Cold in NC

That's right- it's cold in North Carolina! We're enjoying some quality time with my sister and her husband and the new baby, but it's hard to find time to post updates since one or the other of our kids always seems to be awake and finding the time to post then feels nearly impossible. I now understand the joys of having one child with set naptimes! The jet lag has been surprisingly difficult to deal with (I figured the 3 hour difference would be negligible compared to the 16 from Japan!) in part because we are currently sharing a room with Peanut which we don't generally do at home and she's very sensitive to hearing us move around - which leads to more night wakings I'm sure.

The trip has been trippy since I feel like perhaps I'm getting a glimpse of what I looked like with a newborn. My sister is definitely frazzled which I find humorous since her son sleeps really well (i.e. 5 hour stretches at night and he's just about 3 months old!) and he's a very good-natured boy. Peanut was always good-natured but not a "good" sleeper per se. For us, 3 hours at a time was generally our standard of good! As a result, I find it hard to believe that my sister is fretting over a 2 hour crying fit when her son wasn't quite ready to go to sleep one night. I don't remember how often, if ever, that happened when Peanut was 3 months old, but I know it took us longer than their usual 5-10 minutes to get our baby to sleep. Wow. How dreamy that sounds.

Ultimately what this trip has done has give me a new perspective about my relationship with my sister. But that's more for another day.

Fixer-uppers

We're up to our eyeballs in mini home-improvement projects as we try to get our house ready to rent out when we head out "on the road" so to speak in another month and a half. Before that, we're making a quick trip to NC to see my sister and my newest nephew. I'm looking forward to spending some quality sister time together and having a mini vacation which means I don't have to fix anything.

Our home didn't start out as a fixer-upper, but after living here for a number of years, things are naturally starting to break down or wear out and we've put off many of the repairs for a while. Now seems like the perfect time to tackle many of these projects and I'm feeling accomplished because we're getting them done. But I also feel like we're still behind the 8 ball and I'm not sure we'll have it all done by the time we leave. ..