Moving in

We are settling in at our new apartment. Movers came with our furniture and 82 boxes on Thursday, and we've been unpacking ever since. Well, sort of. I may have taken a bit of a break to read Harry Potter. But Brian was unpacking (and very understanding of my lack of willpower)

Incidentally, the last time we were moving apartments? A new Harry Potter book came out. What's up with that? Last time I attempted to alternate unpacking with reading, and gave up pretty quickly and just read the book. This time I wasn't even going to open the book when it came, but yeah. No willpower. That's also why I ate an entire bag of Trader Joe's molasses cookies in two days. But that's better than eating them all in one day. Right?

So. Anyway. We are in our new apartment, after about three weeks of floating between hotels and my dad's and corporate housing. And it's good to be here, in our own space, even if that space is full of boxes and stuff that doesn't yet have a home. Even if we haven't found the energy (or space) to cook actual food for ourselves beyond veggie burgers. The cat isn't quite convinced we aren't going to put her in her carrier and tote her off to yet another location, but she is spending a bit less time hiding out in the box spring.

Unpacking boxes that the movers packed for us is a little weird. I'm not complaining. I'd rather have movers than have to pack everything myself. But there are some surprises when we unpack boxes--they are labeled with their contents, but sometimes random stuff also was thrown it because it fit. And I would have done that myself, I'm sure, but I would also have had some memory of doing it. And when I packed up my books, I would have packed them by shelf and then labeled the boxes by subject. But books were just packed, and in order to get boxes out of our house, we just put them on shelves, to be sorted later. It's probably not the most efficient way to do things, but it seemed best, although it was causing me some anxiety to have a Tennessee Williams anthology, a Michael Moore book, the Bible, The Politics of Fertility Control, and a public finance textbook all in a row on a shelf. I don't think of myself as a highly organized person, apparently my bookcases are an exception.

Although there are still boxes to be unpacked, I've stopped and instead am focusing on organizing and cleaning up a bit. I think that's good for my mental health. Sitting and reading Harry Potter (which didn't suck!) while Brian did the work was even better, but I don't think even I can rationalize a reread of it already. But I bet I could find a way to justify another trip to TJ's for some cookies.

Six months

Oh hi! I have this website where I write stuff, don't I? Actually, I have written a couple things for it recently, but I didn't get around to posting them. I found this one in my Google docs stuff this morning:

Six months

It's so hard to believe that Adriana is already six months old. It's also hard to believe that Adriana is only six months old. I'm not sure how the months manage to fly so quickly and feel like forever all at once.

I'm not so sure whether mother's intuition actually works. After months of thinking she was teething, Adriana's first tooth appeared the day after we arrived in California, with relatively little fussing. She hadn't slept as much on the plane as I had hoped, and had been a little fussier than usual for the rest of the day, but I had figured the travelling was a bit hard on her. A friend tells me she had a similar experience with her little boy, but now she can identify teething, so maybe my psychic abilities will improve with time. Another tooth did come through eight days later, and I wasn't so surprised by it, but that was because I was so fascinated by the first one that I was constantly looking in her mouth, so I saw it waiting to poke through.

I've been amazed at how well Adriana has handled the whole move. I suppose that when pretty much everything is a brand new experience and you're always getting toted around places, a cross-country move isn't as disruptive as when you're an adult settled in your ways. But Adriana seems to be her normal, happy self throughout this whole thing. We visit friends with her, tote her along with us on the ferry to go to the farmer's market in San Francisco, and this weekend we'll take her up to Napa to visit her grandparents and go wine tasting.

Shortly after arriving in California, I bought Adriana three new things: a sippy cup, a play yard, and a high chair. The sippy cup she finds interesting, but isn't convinced that she ought to actually drink from it. The play yard is okay for short sleeps and I'm glad we'll have it to keep here at Grandpa's, but as it lacks room for mama to snuggle up with her, she's not sure that spending the night in it is such a good thing (and I'm too lazy to get out of bed to return her to it after she nurses at night), so I'm glad I bought the cheapest one Target had. The high chair, though, that is fantastic. Much better than the bouncy chair we had for her at home. The high chair has a tray to bang on and let's her sit up high and see what's going on at the table. One of my professors in college would say that if he could get 1/3 of the students really into the subject, he thought he was doing pretty well; after all, if a baseball player bats .333 he's a superstar. By that logic, my shopping trip was quite the success. I'm a superstar Target shopper! Or a superstar mama!

