our order, and we only have 1 DVR box and 1 digital box, which means we have to watch plain old cable in our bedroom and the guest room. Also, no premium channels and no On Demand and no on-screen menu!! I thought this was HUGE DEAL for a low blood sugar hour or so, and than I was like, "WTH is your problem, Princess?" So I got my shit together on that that one. Although, I might actually call and order another box today because sometimes I want to watch Entourage in bed, you know? (Also, the DVR is 80% full of kid TV, and I might miss an episode of Hard Core Pawn.)

I made the bathrooms look cute (although the basement on still sucks a little and needs something on the walls besides towels.)
Ours

Jack's

Harry

I was holding a stack of kid bath towels and thinking OMG where do I put this when I noticed something behind the bathroom door-- a hidden linen closet-- such a nice surprise!

So far, H and J's room is a tiny version of their old room, minus all the toys


Here are (most of)the toys: (we hadn't unpacked quite everything yet when we took these pics).



Luckily, there is a park down the street, so we have a place to run the kids until our grass comes in. Which, at the rate it's growing, should be next summer.

New House Day!

Things we bought yesterday:

1 house
1 mattress set
2 TVs
3 basement tables
Miscellaneous TV hook-up accessories

It was a shopping kind of day, which as funny because it was the most gorgeous day we have had all spring and any other sunny, humid, warm day would have seen me decked out in my rashguard at the pool. But I spent all day yesterday under fluorescent lights a little chilly from air conditioning.

We have never bought a mattress before. Our current mattress which is on its way to the guest room (I apologize in advance for any back problems you develop staying with us) was part of the furniture I bought when I was in grad school at Miami of Ohio. Furniture I ordered sight unseen and totally untested from a catalogue. It's a basic Sealy, and it has been okay, really, for the past 10 years. But 10 years is about all you can expect to get from a basic mattress that gets slept on every night. So we found ourselves lying on a bunch of sample beds in 4 different mattress and furniture stores yesterday.

I almost freaked out when we were seconds from a memory foam purchase because while the guy was checking the delivery date, I did a quick Google search on my phone about mattress toxicity. OMFG. Ben was super pissed because he loved him some memory foam, but I couldn't handle it. Finally, we found a really awesome mattress that felt like a firm, supportive, contoured cloud. In mattress speak. Never having shopped for a mattress before, I was skeptical that we'd be able to tell if we liked one from lying on it in a store, but after sampling tons of mattresses- at least 2 dozen (SCABIES!)-- we were able to clearly identify the one we liked and know that it felt different than any other model from any other store. We WANTED to like this other, cheaper mattress better, but we just couldn't.

Mattress shopping was kind of gross, though. I just couldn't stop thinking of all the people who lad laid down on it (and the pillows) before me. Blech.

Then we picked the kids up at school (Ben actually had to leave me at the Best Buy check out lane, run to pick them up, and then come back to get me and electronics because that's how much we shopped)(thank you, summer preschool for having flexible openings!) and took them to the new house where they ran around like crazy and hid in all the closets and just generally delighted in the fact that they could wear shoes in the house. (But not after today because today, I am cleaning the new house which makes me so happy. And yes, the builder had a cleaning crew, but it is not white glove clean by any means, but it WILL be after today-- I LOVE to clean).

Jack tried to break in through the front door after no one answered his ring (because we were all outside trying to program the garage door entry pad thing which was harder than you'd think).

They didn't ever smile together, but still, they sat next to each other

They love jumping off the giant landscaping boulders in the side yard:


This is me tickling Harry. I include it because of the dumpster-- it used to be in our front yard, but the builders working on the house next door moved it just exactly inches off our lot. Thanks, guys. We were worried it would be an eye sore or something. (Actually, even though it is an eye sore, it might be really nice to have a dumpster outside when we move in for things like TV boxes and other huge garbage) (Also, Harry is super, super, super ticklish-- he melts into a giggle puddle-- it;s hard to not tickle him).

