Life in the New House

Life in the new house is really different, and pretty amazing. We're settling in to new routines -- new commute, new bedtime stuff including bedrooms, new rooms -- lots of them. The post-moving unpack has reached a sort of plateau. We have almost everything we think we need for the time being, so we're not super-motivated to find out what's in these boxes in the basement, or that box we shoved in a closet. (It helps that at the height of summer, there aren't a lot of things we need in the closets.)

We've incorporated going over to the neighborhood pool quite a bit. We can all walk over from our front yard and be poolside in about five minutes, depending on how much freelance adventuring Reid engages in on the path. They have a nice 45-minute rule: at 45 minutes past the hour, a mandatory break takes all the kids out of the pool, which gives grown-ups an opportunity to impose bedtimes, dinnertimes and potty breaks that would otherwise go un-observed.

I think it's been long enough that I won't jinx this. We were bracing for a bit of night-time discomfort with the kids, you know the regular strange-room night-wakings that one would expect. We've been very lucky. Sania had one rocky night last week, but otherwise we've been doing great. The kids didn't get all new furniture or anything, though for the most part it looks like both their rooms are awaiting the arrival of a room-mate with another small scale bed, dresser and shelf. This is because their old rooms were comically small compared to these dance-halls.

Our room is surprisingly spacious, too. I think we're going to get some kind of bedroom furniture at some point; probably something classy and grown-up. It's pretty much time. We're grown-ups.

I'm going to post some shots of the basement, because they're handy and the camera is down here. Since we moved in, the basement has basically been an asylum of toys. Tacitly, K and I both appeared to have agreed that the kids have been through a lot belonging-wise. Since Sania's birthday in April, things they own have been disappearing into storage or packed into moving boxes. We unleashed a whole world of forgotten toys down here, and the kids have been having a great -- if quickly burning through what should be hours of amusement in the span of minutes, and making an enormous mess.

Anyhow, this weekend before we had some friends come over, Reid watched me clean up the entire basement, and then vacuum the carpet. It's wall to wall carpeting, which we haven't had since living in our first official shared apartment as a couple more than ten years ago. I felt like I was vacuuming forever. In our old house the vacuum was employed on an 'incidence-response' basis. Random vacuuming of massive expanses of carpeting left Reid and the dog thoroughly confused.

The picture above shows the fruits of my labor. Reid's friend Jay is over visiting us. The basement room is enormous. Click on the photo above to see Sania playing with blocks somewhere else entirely in the big room, and some of the other features of the basement (bar, office). There are also two shots of just some of the backyard visible from the walk-out doors in the basement. The yard is enormous, and the shed is such a real shed, it has windows and a loft for storing your lawn implements.