Update!

Although it hasn't, apparently, been as long as I thought it had been since I posted here (thank you, Blogger app for Android!), it's been long enough, and a lot has been going on, and I had a month's worth of photos on my camera... So here's our family update.

1) We're still moving!  Sometime in May, fingers crossed.  We signed our lives away last night in the stack of paperwork that the mortgage requires, knowing that this is still just the beginning of the signatures and insanity of buying a house.  It's been an interesting experience, in which M. is the calm and collected one and I'm having mini-freakouts on a regular basis, just waiting for the whole thing to fall through.  It's what happens when one falls totally in love with a house, I think... but it's an odd role reversal, for the time being.

2) I'm still commuting.  It's been a month, and Asa has learned both to talk on the phone fairly well, and to ask if I'm stuck in traffic.  The answer, unfortunately, is often "yes".  I'm also hearing a bunch of other phrases on a regular basis: "I miss you, Mummy."  "Will you be back for dinner?"  "I'm glad you're home today, Mummy."  Fortunately, I only heard "I hate you!" once, right at the beginning; it's helpful that Elias is far too young to know what's going on and that Asa is old enough, and articulate enough, to tell me that he's upset and why.  Never thought I'd be having that particular conversation with a two-year-old.

3) Easter!  I wasn't around for things like egg dying:

...because, you know, Holy Week and all that.  But we did get to have Nonni and Poppy, Uncle Kohta and Auntie Sarah up for service on Easter Sunday, and lunch afterwards, which was fabulous.  Even in times of transition, family gathers: how lucky are we?

4) And, of course, our boys are growing in leaps and bounds.  This past month has allowed me to talk with Asa on the phone on a pretty regular basis, and although it's not even close to the delights of being with him, it's a whole different perspective when it's just his voice and his words.  He's gotten so big!  He seems to be coming out of the worst of the terrible twos; most of his tantrums now are about wanting to change the past: if he gets consequences for his behavior, then he'll cry and say, "But I want to make good choices!  I want to behave!"  It makes us remember that he's still quite young, and that time doesn't yet have much meaning.  (And really, don't we all want to change prior actions once in a while?)  Meanwhile, Elias is nearly five months, 16lbs, and totally laidback.  He's just begun eating solid food, and you should have seen the look he gave me when he first ate banana: as though I'd been holding out on him.  Yeah - you try to explain to a baby that it was for his digestion's own good.  See how far you get.

One thing that hasn't changed at all: look at this love:

Which makes us, despite all the craziness of our lives, some of the luckiest people around.