Aaaahhhhh.....

The picture below sums up how we all feel right now.  We've had almost 3 months straight of non-stop guests.  And while we loved having everyone here and we appreciated all the help, we are looking forward to being the guests and not the hosts at least until after the holidays.   

This morning Rob and Carrie and Eleanor had the honor of being our last guests for a while.  They were here for a quick weekend visit and the routing of the University of Minnesota by the Hawkeye football team.  Other appropriate words would be:  shellacing, decimation, destruction, trouncing, trashing, etc.  Go Hawks!  Will and Rob went to the game while Carrie and I stayed home with the kids - next year Carrie and I are going to the game while Will and Rob stay home.  For those of you who don't follow Hawkeye football, the final score was 55-0.  Carrie and I did get to go to The Crafty Planet - a fun yarn and fabric store in NE Minneapolis.  We did not come home empty handed.   It was really fun to see how many new words Eleanor uses.  

My mom also left this morning after an exhausting (both physically and mentally) week of cleaning up her parents' house with her siblings.  It was amazing to see how much stuff my grandparents saved.  After working all week long, my mom and aunt and uncles had an estate sale to try to unload all of the stuff that nobody in the family wanted.  They had a very successful sale.  Anders and I went to the sale for a few hours yesterday.  It was kind of strange to see a bunch of strangers walking through that house.  It is also really strange to think about the fact that this house will no longer be a house that I will visit.  I'm sure that my mom and her siblings have even stronger feelings about this - it makes me kind of sad for them.  

Just a quick rundown of the last couple of weeks: after Joyce left (there she is saying goodbye to Anders), Jean came to help us out for a week.  Anders and Jean spent lots of time collecting lovely leaves, like these.  

I just finished my 3rd week of being back at work - it is going pretty well.  And Will started his first of 6 weeks home with Anders.  That seems to be going pretty well too.  Anders is sleeping longer chunks of time at night - around 4 hours or so at a time starting around 6:30 or 7 pm.  He is sleeping the majority of the night in his bassinet, but we are still trying to find the perfect combination of sleeping attire for him - he seems to get sweaty a lot of the time, but then other times he is cold.

I'm trying to run in the mornings and am taking him to yoga once a week - here he is with his new maraca.  

Anders went out with the Sawbill Babes last Saturday - he was so excited to hang out with them that he stayed awake the whole time and then conked out on the way home.  

Winter has arrived in Minnesota...

And we had a visitor in the backyard the day that Will and Joyce left to get Joyce back to Iowa.  The light was pretty bad, so we really were not able to identify this hawk, but it was cool anyway.  

Finally, we received a really wonderful gift put together by Carrie and Betsy.  A Book for Anders is something that many of you participated in - it is full all kinds of advice, songs and memories from people we love very much.  It definitely made me very teary-eyed as I opened the package.  Thank you so much Betsy and Carrie for such a thoughtful gift and thank you to everyone else for your contributions - we love this book.  

Lucy loves it too.

Anders also loves his new monkey outfit from his Aunt Jan, Uncle Mike and cousins Russell, Matthew and Sam.

Will finished the bathroom.  The floor has been done for a few weeks, but he just finished the base tiles.  

What we haven't done: caught up on our thank you notes (sorry), finished Anders' room (we are close), finished Anders' fish tank (we are close there too), finished a book (well, Will has, but I am no longer the super reader I used to be), any knitting (just buying yarn), caught up on cleaning the house.