Catching up

Well, fellow bloggers and followers of blogs, it has been a REALLY long time since I last blogged. There are probably roughly 286.4 reasons that I haven't been able to type a quick entry since 9/5, but I won't bore you with those - instead I will undertake a marathon blog session in order to get my blog up-to-date. So, beginning in early September . . .

Eva and I continued to weather the upheaval that accompanies a large-scale remodel. As always, John worked better under pressure, so he actually preferred installing the cabinets in one afternoon while I was sleeping in the back bedroom between nights at work. The corner base cabinet (pictured here, with the included small child), was a little bit harder to get in that we had anticipated, so it took most of one afternoon to install this ONE cabinet. It was a bit of a disappointment, but at least it got installed, which was 1 (of 1,493) step closer to finishing the project.

In mid-September we finished the painting, and John spent a lot of quality time on the ladder and got a HUGE crick in his neck finished off the ceiling and beam. Our ceiling has a specialty (read - annoyingly unreproducible) swirly finish that John did a pretty nice job duplicating. If you didn't know that there were large chunks of new ceiling, you wouldn't be able to tell where the new parts were. And then, it was time for the floor. Initially, John thought our composite tile floor was going to be a breeze to install - the tiles snapped together, cut very easily, and looked great. They had a large variety in their design, so it didn't look like the same tiles over and over again, and the grout lines between each tile made it easy to maintain nice straight lines along walls and stuff. And then, he put the grout in, and it turns out, the only reason these are do-it-yourself tiles is that no professional is stupid enough to spend the amount of time necessary to use this grout with these tiles and get it to look good.

You know your sister really, REALLY loves you when she spends two days on her hands and knees grouting your kitchen floor. With small children playing in the background (we have the best babies ever!) we spent day one cursing the grout - which was similar to John's experience in the laundry room. It is too thick, too sticky, and the grout lines are too shallow for the system listed on the back of the bucket to be at all plausible. That night, Annie went home and spent hours laying awake, wondering how we could make it easier. The final answer was a cake decorating kit she had won in a Christmas dollar game sometime in the past (for more about our Christmas dollar game, stay tuned through the holidays - we'll let you know how your family can have fun for $10 or less). It was the perfect applicator, and once she had mastered the pressure and speed variables, we grouted about 4x more floor on day 2 than we had on day 1. John was suitably impressed, though he claimed he knew that something like a cake decorator would work all along (this was one of the times when his life was almost in danger).

In an ironic twist that brought tears to my eyes (or was it the terrible smell?), John discovered a family of mice had made a home in our BRAND NEW, never-been-turned-on, still-in-the-freakin'-box, stove. Apparently, storing your appliances in a barn for 10 months is not the best way to preserve that "new stove" smell. If you have ever smelled the odor of mouse droppings/pee/body odor, you know why I was crying. Luckily, (for John and our new stove), we were able to replace the damaged insulation. Turns out John knows a guy who has an insulation business, so he was able to get some free insulation. Turns out John can also take a gas stove apart down to the frame, remove all the insulation, and put it back together without instructions. Yet again, a job that should have taken an hour, tops, ended up taking 3 days. However, my stove now has insulation rated for 1,000 degrees, so should I need to start using it instead of the kiln to do pottery, it won't catch the house on fire. Thank goodness!

Also in mid-September, we had a garage sale. After twice postponing it, my mom, Annie and I finally just bit the bullet and did it. John and Dylan moaned and groaned throughout less than 4 hours of loading and moving around merchandise (men are so whiny). John dourly predicted that they would have to spend even MORE time loading everything back up at the end of the sale, since it was supposed to rain all weekend. We (Annie, Mom, and I) re-arranged everything in my garage (which is not as easy as it sounds, since at this point most of my appliances and the island cabinets were still being stored there) and set up everything inside. We took out an ad in the paper and also put signs up that advertised the inside locale and our stand-out merchandise - furniture, craft supplies, and baby stuff. Though it was a little rough getting up for the 7 am start, it was so worth it, because we made craploads, and I mean CRAPLOADS, of money. And, at the end of the sale we only had a few bags of stuff, which Annie took to the Goodwill in the back of her car (which I believe even had a stroller in it, further limiting the space). All in all, it was an unparalleled success, so we are now planning on having a sale each spring and fall.

All the while, I continued to work 2 or more nights per week. On those nights, Eva and her dad hang out. She is pretty easy to take care of in the evening, since she usually takes a before-bed nap. While you have to wake her up from this nap to bathe and feed her before returning her to bed, she is generally in a pretty good mood (see picture). I guess it is pretty amazing that you can wake her up, undress her, and put her in the bathtub and she doesn't get mad. In fact, she loves her baths and has gotten pretty good at splashing. I try not to take her good nature for granted, because I know that my next baby will probably never sleep more than 20 minutes, will hate water, and will have teeth by 4 months of age (read - will bite me while feeding much sooner).

Other September highlights for Eva:

9/17 - started saying "ba-ba-ba-ba-ba"

9/18 - started throwing things, although sometimes it is more of a waving around of things, since she can't always seem to let go

9/22 - got her first bottom tooth

9/25 - got her other bottom tooth

And this brings us to Disney World (and my next post)!