A Jolly Good Home

So it's been a little while since I last posted on this blog.  I suppose some people may be wondering why I've been absent for so long, but those people probably have never spent a couple hours alone with a needy baby and a three-year-old who should nap but would rather run around and slam doors instead.  It's a experience for only the brave and the crazy (I'm part of the latter crowd), and it takes up a lot of time.  Now our toddler has a new home with new doors to open, and our baby has new floors to desecrate, and suddenly we have no time to do anything.  It also didn't help that we need to unpack boxes just to get to the bathroom.  Moving is such fun.

You might remember our old home in Park Slope, Brooklyn:

Well, after three and a half years and two births, we were growing tired of the place and all its charms, including the nails sticking out of the floorboards.  We wanted to try someplace newer, perhaps with more modern features, like closets and a bathroom with a towel rack.  Also, the friends who lived above and below us had all moved out and were replaced with lizards and robots, making the building a little less hospitable.  We decided to pack up our many, many, many, many things and move to nearby Windsor Terrace. 

Park Slope had become a far too expensive place to live, especially if you wanted to be a homeowner, as we did.  We had enough money to buy a two-bedroom place, but only if we split the costs with eight other people and rob the local pet store.  But in Brooklyn's Windsor Terrace neighborhood, you could find a good-sized condo on a beautiful tree-lined block for a decent price (by NYC standards, of course).  Just take a look at our building now:

It's not a bad place.  We have a couple bathrooms, a dishwasher, and an oven that doesn't work.  But that's okay, since the stove works, and I can now work towards my lifelong dream of having Hamburger Helper every night.  The neighborhood itself is great, though some of the neighbors make me a little uneasy...

The truth is most people in Windsor Terrace have been friendly to us.  I'm not quite sure why the people in this neighborhood seem nicer than in other parts of the city.  Maybe it's because of all the available parking spots or the lack of obnoxious taxi cabs.  Yet, the most likely reason is that everyone has bonded together against one common enemy: the raccoons.  Our neighborhood attracts them, since we're so close to the park and the cemetery, and raccoons apparently have a thing for dead people.  They're everywhere, especially at night.  They lurk by the garbage pails.  They loiter by the fire hydrants.  They climb the trees.  They smoke outside the pubs.  I've never seen so many raccoons in New York City before.  It's better than having rats everywhere, though rats tend to scurry when people are around.  Raccoons just sit there and stare, watching your every move.  I get the feeling they might be studying me, trying to determine a pattern in my comings and goings.  That way they can predict when I might not be home, and use that opportunity to break in and drink our beer.

Of course, if they were to break in, they'd find our place still full of boxes.  It would be nice if the raccoons would help us unpack, but I doubt they'd be kind enough to do so.  Even if they did, they probably would put things in the wrong places.  Still, we'd love the help because unpacking has been quite a time-consuming chore.  That's not surprising when you consider that our living room looked like this on move-in day:

So, yes, I've been a little too busy to write.  But we are making progress, and hopefully I will be back to posting regularly sometime soon.  Since I last posted, Adam has done some growing.  Here he is at nine weeks...

... at ten weeks...

... at eleven weeks...

... and, below, at twelve weeks.  There is a thirteen-week photo, too, but I figure I would show that in the next post.  Might as well leave you begging for more, right?

See you soon... hopefully before the end of the year.