I seem to have lost my living space.

It has been over run with piles and piles and mountains of boxes. Nothing quite says reality check like seeing all one's personal items in 1 place. It is most definitely time for us to do some serious prioritizing and downsize (I know I've said this, but having actually received our household goods make this task even more urgent).

Yesterday was a good day, despite being a wee bit overwhelmed by the magnitude of it all. We've met several of our neighbors, one of which has a little boy not much older than Soph. They played together for about 4 hours while the movers unloaded our boxes on Monday, and all I heard all day yesterday while waiting for the phone guy was "Mommy.... when do I get to see my new friends?"...*10 minutes later*... "I see them over there in their yard, I could just walk there while you wait. When is the man coming?"...*5 minutes later*... "How about I just go over there for a little bit"...*repeat all day long*... So, I'm we found a playmate that lives close and is always around just like us :) Our Next door neighbors have a little girl also who is 3 - so we are definitely surrounded by children. Which is a very welcomed change to before.

Oh and I do believe the highlight of the day was when we found a caterpillar crawling up our house, we put him in a jar (with no lid), so we could watch him squirm around, then we went to look up what kind of caterpillar it was - alas our encyclopedias were not accessible, so perhaps we'll have to look for him today now that I've uncovered our Encyclopedias. If it's as beautiful today as it was yesterday, I might have a hard time staying on task. Something about CA weather just yells "COME OUT AND PLAY!"-after being in MD (where nothing about the weather ever said come outside), I must say it's nice to be back on the left coast.

Small houses, Big yards and too much rain

Well, that about sums it up - we now have a house, a small house - but a house. I look at it as a step towards my ideal of less is more. This will force us to prioritize and decide what of our mounds of crap stuff that we really can (and should) live without. I don't think it'll be half bad.

Our yard however totally and completely makes up for the small interior. It's HUGE! Really Huge, and it wraps around the entire house so I can have a nice large veggie garden on one side and all the play stuff can be on the other side with no threat of trampled tomatoes or squished squash. There's even a little teeny tiny patio for DH's Weber. Yay :)

However our huge yard and awesome NorCal location are being totally wasted as we have no household goods (to be delivered Monday), no car (as DH has stolen our transportation to transport himself to and from work... sheesh) and no sunshine! Rain rain rain. Enough already!

The light draws near

It has been a long road (2900 miles of it), and finally the light at the end of the tunnel is starting to emerge. I'll spare the boring details of bad luck and frustration and make a long story short (well as short as a long winded person such as myself can make it). Tomorrow we're going to look at the 60 some-odd houses available on post. We searched for a week or so for a house to rent on the economy, but decided perhaps the super homeschool friendly atmosphere on post would make up for the out dated and rather small homes... after all a home is what we make of it right? I must say our large house in B-more spoiled us. Soooo, by tomorrow afternoon we should (fingers toes and nose crossed) have an address and we should be moving in. It'll be nice to get out of the hotel and into our new abode. Speaking of our hotel - it's not a bad gig. We're staying in the old Del Monte Hotel, which was built in the 1880s and use to be the place to be if you were "anybody". It burned down and was rebuilt twice, and apparently it's haunted by a friendly ghost. The navy bought the land in the 20s during the depression and turned it into the naval postgraduate school.... which it remains today. Nice little history lesson :) Give me a week and I'll be posting and perhaps uncover my memory chip for my camera and I'll even post pictures :) Have a nice presidents weekend! We'll be reading a picture biography of Abe Lincoln and a few others along those lines to learn about the day - had to squeeze some sort of "school" in.

Adventures in CA

Since arriving in CA we haven't done too much. My goal was to clean/re-organize the rooms we're staying in so that we actually have some liveable space... we did take a few breaks and I snapped a few pictures. So, in this 5 seconds of time I have, I shall give a brief overview.

We visited the family. Talk about making someone's day :)

Brenna played... she's quite the adventurous little one, and darn curious too!

Who doesn't love a good bounce?

Our neighbor since forever came over to pick some lemons from our tree, which has more lemons than one person could possibly know what to do with. Well, he did - he and Soph made lemonade.This is the "before sugar added" face.

What trip would be complete without a fashion show?

Or a trip to the interperative center to see the cool stuff about whales?

Poor B got horribly sick (and still is), you wouldn't be able to tell from the picture. She had 4 baths yesterday, it was the only way I could get my non-crier of a child to stop crying and be happy.

Today is B's day of feeling better enough to sleep. Thank goodness. She's been sleeping most of the day, but she still wont hardly eat anything, even her favorites. Hopefully she'll rest up and feel better. DH survived AR, he drove 15 hours yesterday because he was scared to death to stop driving. Both of us nearly had a heart attack when we watched the news last night and saw that there were 51 tornado touch downs and lots and lots of damage and many deaths as a result. I am beyond thankful that he made it through ok. If all goes as planned he'll be in Albuquerque tonight and then HERE tomorrow! So excited! He'll stay until Sunday and then head up to Monterey to report. It'll be a really nice visit and hopefully we can get a house soon so we can join him :)