And then I stopped typing and went to do something else, apparently. I'll have to add pictures later once I've found the cable to download stuff from my camera.

It's so hard to believe that Adriana is already six months old. It's also hard to believe that Adriana is only six months old. I'm not sure how the months manage to fly so quickly and feel like forever all at once.

I'm not so sure whether mother's intuition actually works. After months of thinking she was teething, Adriana's first tooth appeared the day after we arrived in California, with relatively little fussing. She hadn't slept as much on the plane as I had hoped, and had been a little fussier than usual for the rest of the day, but I had figured the travelling was a bit hard on her. A friend tells me she had a similar experience with her little boy, but now she can identify teething, so maybe my psychic abilities will improve with time. Another tooth did come through eight days later, and I wasn't so surprised by it, but that was because I was so fascinated by the first one that I was constantly looking in her mouth, so I saw it waiting to poke through.

I've been amazed at how well Adriana has handled the whole move. I suppose that when pretty much everything is a brand new experience and you're always getting toted around places, a cross-country move isn't as disruptive as when you're an adult settled in your ways. But Adriana seems to be her normal, happy self throughout this whole thing. We visit friends with her, tote her along with us on the ferry to go to the farmer's market in San Francisco, and this weekend we'll take her up to Napa to visit her grandparents and go wine tasting.

Shortly after arriving in California, I bought Adriana three new things: a sippy cup, a play yard, and a high chair. The sippy cup she finds interesting, but isn't convinced that she ought to actually drink from it. The play yard is okay for short sleeps and I'm glad we'll have it to keep here at Grandpa's, but as it lacks room for mama to snuggle up with her, she's not sure that spending the night in it is such a good thing (and I'm too lazy to get out of bed to return her to it after she nurses at night), so I'm glad I bought the cheapest one Target had. The high chair, though, that is fantastic. Much better than the bouncy chair we had for her at home. The high chair has a tray to bang on and let's her sit up high and see what's going on at the table. One of my professors in college would say that if he could get 1/3 of the students really into the subject, he thought he was doing pretty well; after all, if a baseball player bats .333 he's a superstar. By that logic, my shopping trip was quite the success. I'm a superstar Target shopper! Or a superstar mama!

And then I stopped typing and went to do something else, apparently. I'll have to add pictures later once I've found the cable to download stuff from my camera.

Home again, home again

Last night as we drove from our dinner in Arlington with friends down to our hotel near Dulles, I looked out at the monuments across the river and wondered if I was going to cry. I am ordinarily someone who cries very easily, so you would think that leaving the place I'd been for five years would be just the thing to set me off, but instead I'll be adding last night to the (short) list of times when I expected to cry but didn't.

It was a full week: a few "one last times", like a free concert at the Kennedy Center*, dinners at favorite places**, visiting with friends; a couple of sightseeing trips to the National Cryptologic Museum and Tidal Basin; and that crazy business of getting all of our stuff weeded through and packed and out of the house. It wore me out considerably, which is odd, considering that there were guys who came to pack up our stuff*** and put it on a truck, and my dad was in town to help with the baby while Brian and I got stuff done, so it wasn't as though I had to stay up until ridiculous hours to try to finish things after she was asleep.

Anyhow, we survived getting our stuff packed up and managed to make it through airport security and deal with a cross-country flight with both a baby and a cat. Now we're in California, and I am definitely not crying now. In fact, I'm smiling a lot.

*Erin Mckeown, who did a great show, and sang a lot of my favorite songs that I hadn't heard her do live before. I even have a picture of her and Adriana after the show, but it's on my cell phone and hell if I know how to get pics off of there.

**Brian really wanted to go to El Tamarindo. I told him that parking would suck on a Friday night, that the food and drinks there weren't as good as he remembered, and that he liked it so much because of fond memories of getting drunk with Becca there. But the food was actually quite good, as were the drinks, and we found parking almost immediately and only about a block away.

***One thing about the guys who handled our move on the Alexandria end: our stuff has to go into storage because our place isn't available until mid-July. For some reason, this means that the contents of our dressers had to be packed into boxes. When the packers left at the end of the day on Thursday we discovered that they'd packed up everything but my underwear drawer. I don't know what that's all about but it cracks me up.