2 steps back

Well, I thought we were about recovered from jet lag. This morning Katherine was in bed until 7 am. But, her nap today was a little late due to church and lunch. She went down a little after three. Sam and I decided to nap as well thinking we would all be up in 2 hours. Nope, we slept for 5 hours and Katherine slept for 6. Is a 6 hour sleep a really long nap or a really short night? What do you do with a toddler at 10pm who thinks that they are now up for the day? It is now almost 11:30 and Sam and I feel like we have been hit by a freight train and are ready for bed. Katherine is happily playing with her toys. It does not appear that she will be interested in sleep again any time soon. It looks like I need to become a schedule Nazi but I don't even know where to start.

On another note, the weather here has been gorgeous. Our final few weeks in Oslo were quite cold - below freezing for some part of every day. We were fully wearing our winter wardrobe. Today, it was 79 degrees and perfect weather for short sleeves and shorts. For those of you still in Oslo suffering through the cold, that is 26 degrees Celsius - about what the temperature was when we arrived in Oslo in August. Come visit if you are tired of the cold.

Settling back in

We are slowly but surely settling back into home. Before we left, we boxed up A LOT of our stuff to make room for our friends to live in our house. They boxed up more in order to babyproof for their 3 (yes, three) toddlers (14 month twins and 2.5 year old).

So, not only am I unpacking and doing laundry, I am moving back into my house. The thing is, I kind of got used to living with only 4 suitcases and 6 boxes of my worldly possessions and I liked some aspects of it. So before I move all my clothes back into my dresser from my garage I am trying to clean out and throw out. I am sick of having an overcrowded and cluttered house.

I have unpacked my suitcase and Katherine's suitcase. Sam's is still on the floor as is our duffel of miscellaneous stuff.

The great news is that our Fed Ex shipment arrived on Thursday. It actually came while we were at the grocery store and we had a nice little note that they would return today or we could pick it up. Well, picking it up is a pain. We have 6 HEAVY boxes. Plus our larger car was totally dead when we got back and we had it towed to the dealer to get fixed. We were not going to be home on Friday so I told Sam to call Fed Ex and nicely ask if they could come back. Before he had a chance to call, they came back to see if we were home. The driver said she felt bad that we were not here and knew it was important since it was 6 large boxes delivered to a house.

Katherine is a real helper when it comes to unpacking. She helps take things out of boxes and then climbs in the box to play.
Another not so fun task is going through 3 months of mail. We even had our friends trash catalogs and adds and anything that was obviously junk. I am about 90% sorting into piles of Sam's mail, stuff to file, magazines, stuff to act on (bills, etc) and "fun mail". Then I have to actually read the stuff. I hate mail.

We have had a little fun since being back. My very good friend Kathy moved to San Antonio while we were gone. She is back for a few days for doctor's appointments and such so we were able to get together yesterday and again today with our other friend Jen. Here is a photo of the three girls. Sammy was taking a nap and not in the photo. Sarah is 5.5 months. Evie is 10.5 months and Katherine is 20.5 months.
A side note is that Evie has a red bow and a pink outfit. This is not her mama's fault. It is mine. I brought a bow from Stay My Baby to see if it would in fact stay in Evie's faux-hawk. I did not realize that it was still in for the photo and don't want you to think Jen is color blind! :)