Hi Everyone. My sincerest apologies for being absent during such a monumentally bloggable period of our lives. When, in the period of one month you are tasked at selling a house, buying a house, installing over 1000 square feet of wood flooring, packing, moving, having ear tubes installed, keeping a 3-year-old from completely freaking out that you are moving all her stuff and making her sleep in a strange place, preparing for school to start, celebrating an anniversary, attending a weekend-long bachelor party, tending to an extremely short-tempered toddler and continuing to go to work every day, it has clear and direct impact on one’s ability to give you timely and relevant updates.

So yes, we have been in our new house for just over a week now. It is great and beautiful, and needs lots of work. But it is home, and we are all excited to be here. The list of projects is so numerous and sundry that we do list triage everyday – reshuffling item priority based on the previous day’s activities. Example: “Install spring loaded hinges on the two gates” was moved to the top of the list above “Install doorknob and deadbolt into empty holes in backdoor” right about the time that Porter was found wandering in the street…for the second time. Our garage is a warren of boxes and plastic tote bins filled with items we have no hope of ever putting away without a substantial increase in kitchen cabinets. Cabinets, that if the estimate we just got back for the dining room is any indication, we will never in a lifetime be able to afford.

Secondly, today we officially closed escrow on the B Street house. Knowing that this moment was upon us, we headed over yesterday as a last opportunity to take it all in; one final time. I shot tons of pictures, and we each wandered around and soaked up the memories of the life we all lived there. Porter loitered around the berry bush looking for that one last score, Steve walked quietly from room to room, Stella sang songs at the top of her lungs in the empty garage while listening to the echo of her voice, and I took a long hard look at the beauty and splendor of that lovely kitchen. Although I don’t think I could ever adequately convey the overwhelming emotional impact, I can say this: at one point each of us cried. And the overwhelming realization settled in as we all walked away, that it would be the last time we would ever see that house as our own.

It is a little late, but I want to extend a HUGE thank you to everyone who donated their time and physical well being to helping us over the last month: Brian & Andrea, for helping lay floor and negotiate the logistics of the heaviest set of french doors that were ever manufactured as well as the afternoon shift on move day; Dore, for the kid wrangling, heavy lifting and advice on where the bed should go (you win, it’s under the window); Anthony, for the last minute donation of a table saw when Steve’s died halfway through the flooring exercise; but most of all, thank you to Bill and Judy, for continuing to be our benefactors, for dropping everything and driving up to help us pack, move, renovate, wrassle the childrens and even manage to coordinate it so that the two of us could go out in the middle of all this madness and have a nice dinner to celebrate our 7 year anniversary. And, especially for pushing themselves to the brink of complete physical exhaustion. We never could have done any of this without you. Thanks again, to them and everyone.

(click the photo to take one last look…)