Sooooo quiet

I've been very quiet. I blame the house and I blame Berry.

The house is taking a lot of time to get organised. We're painting first and I've figured out that 90% of painting is actually taping. Especially if the builders have gone nuts with crown molding and fancy baseboards and lots of angles. Ohhh the angles. Pretty to look at, hell to tape.

Here's Nathan, cutting in some of the corners...


So there's that... But now (thanks to Nathan's dad, who shall be sainted at a later date) the entire downstairs living area is painted and it's beeeyoootiful. So fabulous. Painting over the grey with Travertine has completely transformed it, and we're feeling luckier by the minute.

Or we would be, if we weren't so sick. That's where blaming Berry comes in. Two half-days in daycare and she brings home an array of viruses a medical textbook would be proud of. Honestly, it's like she went around collecting them. So she's been really sick and miserable for a week now, and we've been falling like dominoes ever since.

There should be a rule against having to take care of a sick toddler when you're sick yourself. I mean really. It feels impossible and very unfair, and makes me seriously consider things like how one might go about getting a nanny. And a maid. Or a sidekick of any kind, really.

Speaking of sidekicks, here is Berry helping her Grandpa put the very glamorous Ikea table back together... See? It really is child's play.

Moving In

This weekend, while other people went fishing and to the movies and out to bars and riding in parks and did all kinds of other fabulously relaxing things, we moved into our house. And... we moved into our house.

We went to Sherwin Williams and Home Depot and scrubbed cupboards and went to the storage place and carried boxes and assembled furniture and unpacked boxes and did trash runs and met neighbours and emptied suitcases and arranged the kitchen and swept and mopped, and met with security people and cable guys and cleaned the bathrooms and unpacked more boxes.

et cetera....

We're still working on it. It's really hard but that's offset by the excitement element – all the planning and decorating and the wow, this is really ours feeling. My least favourite parts are the moments where you find yourself surrounded by half-unpacked boxes, open cupboards and chaos, and you think this.will.never.end.

Disorder makes me deeply nervous, and it renders Nathan slightly unhinged – so for us moving house is awesome.

Yeah. If Nathan's ever-amazing dad hadn't driven down from Dallas to help us, we might well be rocking in the corner by now, and need some therapy.

Oh – the picture above shows part of upstairs. The architect who designed this house was known to have an abiding affection for angles and interesting (but functional) floor plans, so it's tough to show the full effect. The picture below is our bedroom. Those curtains have got to go. The very small girl can stay.