Allllllllll right.  I’m back.  Sorry about that gigantic lag.  I knew it would be long but I’m not sure I realized it would be that long.  The very short version of our moving story is that we left Seattle on August 22nd.  We took three days to drive south with overnight stops in Portland, Grant’s Pass (where we also went river rafting on our 10th anniversary), and Chico, CA.  We rolled into an extended stay hotel in Emeryville a day and a half before the boys started school.  The boys started school.  Our new house closed.  We moved in.  We unpacked.  We waited for wi-fi.  And here I am.  Before I show you some photos of what life has been like for the past month, I will tell you that I know many of you are waiting for food, for recipes.  It’s coming, I promise.  I’ve been cooking in my new kitchen and I love it.  And the light is great.  I think some great things are going to happen here.

Spending the first week and a half of your new life in your new city in a hotel is not ideal.  Good thing there was a pool.

First day of school.  This was a big one – second grade for Graham and kindergarten for Spencer.  My baby in kindergarten.  If we had still been in Seattle and all had been more or less familiar, I would have been very nostalgic and would have come up with a meaningful post about this milestone.  But so much chaos with the move pushed it to the back burner.  Maybe when things settle a bit.

I have a lemon tree in my front yard.  They are Meyer lemons.  It’s pretty awesome.  The tree also grows limes which I didn’t know was possible but I’m pretty excited about it.

I put this photo on Instagram and Facebook and got a lot of questions about it.  Randy and I have the boys do pushups from time to time.  It started on a family vacation when we were getting tired of saying the same thing over and over again and time outs were not feasible.  One day, while we were on the boardwalk in Rehoboth, DE, Randy told Graham to drop and give him five (his age at the time) push-ups.  Which he did on the filthy and gum-strewn sidewalk.  So it became our thing, whine too much and you have to do push-ups.  Hit your brother and you have to do push-ups.  It’s actually a great tool because it puts an immediate stop to the negative behavior and it is a clear sign that they have done something wrong.  Randy has to do push-ups himself when he says a bad word so he does them surprisingly often.  This session was a family attitude adjustment.

And this is my kitchen.  I never took photos of my old kitchen because the light in there was terrible.  It was very big and very nice.  This is smaller and very nice.  And the light is better.  Obviously, now that we are moved in, the kitchen actually looks nothing like this.  It’s a lot messier.

When the kitchen was finally unpacked enough for me to cook, I made dinner.  We ate on the deck.  I can’t believe this is our view.  And what I hate to even mention is what you can’t see in this photo.  Beyond those houses and those hills is the San Francisco skyline, the bay, and way off in the distance, the Golden Gate bridge.

Giants game.

BART ride home.

This lake, which has a lovely walking path, plenty of space for picnics, and a swimming beach, is a 15 minute walk from our house.

I took a vegetarian Thai cooking class from Pim.  It was just outside Santa Cruz.  Randy took the boys to the boardwalk for four hours while I was in class.  They came to pick me up…

…and then we went right back to the boardwalk.

Graham was horsing around (ironically in the same parking lot where he had to do the attitude adjustment push-ups) and fell and cracked his chin open.  He got 5 stitches.  He was so scared he was shaking when the doctor came at him with the needle to numb him up.  But he was a trooper and five days later, they were already out.

My first baked good.  The two things the boys liked best from our time in the extended stay hotel were the pool and the buffet breakfast every morning.  They loved the breakfast potatoes and the small muffins.  So I made mini blueberry muffins.  They were a big hit.

Did you know Oakland is really hilly?  This is our backyard taken from our deck.  That is Graham trying to rescue a paper airplane from that tree.

I’ve always been jealous of people who could just walk out into their yard and pick tomatoes.  Now I am one of those people.

Two soups – coming up this week!