Waldchen Essentials

We just returned from visiting Chrissy, Mike, Christian, and my Mom & Dad in CA for six days. It was the first time Chrissy & her family met Elise. She’s a good traveler! Slept most of the time on the planes. We stayed in a condo with my parents. They were there for 3 weeks, and were helping to take care of Christian while his babysitter was on vacation. We had a pretty low key, relaxing time there, but we got to do some wine tasting, take an intense (not according to Erick, though) hike in Muir woods, and ferry over to San Francisco for an afternoon. (See the photos in the gallery.) My long vacation/maternity leave since I stopped working in March is also about to come to an end. The day after Labor Day I go back to teaching history two mornings a week and working on some projects for The Greenhouse from home. I think it will be really good, but I hope the adjustment goes smoothly.

Ok, so I’m not doing very well with keeping things up-to-date around here. After our first house deal fell through (long story short: the appraisal was terrible), we’ve been looking around again but haven’t been very excited about what we’ve seen. It’s also been a bit discouraging that our house hasn’t had much activity lately. We’re thinking of giving it another month and then reevaluating the whole idea of moving.

We’re also getting ready for our first big trip with Elise. We’ll be taking a week of vacation to relax in sunny San Francisco. The summer in Chicago has been brutal with many days above 90F and very little rain. I’m definitely looking forward to something a little more balmy.

It was a little strange experiencing the day from the receiving end of things. All the people wishing me a happy Father’s Day made me even more proud of Elise than I already am. 🙂 I must say that my first Father’s Day gift was quite an excellent one: satellite radio for my car. My car stereo had the ability to receive XM Radio, it just needed an additional component to make it work. Jenny made the appointment and on Saturday she had it installed for me. Satellite radio is amazing. I have over 60 channels of commercial-free music from which to choose, with almost every musical genre represented. Not only is the selection wide, it also goes deep, playing songs I haven’t heard in years. Good songs. Without commercials. I had been growing increasingly frustrated with Chicago radio, so XM has come as a huge breath of fresh air. Elise will have a hard time out-doing herself next year. 😉

If you haven’t heard yet, we signed a contract on a new house in Geneva this weekend! My head is still spinning things have happened so fast. The reality is just sinking in. We’ve been talking about it for a while, and looking more seriously for the past few weeks. With interest rates still so low this might be a good time to move to a single family home. I bought the townhouse we’re in now about 5 1/2 years ago. We thought we’d just see if anything we really liked and can afford comes up. So last Friday, June 3, I drove by this house when our realtor emailed us the info on it. Photos were not even online for it yet because it was just listed. I loved the outside, so we arranged to see it that night. I knew this place wouldn’t last long. I loved it immediately. It is a wonderful neighborhood with lots of mature trees near downtown Geneva. The yard is so cute, too. The big thing that held us back is we would not be gaining lots more living space than what we have now. But we decided in the end that we were willing to give that up for all the positives it offers. We don’t close on the new house until the end of Auguest, but now we need to get the townhouse ready to put on the market. The adventure continues…

Jenny’s not too fond of the “Waldchen Stuff” name for the website. I’ll admit I just used “Stuff” as a placeholder because I couldn’t think of anything right away and wanted to keep working on the site. Some of the other ideas that have been tossed around are related to the tree theme: roots, branches, bark, etc. I don’t want to overdo it with trees, though, so maybe something else is a better idea. If you have any suggestions, feel free to share them in the comments below (you’ll neeed to register an account before you can post comments). I’m willing to entertain any ideas, but I am kind of getting attached to the non-descript “Stuff”…

I’ve just added a new feature that lets me post images directly into a journal entry. For example:

[img_assist|nid=12|title=Sleeping Elise|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=100|height=75]

It’s great when she’s sleeping, but she’s still learning to coordinate with our schedule. Hopefully we’ll get her into a routine that doesn’t involve waking up as soon as we try to fall asleep.