First month in Chicago, whew!

Its a bit overwhelming to describe the past month of utter whirlwind chaos, so I'll keep it short. We managed to move to pack up our house in Pasadena, have everything moved to storage, ship our van, fly to Chicago, move in (GREATLY helped by Grandma and Grandpa Spindler), and "settle" for a few days before James started teaching. We had a few fun events right away: Greektown (the Parthanon restaurant where the Spindlers have been going for about 20-30 years I can't remember, and where we had our engagement party) for James's birthday, and Easter for Rosemary's first Easter egg hunt (you can see how seriously she took it below). We had a few set-backs: our van was illegally repossessed (!), and I got swarmed by secret service agents for accidentally taking a picture of Obama's house. All-in-all, now that the move is over (we both agree that, of our 10-12 moves over the past 10 years, this has been the hardest one), its fun to be here, to reconnect with our family and friends, and to ditch the car! The weather has been a bit rainy, but there have been a few glorious spring days where we have been able to go outside our front door and play at the playground until bedtime. We have a lovely view of the lake from our sunroom, to boot. Rosemary has been having the BEST time with her aunt and uncle and grandparents -- Katy has been coming to babysit regularly and she loves it.

Oh! And Rosemary pulled her first Jedi mind trick on us -- two nights ago she told James, very confidently, "tomorrow we're going to the zoo!" He was surprised, as we hadn't talked about it, but he said, "OK" as he assumed I had told her we're going to the zoo. I hadn't said anything about the zoo, or even thought about the zoo. But once he said, "OK," we felt like we had to go, so we did. Wasn't hard to convince us -- the Lincoln Park zoo is actually my favorite zoo. Its small, but really really impressive and beautiful.



After a few weeks of Chicago-time it was off again to Austin to go house-hunting. This was also a really exhausting trip, despite a huge amount of help from Nana and Nani (Rosemary had a blast with them, Louis had a hard time adjusting -- he is just old enough that he is upset by the all the changes, although I can't imagine why since he's had very little stability in his short six month life!) We put a bid on two houses, and probably won't get either BUT we learned a TON about neighborhoods, houses, schools, prices, and even construction. And we did manage to have a little fun -- a morning at McKinney Falls State Park (where poor Rosemary got bit by fire ants in the taking of the photos below -- but weren't they worth it? She's still talking about it -- she thought it was quite exciting, overall), and a train ride at Zilker Park. I feel quite optimistic that when we go back we'll find something great.

The next five weeks I'm going to put a moratorium on anything too exciting (although we have visitors and a camping trip to Michigan) and try to work on a schedule with Louis and getting back my milk supply (I think greatly diminished from exhaustion and dehydration). Exciting!