i am at a nicely packed coffee house near our home. finley is asleep on my back. we ran into some w and m people here earlier. our house is a disaster. moving with a baby is hard. but finley is loving it. so many things to get into. boxes to pull up on. tools to play with and markers (permanent) to play with (and mark up your body). yipes. but overall we are doing well. the stress hit the high mark over the weekend. witha bit of an explosion, but we survived and now we are functioning as a team. coming up with a plan each morning and going from there. i am happy with how well jason and i are managing this huge step. we usually have a hard time with big changes. and this week is full of them. he is done with work until september. we are moving out. we are about to go on a month long trip out west. we are moving half our stuff into storage, the rest into his folks little house. we are weeding out things we don’t need. i am guessing (and am very likely right) that our place in nyc will be much smaller. but all goes well. and it feel good to be cleaning out things. life feels lighter. ahh the joy of moving. i hope we don’t do it again too soon.

we leave for the bay area on tuesday. we have a busy month ahead. but we now have bits of calm amid all the moving. we’ll be staying in mendocino at a cabin for a week. my dear friend adam is having a mother/father blessing there and we are going to enjoy a week of family time around the blessing. we’ll be with tripp and r for a few days too. i am hoping to cook a little with r. it’ll be nice for jason to actually get to know tripp (and r too) after all these years. we’re also heading north to visit family. two of my mom’s sisters live in washington state. it’ll be good to reconnect with them and my cousins there. but it also means going over my mom’s stuff with all of them. that is how family gathers go for me. a lot of talk about mom, her health, the future. i feel like we get dragged down into this depressing spot…where we talk about her mind failing, feel depressed and scared and forget to connect on all the good in our lives. maybe i can turn that around on this visit.

i’ll post from the road…i hope. maybe a picture or two. finley is getting so big. he is almost one. where did the year go?