My little brother...

just rescued a woman from a burning airplane!! No kidding. He's been all over the news. Even my mom was interviewed by ABC.

Barefoot Bread Baker Craig Schum Pulls 2 From Fiery Hamptons Plane Crash

The good life

I'm sitting here with a dish of Abbott's chocolate almond, which I brought home from the Abbott's within walking distance of our house, and looking at the pictures from the last week or so of brilliant blue skies and green lawns. So far Rochester is pretty awesome.

Since most of the pictures I have were taken of happy children playing outside, not cranky children having tantrums while I try to make phone calls or cook dinner -- arguably the more common condition lately -- I'm going to try to focus on the positive here. :)

One of our first adventures was to a big athletic field complex within (longish) walking distance from our house. It has three playgrounds. We only got to one of them before heading on what has become a daily trek to Wegmans (ACK!) The kids really liked this playground and the other parents and kids there seemed, well, normal. They were friendly. Some little girl picked me a flower. There was a little boy there the same age and exactly as bald as Kate.

Saturday night Molly had her first sleep over away from home without parents. She and Lucy and Freddy spent the night at Oma and Grandpa's house.

The funny thing is, their house is still probably way more familiar to her than our new house. She had no problems, wore a princess dress to a campfire, stayed up late (8:30 :) ), ate waffles, ice cream, s'mores and who knows what else, and played with her cousins. Is it any wonder she didn't want to leave the next morning?

We spent a beautiful morning at Sonnenberg Gardens taking in an art show and the mansion.

Molly got a little goofy at lunch after.

Yesterday was yet another beautiful day so we wandered over to Mendon Ponds for a little while in the afternoon.

Can you spot Molly in the distance?

Resting in the shade at the top of the hill.

Molly got wrapped up in drawing things that have to do with Easter. Not sure why, but what a great place to sit and draw.

Catching up

So ... where were we?

It's been a while since I posted an updated. We moved out a little more than a week ago and already it seems strange to look at pictures of our family at our hold house. It seems like it's been a year.

But just for fun, here are the kids playing in the last few days before the move.

Molly and Jim were in a wedding the weekend before the move.

It was supposed to be in this lovely rose garden in Schenectady. Here's Molly at the rehearsal.

Unfortunately it got cloudy and rain rolled in just hours before the ceremony, but it all turned out fine. They moved the wedding to the inn where the reception was held, and where we were staying, and it was still lovely. Molly wore a beautiful flower girl dress and sparkly gold shoes. I was too busy wrangling children to get even a single picture of the bride, but here's the groom, best man and flower girl in the last minutes before the ceremony.

Molly had a bit of a tantrum ... OK, a big tantrum when it was time to pose for pictures before the ceremony. The ring bearer wouldn't hold still either, so I guess she didn't ruin the entire thing herself. That's what we're telling ourselves anyway.

With all the stress of the move, replacing our car after our accident on beach day and staying up really late the night before at the rehearsal dinner, Molly was not in the most cooperative of moods.

But she pulled together when it counted, walked down the aisle and spread petals like a pro, and rocked out at the reception.

Kate had a good time, too.

The DJs were great. They gave the little guys balloons to play with on the dance floor while the adults had dinner.

It was a lovely day, and we're so glad to see Jeff married to such a cool person. What a great weekend!

Then back to business. The girls were great sports about all the packing and craziness.

We couldn't have done it without my mom's help watching the kids while we packed non-stop for three days and wrangled with the car situation. We even got all our house plants in the back seat of her car -- stage 1 of the big move!

Jim left the next day with his truck loaded up. Then on a 95+ humid day our big moving truck arrived. The movers were fantastic with the kids and did a wonderful job loading our stuff. It took them about 6 hours!!! By the end even the fans were packed, the ice to cool their drinks had long ago melted and it was getting hard to stay enthusiastic about anything but they pressed on.

Kate took two naps, including one in the kitchen right in the middle of the action.

Finally the house emptied out.

I cleaned as fast as I could, picked up some food at the grocery store to eat in the car and drove the kids and the bunny to Oma and Grandpa's house.

It was an incredibly smooth ride. We stopped only once for about 20 minutes. The girls were fantastic!!!

Then everything got much easier. There's nothing like having family around. And there's nothing like waking up in a warm home surrounded by loving grandparents, aunties, cousins, and non-stop fun in the pool, hot cocoa with grandpa every morning and visiting alpacas.

We found Kate napping like this. Guess she was tired.

The kids are in heaven. Molly is giddy about being with her grandparents. I'm still expecting her to get home sick at some point, but so far she is just loving every day.

Tomorrow Jim starts his new job. We ladies are going to have a quiet day, maybe check out the library. We're all looking forward to a great week of settling in to a new routine.

New house

We just got our Internet service up in our new location.

Here's where we landed...