Things of note

There have been countless reasons to blog lately but just not enough hours in the day.  Here are some things of note to capture:

After six months of Cora sleeping on the floor of Jack's room because, well, I'm not entirely sure...

we bought a loft!  Night one saw two children giddy with the excitement of it all.  Night two saw Jacob and me trying to reconfigure Jack's room to make the new furniture work.  Despite our best efforts, we have too much stuff.  Do you hear that grandparents?  Too much stuff!

Monopoly.  Jack can frequently be found playing two hands of Monopoly since he always wants to play and we don't have much free time on our hands.  He's got a natural knack for numbers and it's giving him great practice with addition and subtraction (as well as ruthless property acquisition.)

The Minivan.  Horrible gas mileage.  But I can open any door with a button, it's roomy, it came clean and with a free satellite radio subscription (On Broadway!), so basically I love it.

Urban South Brewery. I don't know how anyone successfully starts a business in this city because it's complicated, stressful, expensive - a dance with many hoops.  But Jacob is hanging in there and within arm's reach.  I'm so proud of how hard he is working and so impressed with all he's learned and figured out.  Plan to have a beer with us soon.

Siblings. If only these two always got along like this. 

They do play well together sometimes, but there is also so much fighting, so much whining, so much teasing. It's becoming clearer to me lately how a lot of this is a result of them jockeying for position. At times, it's almost visible to see how Cora fights for air when Jack comes home or how he tries to gain dominance by putting her down.  It's a lot to have all three of them at once and to try to spread attention around evenly.  Inevitably someone isn't getting their (attention) needs met, and then I get to see the myriad ways that can play out. 

And this is all harder to manage because we are stretched thin right now.  The pace of our life is not sustainable so we are working to figure out ways to slow things down.  I'm looking forward to June and both my and the kids' vacation!  

 More to come on this guy :)  He somehow has a major birthday next week!