Eat, Read, and Be Mommy

Hello, world!

I really meant to put up a post saying I was tied up with family, because I took my kids to Idaho to visit my parents, and we just got back yesterday.  I was too busy packing for four before we left, though, and then I was tired from the drive, and THEN, well, my parents’ computer is painfully slow.  (It’s one of the hazards of living with a computer guy; most people’s computers feel slow to me, but my parents’ is particularly bad.)  And so I didn’t, but I am back!  The kiddos had lots of Grandma and Grandpa and cousin time–my brother lives 5 or 10 minutes from my parents–and are still kind of tired and grouchy, but hey.  We are striving to get our lives back in order.

The reason that it feels like we came home to madness, incidentally, is that we are in the process of switching bedrooms for the girlies.  The boy is going to need to move out of the crib sometime this winter, and three kids in the same bedroom isn’t ideal anyway, so the girls are moving downstairs into the (former) library/storage/guest room.  Which, of course, involved Mommy and Daddy–and specifically Daddy while the rest of us were out of town–moving all of their stuff out of it and trying to find a place for all of it to go.  (We have SO MUCH STUFF!)  We’ve donated two (large) boxes of books, plus our old cd and dvd racks, and my hubby even partly cleaned out his shoe collection.  (He’s really not much of a shoe guy himself, but his dad likes to try different brands and styles, and my hubby gets all of the hand-me-downs.)  The whole process would feel more impressive if it weren’t just a teeny tiny drop in a very large bucket…

Anyway.  While I was in Idaho–away from the craziness–I did manage to finish the third book in the Melendy quartet, and I found it to be every bit as delightful as the first two.  Then There Were Five begins at the end of the school year, when the siblings have a whole summer awaiting them, and carries them through to the fall.  Along the way they make a host of new friends and have all sorts of adventures–exciting enough to make for fun reading but normal enough to be believable.  They also, as the title suggests, manage to expand their family a bit.  All in all, it was a lovely read; Elizabeth Enright hasn’t disappointed me yet.  You should absolutely give the Melendys a try–The Saturdays is the start of the quartet–as well as Gone-Away Lake, which has an irresistible premise.  I promise you’ll be glad you did!