Unpacking and more

I think the title adequately sums up our lives for the past month or so. It's hard to believe that we've been back a month. I hate to keep harping about unpacking, but when that's what you've been doing in your spare time, that's about all you have to talk about. We have managed to get down to what I consider to be a more manageable group of boxes, mainly consisting of toys and books. In between the unpacking, we've also been single-handedly attempting to buoy the economy. In the past month, we've bought (among other things): a car, a computer, clothes, dishes, towels, a mattress, bedding, and a kitchen table and chairs. We've also adopted some hand-me-down furniture.

The English weather seems to have followed us - with the exception of a single sunny week, it has been raining more or less since we arrived. And raining...and raining. We keep looking out at the yard/garden, knowing that we have lots to do to get it in shape, but we've had very little time to do it. I managed to trim the hedges this past week, and we actually hired someone to trim back all the overgrowth that has seemingly blossomed over the past two years, so hopefully that will give us a headstart for when it stops raining. We'd like to get everything properly landscaped at some point, but until then, we'll just have to make do with our feeble gardening efforts. I'd really like to see what sort of flowers we can get, having become enamoured of the little English flower gardens.

This past weekend we did the typical thing - yardwork and house cleaning on Saturday, church on Sunday, out to Mich's parents on Monday for Memorial Day. I do find it interesting that Memorial Day coincides with May Bank Holiday, so that both the US and the UK are on holiday, but for different reasons. It rained a good part of the day on Monday, although when the sun did poke through, Mich and I promptly went to sit outside. We also finally took her cat back home. For those of you who aren't familiar with Chloe's personality, she is quite finicky and, well, odd. When we first moved into the house about four years ago, she spent the first three days hiding in one room, until I finally picked her up and took her out to the rest of the house. This time, she seemed to remember it, since she came out of hiding almost as soon as the kids went to bed, and went exploring throughout the house. Mich says she even came and slept on our bed for a bit.

At the moment, Maggie's condition continues to be about the same. We still don't know what is going on, and haven't heard anything from the doctors that would give us a clue about what is coming next. This isn't exactly the best forum for discussions about it, though, so I'll just leave it at that for now.

I'm hoping in the next few weeks to sort through our photos from the past two years, and maybe do a two-year recap, kind of "the best of the best" sort of thing. Stay tuned...

More Information than Necessary

I have high hopes that I will be able to update with the Ireland story soon - Michelle requested that she be the one to pick out the pictures, so I'm letting her do that, and then I'll try to post our tale.

In other news, we are in fact, slowly settling in - I spent my first (mostly full) week at work this past week, we finally got phone service, and we've got our utilities sorted. Our house is beginning to take shape again, although it still resembles this:

This picture comes from about a week ago, when I was first putting the boxes into appropriate categories for figuring out which ones were important enough to warrant immediate opening.

All kidding aside, we are very much in "unpacking mode", and while we've made significant progress in normalising our lives, there is still plenty to do. All of this doesn't make for interesting blogging though, so I thought I would share a little story of Mother's Day.

My kids are generally pretty excited about birthdays and other holidays, including Mother's Day. So, yesterday morning, we all came in to give Mich her Mother's Day cards and the things that the kids had prepared for her. Maggie gave her a card that she had made which had several drawings in it. Interestingly, quite a few of the drawings had been covered over with dark blue marker. Of course, we asked Maggie why this was, and Maggie patiently explained that this was because there had been a thunderstorm and the lights had gone out, so we couldn't see very well. It was also quite clear that Maggie is our resident snugglebug, as several of the statements in the card were things like: Mommy likes it when I hug her. I like it when Mommy hugs me. It was just very Maggie-esque, and if you know Maggie, then you know what that means.