August Check In

Sigh, it's August.  I knew I had been away from the blog for awhile but I didn't realize my last post was in June.  Summer has taken it's toll on my quiet computer time.  Milo doesn't nap anymore and there are no peaceful school hours.  Between 9 or 10 each morning the neighborhood kid takeover begins unless we are going somewhere like swimming lessons.  Soon it is lunch time and then it is pool time in the afternoon.  Then comes more chaos of kids running in and out, the torturous task of throwing together some kind of evening meal ( I would rather do almost ANYTHING else during summer) and the rest of the nights have been spent unpacking, sorting and churning more junk than anyone would believe between storage units, our garage and different floors of the house while the kids undo our progress.  I've had many moments where I have looked longingly at my laptop, folded, quiet and unopened for days at a time as it sits wedged various places.  I don't have a designated safe spot to leave it out in this house like I did before so I find myself defaulting to using my phone for the Internet more often than ever before.

There have been many occasions that would have made amusing blog posts.  A few weeks ago I ordered a rug for the master bedroom.  I knew I needed a big one so I just ordered the biggest one they had (from Wayfair, the flash sale site) and it turned out to be more like wall to wall carpet (because I didn't measure the room).  So it had to be returned. That was embarrassing. Who doesn't measure the room? Or there was the incident where Justin hung a tiny rack of hooks for keys at the back of a cute little built in grotto (formerly for the land line phone with a little shelf protruding from the wall) and the screws popped out of the living room wall and no one noticed until the next day.  More patching, more painting.  We had a final trip to Bismarck to clear out our storage unit and we had an impromptu block party with our neighbors on the old cul de sac.  It wasn't easy to drive away after that.  It was especially sad when Milo got excited and said "We go home Mama?" as we were driving on our old familiar route.

The new house is slowly coming together but moving has been so much work this time around.  I have been tossing cardboard boxes out the back door for months now and we have unloaded endless trailer loads. The neighbors probably think we have some sort of deep underground storage area buried beneath the house.

Calvin has been progressing as expected.  He's very close to crawling and he has five teeth.  He's a popular baby with the elementary school aged girls in town.  I reached a big milestone also.  I wrapped up nursing and pumping!  We had many bags of milk in the freezer and when the last one was gone I had the strangest feeling...and it was not a longing for another baby I can tell you that.

Here are a few pictures or Mr. 7 Month Old himself.

Notice the nice new rug behind him...which fits nicely in the room.  

Calvin has more hair that any of the other babies.  Tessa didn't have this much hair when she was two years old.  

Allan is established in the new house.  He used to like to lay in the sink at our first house right after we adopted him and he's started doing it again.  

He does this on  a daily basis.  It's so weird.  

School will be starting in 19 days (not that I'm counting) and the sports field across the park from my house has already been prepared for football with the lines mowed into the grass.  Soon the clink of baseball bats will be replaced by football sounds and hopefully I will be able to write a blog post more than once a month.