*cough, cough* Gracious! It’s dusty in here, isn’t it? Let me just wipe away these cobwebs and blow off the dust…there, that’s better. I’m a little embarrassed at how I’ve neglected things around here. I have resolved to do better in May. Wish me luck.

My mom and my niece Aurora are here visiting us for a few weeks! It’s fun having them here, but my mom and I have been a little surprised by how much more exhausting it is to have three kids in the house (two of them toddlers) than it is to have only two. Of course, this is partly because Aurora has never been to our house before, had never flown on a plane, had never been more than a couple hours’ drive away from Omaha before. And Aurora is very two right now. In fact, she’s just about two and a half, which means she’s entering that period of disequilibrium that kids often go through around their half-birthdays. (I’ve talked about this before with Annalie.)

Since Elliora is almost exactly a year younger than Aurora, she’s been going through a bit of disequilibrium herself lately, which isn’t surprising. She’s changing so fast these days, adding new words every day and even putting them together in short sentences. Three of her first-year molars have just popped through her gums, and at the park the other day she was climbing all over the big-kid play structure and going down the slides without any help from anyone. She cracks us up every day with mannerisms and reactions that seem older than her 18 months. She regularly eats more than her big sister, and when we have brussels sprouts or asparagus (!?) she eats as much or more than I do. She is meeting life head-on and keeping up with her cousin and big sister just fine.

Annalie, meanwhile, is almost eight! Her birthday is only eight days away. She’s been simply FANTASTIC with her sister and her cousin. She’s been patient and calm through tantrums and craziness. Since they’ve both been sitting in the back row of the minivan, Annalie has been buckling Aurora into her carseat every time we go anywhere, and unbuckling her at the other end. She’s willingly shared food and toys with the littles, and more than once she’s cheerfully agreed to wait to do something she wanted to do until naptime. I think I’m gonna love eight.

What have you guys been up to?

There are so many violets in our backyard in the spring that it looks almost completely purple for a couple of weeks. It’s one of the reasons Elliora’s middle name is Violet, because our backyard looked like this around the time we found out we were pregnant. It was actually even more violet-covered a week before this, believe it or not. It’s almost the end of violet season around here.

Here’s an alternate Day 7 shot. Our LED twinkle lights (they’re not Christmas lights because we keep them up year-round) cast interesting pools of light and shadow on the ceiling and walls around them. I was inspired by Bex’s shot of her grandparents’ vintage bunch-of-grapes lamp and the cool shadows it cast.

Hey, look! I am actually done blogging every single one of my 7 Days photos from the run that was only a couple of weeks ago! Not only that, but…I MADE IT THROUGH THE WHOLE WEEK WITHOUT GETTING SICK. IT WAS A 7 DAYS MIRACLE! *cue angelic choirs*

I expect to come down with the plague shortly, now that I said that. (Although I originally wrote that almost two weeks ago and I’m still not sick.) I guess there was that toothache I had that week—really that I had had on and off since around my birthday almost a month ago. It was finally resolved on Day 6 when I went to the dentist. It turned out the problem was a cavity in one of my remaining wisdom teeth. The solution was easy: pull the tooth. It was done and I was driving home less than 30 minutes later, much relieved. I don’t really count that as being sick.

While I’m blogging, a couple of quick things:

• Up until a few days ago, I was more than a month behind on uploading photos to Flickr. I’m still taking photos every day, I just don’t get around to doing anything with them. I’m starting to catch up and am hoping to be caught up before I leave for Omaha. Wish me luck.
• Instagram finally released an app for Android phones, just a few days before Facebook bought Instagram. So I’m enjoying using Instagram as a new, easy way to share photos from my phone on Twitter and Facebook. Or you can see my photos here.
• Elliora has a new favorite all-purpose word, suitable for all sentiments and occasions: MINE. Her dad’s laptop? “Mine!” Annalie’s jacket? “Mine!” My frosted mini-wheats? “Mine mine mine!” Lily the cat? “MIIIIIINE!”
• We’re heading to Omaha on Friday, just me and the girls. (Poor Troy, he has to stay here and work, and have the house to himself for a week and a half.) When we come home, my mom and my niece are coming with us. They’re going to stay and visit for three whole weeks and will be here to celebrate Annalie’s eighth birthday. We’re all pretty excited about that.
• Party plans for Annalie’s birthday were on hold for a while, because we weren’t sure if my mom was going to be able to come here, or if she’d have to stay in Omaha because of some family obligations. Now that we know, I have sorted out the party plans and I think it’s gonna be really fun. It’s a big relief to finally have a plan.
• Chris wrote something great about blogging with two small children that expressed perfectly how I feel, so I’m just going to quote her:
  

  Well, I’d still love to have an awesome, regularly-updated website. That endeavour is sitting on a back burner, as our time and energy are all earmarked for other stuff for a while.

  In my mind I have an enormous stovetop with quite a lot of burners, especially at the back.

• I started a page to keep track of all the words Elliora says. She’s adding about three or four new ones every day. There’s a button for it over on the sidebar. —>

How on earth did it get to be mid-April already!?

This is a boring post. It’s not one of the half-dozen posts I’ve thought about writing recently but have not had the time or energy to write. I just wanted to get that birthday post off the top of the page because for Pete’s sake, that was over a week ago. And it was a doozy of a week.

Last week, Troy didn’t get home until after 9pm every single night. And then he went to work at 8:30 on Saturday morning and didn’t come home till after 10pm. On Sunday he “only” worked from 11am till 7pm. And today, he didn’t get home till almost 9:30pm.

Elliora didn’t see Troy from Sunday night until Saturday morning. Annalie only saw him once or twice when she was still awake when Troy went in to give her a kiss good night. Troy’s sister Dana and her son Leo came up for a visit over the weekend, and they barely saw Troy at all. (We had fun sightseeing with them, though, and it was nice having them around to distract us from the fact that Troy was gone all weekend.)

It hasn’t been too bad. Annalie, Elliora and I have been chugging along, doing our usual thing. It’s actually been good, having zero expectation that Troy would be home early enough to have dinner or give Elliora a bath or help with bedtime. Of course I wish Troy were home earlier, but it’s okay that he hasn’t been. I’ve managed all right, even if I am more exhausted than usual, and a little more stressed out.

But still. I’m hoping that these crazier-than-crazy hours don’t last much longer. We’re all hoping.

p.s. Isn’t my new daffodilly spring banner awesome!? Thanks, Brenda!