It's been a busy time

Well! I am sorry about the long break I took from this blog, but I have some very good reasons.

Reason #1 -

Chris and Dante, with some help from Dan, put in a beautiful new wood (laminate) floor in our living room! It is absolutely gorgeous, and it somehow magically makes the rest of the house look much nicer, too. (That may also be due, in part, to the frantic cleaning, purging, and packing I've been doing, though.)

Reason #2

We have been extremely, almost obsessively, preoccupied with the little nest of hatchling on our deck. We monitored the mommy robin while she laid an egg a day for four days, and then stalked her (through the glass door) throughout the two weeks it took her to hatch her little birdies. The four baby birds have just begun to grow feathers now, and they chirp impatiently with open beaks while they wait to be fed. The girls have named them after Katie's current Narnia obsession: Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy.

Reason #3

Our house is for sale! Actually, it is almost sold!!!! I don't want to count our chickens before they're hatched (appropriate analogy, given our current bird-watching), but we have a buyer and we are very close to closing the contract. :-) If this goes through, our house will have been on the market a mere day and a half!

And Reason #4, which is the most serious and least positive is this:

Abbie has had a very seriously strained neck for going on three months, and we've been running her all over town to figure out what the deal is. In the meantime, she has been getting worse and worse -- at this point, she can barely move her head from side to side, and she won't move her head up at all. So she is walking around with hunched shoulders, her chin close to her chest.

She has an MRI next week, which will hopefully provide us with some answers. So please say a prayer for her!

So, things are looking to continue on in this hectic way for quite a while, but I promise to try and update this more often. :)