Thanks to SAJ, who helped me unpack and arrange the whole room in an evening! One room down, eight to go.

You can see more photos in my set SAJ & BabyBug come to visit! or Brenda’s set Weekend at Bethany’s on Flickr.

Hmmmm, what WAS it? I know there was something I wanted to do today. Oh, right—I wanted to unpack some more boxes. But here’s the thing: Annalie thinks unpacking is boring. She’s excited about helping for a minute or two and then she wants to move on to the next thing.

And I freely admit that Annalie is not the only one who was spoiled by Gramaw over the past couple of months. Sure, Annalie got used to always having an adult paying attention to her and it might take her a little while before she is happy to play on her own more often. But I got used to always having another adult around too!

I did open a box and try to arrange some stuff in the kitchen but I kept having to interrupt what I was doing to make breakfast, find a coloring book, pour a glass of milk, go upstairs and turn on Zoboomafoo, make a snack, etc. Sometime before lunch I gave up and asked Annalie if she wanted to play outside.

We found the blue wading pool in the garage. It was a little squashed, a little dirty, with a couple of cracks in it. We scrubbed it down and plastered packing tape over the cracks on the bottom and it worked just fine.

I sat in the shade with my Diet Coke and read my book while Annalie splashed and messed with the hose. I felt a bit guilty at first for not being inside industriously unwrapping and organizing all our stuff. But as I watched Annalie play and giggle, I let my guilt evaporate in the summer sun. She won’t be four and carefree forever, easily pleased by an hour in a cheap wading pool with an old plastic cup. We might as well make the most of it while we can.

And anyway I have a friend coming to visit this weekend and she’s going to help us unpack! Do I win hostess of the year for that, or what? At least I can offer her fresh-squeezed lemonade while she works.

Or maybe we’ll just sit around and let the kids play in the wading pool. That would be fine by me too.

What’s that you ask? How’s the unpacking coming along? Oh, slowly. The first week or so there are always half-unpacked boxes in every room, unopened boxes stacked along the walls, empty bookcases and dressers sitting awkwardly in corners. That’s still the stage we’re in right now. We didn’t get a whole lot of unpacking done over the weekend since Troy had duty on Saturday (which meant he had to stay overnight on the ship) and we spent most of Sunday driving up to my aunt’s and having dinner with relatives. But when we came home we brought my mom with us for a couple of days’ visit before she flies home, and she helped me unpack four big kitchen boxes and ten boxes full of books! That’s a lot of unpacking in one day for me! We were pretty proud of ourselves.

I’m not lazy exactly. I just work much better and stay more focused when there’s another person working with me. As long as my mom is here, I’ll take advantage of that. We’re hoping to get a bunch more boxes unpacked tomorrow. We also want to make some lemonade!

When we first got here we picked all the lemons that came easily off the branch, so we have a bunch ready to go. Today when we were unpacking one of the kitchen boxes I found the glass juicer, and when Troy and I were on a date tonight we found a lemonade carafe on clearance and bought it. I figured, why not have a special lemonade carafe since we hope to make lemonade often while we’re living here? I am already imagining Annalie reminiscing about it in future years, how when we lived in the green house in California we’d pick lemons and squeeze them and make lemonade in the special lemonade carafe. I have good memories of picking lemons from my grandparents’ tree when I was a kid and making lemonade with my Grandma Adams. I want Annalie to have memories like that.

But I really don’t want those memories to include cardboard boxes in every room of the house. We’ll make lemonade, but mostly we’ll try to focus on the unpacking. The sooner we’re all settled in, the sooner we can have guests come to stay!