May 18, 2009

We've moved! Here's a misty photo of our house from back in early spring. It's in Wallingford, a neighborhood of Seattle, and we're slowly getting settled in. This was helped a lot by my mother, who was with us for almost 2 weeks and pretty much organized the house, including putting in closets, toilet paper holders, organizing the kitchen, putting up curtains, cooking all the meals, and prepping the house for our first guests, Rachel, Steve and Naomi from Vancouver. Our house is now liveable and would be much less comfy without her help. Rachel and family were in town to visit some friends, and crashed with us so we got to see them in our limited free time. We went out to eat dinner at Cantinetta, a Wallingford Italian restaurant recommended by friends Dawn and Eric as both vegetarian- and kid-friendly. It was both. This photo is of Maeve and Naomi walking back to our house. My mom's pushing Naomi's stroller. Maeve is a big helper and wanted to help Naomi walk, and this did keep Naomi walking a bit longer.

Luckily, they stayed in the basement and identified a small wet spot on the basement carpet. This turned out to be the tell-tale sign of basement flooding, a perinial Pacific northwest issue where water is the enemy of your house. We've found a faulty downspout from our gutters and will be getting that fixed, which should mostly solve the problem. We now have slightly moldy carpet, a soaked carpet pad that's been put in the trash, and are running a fan in that room in the basement with the carpet pulled up. Sigh. Homeownership.

Last weekend, we took a little day trip to start enjoying the nice spring weather. I'd never been to the Cascades, so we went to Snoqualmie Falls, which is maybe a 45 minute drive in a pass in the mountains. The falls are beautiful, and there's a 1/2 mile hike down to see the river at the bottom. Maeve hiked all the way down, no problem. The way up, which is steep, was clearly going to be a problem, but we discovered hide and seek. Maeve would run ahead and "hide" often by standing by the side of the path and saying "here I am." By the end, she got the idea of going off-path a bit or hiding behind a tree. We did this for the whole half-mile - one of the first hikes she's walked the whole way.

She also enjoyed playing around this tree. She was wearing Mike's earbags and was being and elephant with great big grey ears.