We're Back!

Life has been B-U-S-Y for our family. We bought the yellow house in June and Rob has spent pretty much all of his non-working time working on the house. Caleb was his biggest helper since he's big enough and strong enough to carry wood, hammer nails and such. They enjoyed lots of man time at the house - and that Daddy would usually take him out to lunch at one of the fine fast food establishments near our house didn't hurt anything either!



The kids were able to go on vacation this summer. They took turns in Vermont visiting Nana and Papa. Caleb and Camille took swimming lessons for a couple of weeks. Caleb is a little fish, able to swim the pool the long way. Camille has finally progressed to putting her face in the water so we're looking forward to seeing what she will learn next year! Chloe is excited to turn four next spring because "when I turn fo-ah, I can take fwimming lessons too!"

We are now pretending that things are slowing down here a little bit for us. School started the last week of August, so both big kids are gone from 8 - 4 every day. In the middle of getting ready for a new school year, we also packed up our rental house, moved all of our belongings into the attic of our new house (we couldn't move all of our stuff in yet because we were waiting for the drywall guy to finish our sheet rock so we could clean up the mess and throw on a coat of primer before moving in), stayed in a hotel for a week (there's nothing like the excitement of having two beds for five people...no matter how you do the math, no one sleeps well - but at least we did get a continental breakfast every morning), and finally moved into half of the upstairs of our new house. We are currently have two bedrooms, a bathroom and a laundry room. We have a makeshift kitchen downstairs where we've been getting along pretty well with a microwave, toaster oven and crock pot. It's slightly more glamorous than camping, as far as our cooking set up is concerned. We do have running water (in the downstairs bathtub which is set up as our "kitchen sink" only).



We are enjoying our new neighborhood. There are lots of kids for mine to play with. Caleb is in boy heaven since most of the kids are boys. Camille is a little put out still that there is only one girl her age on the street (that she hasn't even been able to play with yet because the girl was gone all summer) but we're sure she'll be making lots of friends at school before too long.



We are thrilled to report that we now have Internet access at our house. We had been sharing an internet connection with our neighbors until our neighbors packed up and moved a month before we did. So we did a complete computer detox, only checking our e-mail at the library a couple of times a week. It was kind of nice not being tied to a computer, though a bit disabling when we needed to find information. Thanks to those of you kind enough to look up things for us. We do appreciate it!



That's as good a post as y'all are going to get right now. The kids' movie is almost over (they had the nerve to get up at 6:00 this morning, before there were any kid shows on tv so they've been watching the Wiggles - it was Chloe's turn to choose) so I should start thinking about breakfast. Not that any of them should be hungry. I gave them each a banana for snack and then they found my secret candy stash. (It's hard to keep secrets when all of your living is done in two rooms.)