We're home!

I always felt funny talking to people about this, our yeddow house (pronunciation has evolved from yeyyow), before we moved in. I was afraid of jinxing yet another deal. Sometimes I still don't feel like we really live here, but the signed contract and the change of address stickers and the parade of repairmen and the mountain of boxes conspire to make it more real. We live in the yeddow house! And Rachel loves it. She loves the straight stairs, she loves the backyard, she loves the nearby park, she loves walking with Daddy to the train in the morning. It is good that we are here.

We're slowly plowing through the mountains of boxes. This morning we found a number of hats

and aprons.

We're running out of places to put things, so we just have to put on anything that's wearable. Maybe we should have waited to move until winter--this could get a bit warm!

We also declared several boxes "henhouses," as Rachel and Daddy had read this morning The Sly Fox and the Little Red Hen. Rachel is getting good at imagining things--she told me her henhouse was red and had a little blue door, just like in the book. Here's her little red henhouse with its little blue door. Isn't she a cute little red hen?


Rachel's speech has really taken off lately. She's added mimicry to her repertoire--she mimics us whenever we make a nonverbal sound. My grunts while pulling weeds, David's "Baah!" to scare a squirrel, and every noise produced by every tool wielded by the plumber who sawed, drilled, plugged, joined, and vented in and around our pipes this morning. And of course she thinks she is quite hilarious every time she makes one of these sounds. Perhaps there is a career in Wall-E-type voiceovers in her future. Even cooler, though, is her ability to form sentences. Really sophisticated ones. (A skill she did not learn from her mother, judging by that lovely fragment.) "Nana wear red jacket." "Daddy come home for dinner." "Libby go in henhouse wi' Rachel." It's really fun to be able to communicate with her--more fun all the time, as she gets better and better at it.