The new place

We are no longer living in our tall and skinny corporate housing apartment and are so happy to be in a real, live house!! I don't think living on the ground floor, having a fenced-in backyard, dishwasher, garage, and washer and dryer will ever get old! Sometimes the garage door opener doesn't work very well but I'm just so grateful to have a garage at all, let alone one with an automatic door, that I don't mind in the least. Plus, we can ride bikes all around the neighborhood and to the grocery store and a random produce stand down the street and everyone's happy!

So, without further ado, here she is!

Yup. She doesn't look like much, but it's so great to live here!

There's this cool gingko tree in the front yard that I lie underneath sometimes while the kids are riding bikes. Because the weather here is always perfect. Maybe a little too perfect... we need rain!

And just down the street, right at the end, where you can sorta see the fences? That's the elementary school!

I tried to take a few pictures of inside our house, but I wasn't willing to pick anything up and we're sort of messy, what with four kids and all, so what I did get looks a little ghetto.

Living room. Still working on figuring out furniture and unpacking. Also, we haven't really hung anything on the walls yet.

Piano corner.

The backyard. It looks pretty trashed right now, but like I said, I didn't pick anything up for this series of pictures. (I had chicken cooking on the stove!) We ate out here every single night for a couple of months. We eat outside less now that it's getting darker and colder, but it's been really, really perfect. Most evening we ate out there I would comment to Joseph that I couldn't come up with a more paradise-like day if I were able to custom order them.

Em somehow has her own room in this house, since El opted to sleep in the boys' room. This is her little study corner, with a thrifted Ikea desk scored for $15, thrifted Ikea chair for $15, garage-saled Ikea shelf (along with another that we haven't put up yet) that was bundled in with a bunch of other stuff basically for free... yep. We've worked hard to spend almost no money here!

Closer up of her shelf stuff. The girl loves Shel Silverstein! And isn't that teeny Calico Critters flower bouquet so cute?

Her bed with pink jewel lights along the ceiling and those cursed fairy books sitting at the foot of her bed.

A peak out Em's window from when I was taking pictures in her room. El's always up to something!

The book situation...
Em has a whole bunch of books available for her perusing in her bedroom (really, sometimes I just go in there to stare and enjoy them all in their neat little rows!), but this is all we've decided to keep out for now of the picture books:

Woops! No, this:

We just pulled out the favorites and stashed the rest in the garage to rotate in later on. I was very much opposed to the idea at first -- Books?? In our non-climate controlled garage?? -- but Joseph set it up so nicely and we have SO much empty shelf space out there that I was immediately convinced once I saw it.

And just for context, here's the rest of that slanty picture, with the water heater to the right and an extra crib mattress and plastic drawer on the left. It really is out in the garage.

 While we're talking books here, can I just tell you what a breakthrough we've had in the reading department with Caleb? All thanks to this man:

Yup. That's Mo Willems.

And again. Anything Mr. Willems writes, Caleb will drop everything to read. And it's not like these books are a new discovery to us - we've owned several of his books for years. I think Caleb has just realized that he can read stories now that are entertaining and unpredictable and just the right sort of silliness for a 5-year-old boy. Plus, finding the pigeon in every book is a favorite pastime for all the kids.

Elinor likes unicorn trains.

Jacob likes to have his picture taken.