We’ve finally moved into our new house. As I mentioned before, we’re now closer to both sets of grandparents, though further away from work. In general, I’ve found that I don’t mind the commute–before, when my commute was 2 miles, I never got a chance to listen to NPR. Now, I’m all caught up on the news.

On various psychological stress scales, “moving” ranks as a significant stress. I would say that moving with children is what makes things stressful. I don’t think the kids care at all that we moved to a larger, nicer house. In some respects, I think Eleanor preferred the tiny apartment. On the first day, she wouldn’t let me go upstairs without her–it was like I was going out-of-state everytime I wanted to go upstairs to get something.

Anyway, I’m glad we’ve finally settled someplace that I hope we’ll be at least until the kids graduate from high school. (This is probably wishful thinking.) The last six months have felt like constant limbo, what with the following activities: moving the clutter into a storage facility so that we could stage the house for sale, painting and carpeting the house, the constant open houses, moving out of the house and renting an apartment, selling the old house, clearing the rest of the stuff out of the old house and into the storage facility and apartment, buying the new house, finally moving all of our stuff (half in the apartment, half in the storage facility) into our new house. We only used movers for the last move, so Bernard and I did most of the grunt work. I’m exhausted–and we still have 50% of the unpacking to do. It’s okay, I’ll just do it slowly over the next six months. I’ll be updating everyone with our new contact information soon.

Yes, it’s 2009 already, and I’m just now posting the November 2008 photos. It turns out I didn’t make up any time at all in putting together these photos, as compared to the delay in the October photos. Again, I’ll use the excuse that we’ve been busy with selling and buying a house.

The November pictures include a visit from Shane and Anna, a trip to Disneyland, and Thanksgiving. While it’s not in the pictures, we actually had Thanksgiving with both Agnes’ parents and my mom, which meant we had two separate turkeys on the same day. We brought home the leftover turkey from Agnes’ family’s dinner, and made pot pie.

The girls are still watching and listening to Mary Poppins. We listen to it in the minivan, where Eleanor and Miranda will ask for the different songs by name–at least the name they’ve made up for the songs. Recently, Miranda has started asking for supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. She didn’t know what to call it, so she asked for the “Daddy and Mary Poppins” song, where the dad intends on firing Mary Poppins. When we got to the point in the song where the dad can’t pronounce “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” she said, “I want that song”. We now just call it the “super” song. Miranda sings along, and pronounces it “super-halla-hana-duhnuh”.

The girls took swim lessons in November. We were paired up with one parent, one child. Our kids were among the older kids in the class, and for their next lessons this month they’ll be in a class with just the instructor. In this class, they mostly focused on putting your face in the water, blowing bubbles, and reaching for the side of the pool if you fall in. It was a nice part of our routine, though the girls got cold in the water pretty quickly. We’ve been looking for neoprene suits for their new lessons.

I’m not going to promise to have the December pictures up any time soon. We had my whole family get together for Christmas and took about 2200 pictures. I’ve combed through them, but I have still picked about two hundred. They need to be edited down still further before I write captions for all of them.

Last night during the girls’ bath, I heard Miranda say, “Only mommy and daddy and the dentist can touch me here.”

So close…

The kids are spending the morning at Effy’s while I watch the movers move our stuff.