micheleandtom.com

As near as we can tell, the Argentine people do not need to rest.

They seem to keep the same eating/socializing schedule you would find in Spain (dinner doesn’t start until 10 pm), and yet, they don’t appear to take the long mid-day break for a nap/rest. I don’t know how they get to work and school at 8:00 am, work through the day, and hang out until midnight or 1:00 am.

Our girls are not going to make it! Zoe and Zelda need a ton of sleep to be functional kids with reasonable mood modulation. *Sigh*

I think this means lots of cooking at home so we can get them to bed at a reasonable hour.

The tainted milk scandal is a great example of why we are not living for a year in China with the girls.

I think of all of those poor parents who served their children something as innocuous as a dairy product who are now just hoping their child doesn’t die as a result. Four children have died and 6,200 babies are ill.

Okay, anyone who lives in Portland, I have a HOT tip for you–Willamette Moving Company.

These guys were so good, Tom and I have now made a pact that we cannot ever move out of their service territory, thereby guaranteeing our future moving success.

I picked them based on their citysearch reviews–which were so glowing, I was slightly suspicious that they were planted. Charles and Brent were our movers, and they transferred some heavy, very bulky pieces of cherished furniture to storage for us, and they did it beautifully with nary a ding, complaint, or scuffed wall.

I have had my first happy moving experience!! It can happen.

We feel like we’ve done quite the purge on our library of books.

With an eye toward minimizing our storage needs, we are getting rid of mucho stuff before we leave, including (gasp), a bunch of books. Frankly, all of our shelves looked decimated when we were done–it was sort of sad.

Mom and Dad scored, taking a bunch of books home.

Tom then took the remainder (easily over 300 books) to Powell’s warehouse (near Montgomery Park on NW 29th) to sell. He wasn’t very popular though, dragging in 5 boxes of books right before closing, but they soldiered through!

Now we have a nice Powells credit, which we can use when we return!

Parenting tip: make sure all of your doors squeak.

Tonight, after we put the girls to bed in different rooms, Tom crept up on them and caught them in the same room playing their Nintendo DS in the dark.

“Dad, how did you know?” asked Zoe.

“Because you guys make a racket,” Tom replied.

Really though, it was the squeaky bedroom doors Tom heard creaking from the other room. We can only hope they are this easy to catch as they get older!

We were visiting a friend of mine who had 6-month old twin boys yesterday, and the girls were entranced with all things “twin.”

At the dinner table last night, they wanted to know more about the biological processes that lead to twins, and the differences between fraternal and identical twins. Since we try to be comfortable with the girls about reproduction, we end up discussing it whenever they have questions, which means we had a lengthy discussion about sperm, eggs, fertility drugs, and cell division at the dinner table.

The whole concept of sexual intercourse is extremely distasteful to the girls (thank God), and they assume that we have only had sex twice, once each time strictly in order to get pregnant with each of them.

They asked us again last night how many times we “tried” to get pregnant. I said 1 and 1/2. Then Zoe looked at us funny and said, “Where did you do it? Because I would have remembered if I had seen something like that!”

We demurred.

Ahh…raising kids. They always hit you with this stuff when you aren’t expecting it.

Tom (you know, the guy who rarely posts on “our” blog), being the thorough young man that he is, was doing some research prior to renting our storage space and discovered the idea of laying pallets down on the floor of the storage space to a) provide circulation; and, b) protect items from water leaks.

Well, you know how it is, once you read something like that, you kind of feel as if you have to do it, because if you don’t, the space will spring a leak and everything will be ruined.

So, we have our storage space rented and the piano moved into it. The space has pallets on the floor. In four days, we have movers coming just to transport several heavy pieces of furniture into the storage unit. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that we have nothing else boxed up, packed, or sorted. *Sigh* Guess what we are doing for the next 4 days?

How do we handle music while we are gone? We’ve given it some thought and have a plan (of course).

We have our entire music collection ripped electronically and have transferred it to an iPod Classic (160 Gb).

The iPod will then be connected directly into a pair of small Audio Engine Speakers, which have their own power amplifier built in. Just plug and play. (We have been using these speakers with the Squeezebox at home for the last year and they have pretty damn good sound for such a small size.)

All very packable.

Well I guess I reverse jinxed us and got the car sold with my last post! (Tom finds all of my jinxing theories to be exhausting.)

Yes, that’s right, the couple who came to look at the car bought it last night. We are now car free (well, we are borrowing my parents’ jeep, but that’s almost car free).

A wonderful retired couple (who already own an automatic red 2002 PT Cruiser Limited) bought our red 2002 PT Cruiser Limited because it has a manual transmission and can then be towed by their RV. (The buyer said the automatic wasn’t rated to be towed–who knew?)

Whew! I bet Mom and Dad are glad we aren’t asking if we can park our car at their place while we are gallivanting around South America!

Interesting Notes: We only had one person come test drive the minivan, and they bought it on the spot. And, we had only one interested party come look at the PT Cruiser, and they bought it on the spot. They were both older buyers (the only people with cash to buy a car).

Zelda’s due date was September 11, 2001.

From a very pregnant woman’s standpoint, I wasn’t too happy that Zelda was born after her due date (not “too happy” is probably putting it mildly). But, I am delighted that she was not born on her due date, as it would have been tough to go through the rest of her life with a birthday on such a horrible anniversary.