Since I made that last post I've found the following items: about a thousand other photos, including the entire roll I took at Reunions two weeks before Adam and Brett's graduation; the birthday card Adam and Brett and AJ gave me for my twentieth birthday; my phone bill from June 1997. Clearly, I'm being mocked by the god of archiving. I think it's time to put this obsession aside until next year. Still, though, some of the photos I've found have been pretty great, and I got two boxes of my things out of my parents' house, which essentially doubled the number of boxes of mementos that I have. I must be getting sentimental in my old age.

And Robbie has this week off from work (he's taking the last of his parental-leave weeks, which need to be used up by Peter's birthday), which is nice, although I can tell already that it's going to be exhausting, since he brings a level of productivity to his at-home vacations that we usually don't even come close to when it's just the three of us. When Henry was born he made us keep a list of daily tasks on our white board, which, okay, sort of made me want to punch him, but that was probably just the postpartum hormones, because it was actually pretty useful and we did it again last year. This week we're trying to get a bunch of things done around the house and get Peter's passport (not for any reason, it just gives me nightmares sometimes that he doesn't have one) and look into possibly refinancing the mortgage, because my parents just did theirs and got a shockingly better rate. We're also planning to visit essentially all the sources of merriment in the city (today was the zoo, and also on the docket are the museum, the children's museum, and the car museum), just to keep things balanced and also because we have all these memberships we kind of never use.

Also, and I admit this is a stretch goal, we're planning to fix up our bedroom so that it doesn't make us actively sad. I don't know if I've complained about this room before in this blog, but you know how they say that once you have kids you should keep your bedroom all pretty and calming and sanctuary-like? We sort of went the opposite direction with all that, and so the room looks like someone got about a third of the way done moving out of it in an orderly fashion, and then got evicted and ran. There's a rolled-up carpet and essentially nothing on the walls, and the furniture is just sort of set down wherever, and it's depressing to be in there. We were playing Sims 2 with Henry this weekend, so this analogy is fresh in my mind, but you know how in that game when your Sim goes into the crappy living room you ran out of money for that only has a folding chair and a remote-control car on the bare floor, they lose environment points and exude misery and eventually start pulling their hair out and fantasizing about artwork? That's essentially what happens to us. So, I'm not sure what we're going to do, but the plan is to do something.