A new life; same as the old life?

When I lived in the UK, many's a day Charlie and I would find ourselves rumminating over a DIY problem, often with a beer in hand and some Tiger Woods golf on the Playstation or Xbox in obeyance until we were done. Everything from building summer houses for my then MIL, to erecting fences in his garden to simple painting and decorating, although we tended to do the simple stuff in our separate ways. As I have been working on this house, I have often wished for his assistance or support, if nothing else, a fresh pair of eyes. I miss the spare hand, the common sense approach but most of all I miss the camaraderie. So when I was working on these new doors, replacing the horrible old, brown stained, flat, hollow cores, with some nice 6 panel, foam core versions, with brushed nickel hardware, I thought of Charlie. Particularly when I left the door standing in the opening for a minute to get a tool, and it fell through into the room, landing on Addison's new fan, and her toy chest, a...

May was a pretty quiet month for us generally, the weather was unseasonably cold, I went to a few Cubs games, and generally we did homely stuff. We did go to Sarbina & Bob's twins first birthday and had a garage sale at the end of the month, where we made some decent cash. Also we went to that iconic American insituttion, the drive in movie, but that's a post for a different day. For anyone interested, here are some general pictures of the kids from May.

I remember as a child living in South Africa, going to the drive in movies with our parents in an old beat up Volkswagen Beetle. They would lay down the back seat and we would curl up under a blanket "asleep" to be able to into 18/R rated movies, so they could see them without having to hire a babysitter. I guess I must have been around 9 or 10 because the movies I remember came out in the late 70s. We saw a terrible B movie, The Car and what I thought at the time as hilarious, although now who knows, The Last Remake Of Beau Geste , but I remember it as a very cool experience. Care all around, windows rolled down a bit, speaker on a cable, hung on the side window. At the time, of course, I didn't know it was really an American institution. It was much later through the magic of television and my exposure to American TV shows, that I learned just how much of an icon the drive in was. Of course with the advent of modern cinema, surround sound, air conditioning, etc, they ...

The debate will never be resolved of course, but it is an interesting thought process. Theoretically we have done nothing different with Cooper than we did with Addison, yet the differences in his behaviour are marked from Addison's. I say theoretically because, of course things are different. Our values have not changed, but likely our approach has. He is child number two, so of course lessons have been learned, attitudes are different, and Addison is here being very involved in everything going on. He is way more grizzly than Addison ever was, doesn't sleep as well, and seems to need to burp every minute of EVERY DAY. Appearancewise, he could be her twin at that age. There are often time when I look at pictures, on the computer or the digital frame, with some hand me down outfit from Addison, and I cannot tell for sure which one of them it is. All of this to say that he has been a nightmare to feed, to the point where I don't even try any more and Lorraine spends hours w...