Kevin’s sister is…

Kevin's sister is visiting right now, so mostly, we're just sitting around the house chatting with her. Susan is two years younger than Kevin, and is currently six months pregnant with her kid, so as you can imagine, there's lots of baby and baby-stuff discussion. For exampled, we marvelled over how people can justify spending $700 on a Bugaboo stroller. I'm sure they're cool, but still. (They are also common in our neighborhood, which apparently proves that we are living beyond our means.) We tried to come up with good pumping solutions for when Susan goes back to work (v. difficult, as she teaches elementary school to special needs kids, and has very few breaks in her day and no place private to pump). We discussed the merits of having your parents/in-laws stay with you in the first few weeks post-birth. Etc. and so on. When you become a parent, there's suddenly a whole lot of extra stuff to talk about. Nothing particularly profound, but still. The nitty-gritty details of the job.

We did venture out for a bit yesterday; Ellie needed her annual heartworm test, and then we went to the dog park. Sort of fun, sort of dull. That's also what playing with the baby is like right now. Kavi's getting more interesting, with new facial expressions and sounds added every few days, but it's still a slow process.

We're starting to get ready to go out west. It's a big move -- somehow, when Kevin first mentioned a semester in Berkeley, it didn't sound like that big a deal. But now it's coming home to us that it's packing up the whole family and moving for five months, and that there's an awful lot of stuff we have here that we won't have there, and an awful lot we have to have, which we have to pack and get there somehow. It's not really like we're moving, exactly -- the vast majority of our stuff will be left here with our sublettor, who will hopefully take good care of it. But we do need furniture and clothes and kitchen things there. Do we take our favorite knives and pots and teakettle, for example? If we don't, we'll be cooking on inferior products for five months, which will start to get irritating. But if we do, that's more stuff to fit in the car somehow. Oh, it's complicated...