Tonight my brother- and sister-in-law and their beautiful toddler arrive.  They are "easy" in-laws - they don't demand gourmet meals and are easily entertained by baseball games and Plaza shopping trips.  However, in the whirlwind of travel that has been July/August, we haven't had time to attend to much around This Old House. 

There's nothing like visiting in-laws to bring your attention to the bevy (herd? flock? gaggle?) of spiders in every corner, attending to their large, only-visible-when-visitors-come cobwebs in the corner of every ceiling.  Or the fact that the entire yard is dead and crunchy, the flowerpots broken and filled with half-dead impatiens.  The office we swore we would paint before one more visitor descended upon us.  Things like that.

To add insult to injury, our house is so hot up in my home office/guest room that during the day it peaks at 85 degrees and doesn't really cool off to 77 until around midnight.  There is no room in the office/guest room for a pack-n-play.  So what to do with four adults and two toddlers in a two-and-a-kind-of-half bedroom house?  We decided to give them OUR bedroom, so they could put their daughter in with them and let the teething, waking-in-the-night angel keep her little fiefdom.  Am I being overprotective?  Oh, probably.  But why mess with a good thing?  She slept through last night AND past the witching hour of 6 a.m.   Maybe, just maybe, A. can teach her to sleep until 7 a.m. At the very least, we'll take all sorts of photos of them being cute together then drink when they go to bed.