Kiwi's Big Adventure

Ahh...where do I begin? We've been without the comforts of house phone, cell phone (well, mine, at least), internet, or TV for days on end, so now I have an accurate idea of what it feels like to be a character on LOST. Minus the mysterious smoke monster, of course.

Friday, Greg came to New Housh, as Keira calls it, early and started taping off Keira's room to be painted. Pap-Pap and I came over around noon and the three of us managed to paint that room and the family room in about 4 hours. Not bad! Here are a few pics:

Keira's lavender room:

Paps and Greg working on our blue family room:

Saturday, Keira went to Grandma W's house in the morning while we moved, so she came "home" to find all of our stuff at New Housh, but probably not understanding at ALL how it got there or why. Luckily, all the chaos and all the people helping us move (to whom we are forever indebted) distracted her until bedtime on Saturday night, and then we had sort of an open house on Mother's Day for my family, which kept her busy...but when yesterday arrived and it was just me and her in this big house, she freaked out a little bit. She must have been going, "Wait...hold the phone. We LIVE here?!" Going from 900 square feet to 2,500 is a major change for US, and she's about 1/3 our size, so poor Binks is understandably about three times as frazzled as we are. She wanted to be carried around all day yesterday, but now she seems to be getting used to the layout and just yells, "Mommy?!" if I'm not within sight. Progress!

I'll spare you the boring details of the move. Suffice it to say that it had all of the ingredients a typical moving day has, including a big truck (which I successfully drove twice without doing any damage to property or human life, despite the doubting men over at the U-Haul place), donuts whose calories don't count because you're hauling boxes up a ramp all day, and that sense of panic that arises when you realize you have no idea where the [insert extremely important item here] ended up and you desperately need it. How about I just boil it down to this: a random list of updates.

Here's a 4-generation pic of Grandma N, mom, me, and Keira from Mother's Day:

This is Keira and Poppy, who'll be 79 in a couple of weeks!

And here's Milkface dining in our new kitchen:

Living where my mother-in-law calls "out damn nowhere" means we are surrounded by such lovely members of the nature community as stink bugs, giant mosquitoes, about 7 million bees (I hear they're endangered, but I think we have the world's population in the ugly ground cover in our yard), and at least one snake (sorry, cable guy). None of said creatures have been found in the house as of yet, but ewwwwww.

Oh, on Mother's Day, my mom let Keira have a little bit of salsa on her tortilla chip. She's now a total addict, so here's a video of her at Chili's begging for "sassa."