After we finally figured out the garage door opener, we took the kids to Toys R Us, where they had so much fun picking out Power Ranger Samurai zords (?) and Star Wars guys with their gift cards from Bomma and grandpa Jack (thanks! and happy 91st birthday!). Here they are posing on a bench after dinner.


I would say that after tomorrow's binge I will never shop again, but I am actually headed to Target to buy an obscene amount of crap in just a little bit. Ah, moving.

Tons of pictures of my empty house

The title pretty much says it all, but let me give you a sense of layout before posting a billion pictures that you likely don't care about.

When you walk in, there's a closet on your right and the boys' bathroom and bedrooms on the left. Straight ahead down a short hall is the great room/kitchen. To the right at the end of the short hall is our bedroom/bathroom, the laundry room, and stairs to the basement. Make sense?


Looking toward the front door.

Looking away from the front door

Baby No Name's room painted bright green.

H & J's room painted blue

Kid bath. On the upside, it is right across from their rooms. On the down side, it's the guest bath, too, so it'll have to be clean (because a bathroom shared by 3 boys? probably always spotless, right?)




Laundry room with partial shot of laundry machines


Our room painted green.

Our bathroom and closet. We both have enough crap to fill that closet up tomorrow. So much for room to grow.




Kitchen

Eating area

Deck

Great room

Going downstairs


Hallway into the family room

This is the family room. The half by the slider and the tiles is sort of up for grabs right now. When the kids are a little bigger, we will put a desk and a couple of iMacs (or whatever crazy robot computers we'll have in the FUTURE) there, but for now, we are thinking some IKEA Expidit shelves with baskets of toys and the train table. The other half of the room is for staring at the talking glowing box.





Play room! I am so excited for them to have a space for most of their toys, including the big ones like their puppet theater, easel, cardboard bricks, etc that they don't always have access to here. Yes, we sure did put vinyl on the floor. I want them to have a room where they say "I want to paint" or "I want to make a huge freaking mess with moon dough," and I can be like, "Whatever, man." When this room becomes somebody's bedroom someday, we'll put in carpet. Or we can do wood and make it an office. Oh! And I am going to hang all their dress up clothes on a low bar in the closet-- how cute is that?



Guest bedroom. Future home to my precious, precious files and probably our printer, as well. I am hoping to stash a treadmill or an elliptical in here, too, because I think we might let our gym membership slide for a few months because we can't take a baby to the gym daycare in the heart of cold and flu season and by the time I drive to the gym and get situated,it will be time to turn around and feed the baby.


Harry claims that this downstairs bathroom is his and he will not be sharing it. Cracks me up. As if any of us is clamoring to share a bathroom with him!

Storage room

Mechanicals in a cool little room behind the stairs.




Under the stairs


Side yard. Jack calls the house next to ours the "tape house"

Back yard. And Ben.

Harry's 5th birthday

Wow. I have a 5 year-old.

Harry told us last night that he is no longer going to pick his nose now that he is 5. And you know what? He hasn't.

He had a pretty chill day.

Presents:




A teeny breakfast cake

Wearing his favorite blazer to preschool

Bringing these Family Circle blueberry cupcakes and a loaded pinata to his class

After school, we finished reading the second Harry Potter book, immediately watched the second Harry Potter movie, and launched into the third HP book at bedtime


But it also sucked today. I got called out of my summer class after a mere 45 minutes of instruction time to pick up Jack, who had a 101.5 fever at school. When I finally got there after 40 minutes (road construction!), Harry was in the office, too, handing out spare cupcakes to the staff. When he saw me, he decided not to stay at school and do things like play outside and go to music class. Instead, he came home to sit in our tiny house made smaller by stacks of boxes. I was bummed because it was a beautiful day, and I felt bad that he'd have to be copped up inside with his sick brother. And also because I wanted to take a damn nap.

I don't know how we'd juggle being a working family with the kind of inflexible schedules we have this summer. Normally, we don't teach at the same time, making kid illness less of a big deal But today, we were both in class, and Ben was an hour away, so I got the call to flee class and leave my credibility behind. Bah.

Guess Jack got an extra special party favor at Chuck E Cheese, huh? Freaking germ factory.