Home Again

We're home.  We flew all night last night (the kids slept the whole long flight, and I got sleep on and off, but Michael didn't sleep much).  The kids did really great on the red eye flight – Courtland even fell asleep before the plane got all the way up in the air.  But the hard thing was that we left at 10:30 and had a 4 hour flight, so by the time we arrived in Atlant is was 5:30am – which was 2:30am San Diego time, and waking up peacefully sleeping children is never a fun thing.  Then we had a 4 hour layover in Atlanta, and then a 2 hour flight home.  Michael and I kept falling asleep on the 2nd flight, and the kids did pretty well but they were definitely ready to be done by the last hour or so.  It was a lot of juggling with all the luggage, but much easier with Michael there too.  We got out of the airport about noon, then headed home, unloaded the car, had to jump the minivan because it had been un-used for too long in the cold, and stocked up on groceries.  Michael is sleeping right now because he wasn't feeling great after being up so much in the night, and the kids are playing with their toys in the basement (it's supposed to be "quiet time," but although it's not too quiet they are having fun with their toy sets with the castles and pirate ships).  In a couple hours we’re going to drive out and pick up Brax from the kennel, which will be fun.  

The house looks great.  It’s fun after being gone so long, and after Michael did so much work while we were away, to see all the little changes around the house.  The biggest change, of course, is that we had someone come and install all new white 6 panel interior doors and sliding closet doors.  They look great, and now we just have to make sure no one touches them for at least the next couple months so there won’t be any finger prints on the bright white doors when we’re ready to show the house.  While I was gone, Michael also entirely cleaned our bedroom and totally organized our closet, which was a big job.  He replaced the outlets in the dining room and the basement that had stopped working last year, and installed GFI outlets in the kitchen and bathrooms.  He patched a hole in the drywall in one of the bedrooms and painted over it – you can’t even tell where the hole used to be.  And the house is all cleaned up, and he replaced a vent cover in one of the bathrooms, and some of the recessed lighting in the kitchen, and had the kitchen ceiling painted.  And he got the boys’ bedrooms totally organized.  Lots of little jobs add up to a lot of work – there’s probably even more that he did that I can’t think of at the moment.  But it’s looking really good.  And it’s great for me, because now the remaining work doesn’t seem quite so overwhelming, so I’m getting ready to get some more little projects done – mostly touching up paint throughout the whole house, adding some small floorboard pieces to finish up the banister at the top of the stairs, planting a few flowers around the yard to brighten it up (as long as this really nice spring weather holds out), and power washing and refinishing the deck.  And I want to get the garage all cleaned out so we can start to pack up some of the stuff around the house that we can survive without for a few months and stack some boxes neatly along the far wall of the garage so the house will seem a lot less cluttered when we’re ready to show it.  

But I think I’ll wait a day or so before we start into the hard work quite yet – I think I’ll give us a couple days to recover from traveling and the time change (we’ll see how it goes on this end of the trip, but when we first got to San Diego the kids woke up at 4am for the day several days in a row, and seemed to take a week or so before they adjusted to the time difference and the new situation all the way).  But the boys are way excited to go back to school, so I guess I’ll just wait and see how they’re doing tomorrow (if they sleep well tonight and if they are awake early enough in the morning) before I decide if they will go back to school tomorrow, or if I’ll give them one more day.  We’ll miss San Diego, but it’s only for 4 more months while we sell the house, the boys finish up school, Michael graduates and takes his big board exams, we pack, and move across the country again, and then we’ll get to settle down for good.  I think these next four months are just going to fly by, with all that we have to get done between now and then.  And it is good to be home.