I was skimming the pool and Laura came outside and offered to finish the job for me. I guess there’s nothing like novelty to make a chore appealing! I wonder how long the appeal will last.

Colin spent some of his Christmas money on this “Giant Inflatable Unicorn.” He bought it in Melbourne in anticipation of having a pool in Houston and has been excitedly waiting for it to be unpacked.

It has certainly delivered on expectations! It is indeed giant, and Colin is thrilled to bits.

These flowers have bloomed in front of our house, adding some lovely colour to the front yard. We are lucky they survived the freeze in February!

Just some perfectly average suitcase contents.

After 11 weeks of temporary living, the end is finally in sight.

Sorry for the delay – we ran out of storage space on the blog! We’ve managed an interim fix by finding some old videos that were uploaded twice and deleting the doubles. Hopefully we can sort a long-term solution soon!

After all the wallpaper removal, we have been busy painting. Everybody has a role to play.

Some are tapers:

Some are cutters:

Some are rollers:

And some are readers:

The kids really wanted to try the pool. It was very cold that first day – only about 65 degrees! They didn’t last for long and then warmed up in the hot tub. Colin had already been in for a minute when Laura wanted to jump in together. He changed his mind at the last minute!

We have a new house, hooray! It’ll still be a little while until our shipment arrives, so we are redecorating the kids’ bedrooms while they’re empty.

Step one is removing all the wallpaper. There is a LOT of it, and two layers thick in some places. Thankfully everybody is helping.

I know she desperately wants to go be in class and meet new friends, but she has not complained once about still doing online learning. Seven weeks of it so far in 2021, and it’s extra hard when everybody else is there in person.

Can you even imagine a more comfortable position in which to read? (yes, his Kindle is in there with him.)