Progress Report

Bathroom window is in.

 Steve is about to frame in the wall between the mud room area and the stairs.  You can also see that he's stripped off all the exterior wood (left the yellow insulation for now) in preparation for that part of the wall to come out.

 This (right hand side centerish) is the hole in my kitchen cupboards from the outside.  I am very grateful that no nosy creatures have taken it upon themselves to investigate this convenient entrance... besides all the ants!  It sure is a rotten mess!

 Oh yes, so there is the wall.

Coming along...

A lot of Cuteness in one Evening

 We went to go watch this cutie play soccer.  A fantastic game!  Lots of running the first half...

 and in goal the second.

This cutie wanted to get dressed up like his big brother.  Shelly, a lot of the credit goes to you!  He looks great in it!  He's the wrong color mind you but he does look cute :)

 After we got home and everyone was showered and tucked in bed, this cutie went outside to get the door installed.  Just another step in the right direction.  Hopefully this allows for some bigger steps to follow pretty soon!

Barnston Island - A Great way to Spend a Holiday Monday

Raring to go - crossing over on the ferry... which is a loving term for this tugboat-steamed barge.

Better than biking any day :) This ride was a favorite.

My focus is all wrong but these two had a fun day together.

This is the last we would see of our group behind us :)

Never fear, we didn't see too many of our group but because I gave the camera to Cara we got 51 nearly identical pictures of Cody riding ahead of us. :)
Once Sam and Steve passed we stayed last, went out 2.3 km, realized that was a mistake and went back that many past the ferry landing to go 1.7km the other way.  By that time our absence caused a wee kafuffle. Oops!

Cody did amazing for finally deciding two wheel bikes are cool but that's still a long ways to go when your legs have to make 3489 revolutions per minute.  Well, that may be an exaggeration but those little tires sure require a lot of leg work.
After he had biked a good 2.5 km I loaded him and his bike up and ran for a nice long way.  When I met another family I asked them to please take a picture so I could have it if I ever needed a, "after ALL I've done for you" picture :)

Super group we went with!  Thankfully we could get this picture after all the search and rescue personnel were back again.  (Sam did the whole route a second time when he went out with Steve to look for me and the lunch twins)

Thankfully because of one person's kind offer we even got this....

and this!

So thankful for a safe trip on the highway and going the opposite way of the busiest traffic!! :)

It Might be a Holiday

Forget sleeping in, these boys hatched a plan and got up at 6:30 to play!

Tornados

Apparently Cody's class talked about tornados at school.  The other day he came inside with two hand fulls of "stuff" including everything on this paper and more.  "Don't worry about all the mud," he said, "we can just shake it off after you're done gluing everything down."  Says the boy who obviously doesn't vacuum or wash the floors nearly enough:)

I told him to get it all set up and then tell me about it.  This is what he had to say.

"This is where a tornado happened.  See this brook?  It has some pieces of houses floating in it.  You can see the tornado came through and destroyed all the trees and houses.  This (pointing to the pencil sharpener) is a piece of furniture that got wrecked.  Can you please hot glue it all in the right spot?"

Then he took the paper outside and let the wind rustle it up a bit.  "See, Mama," he said as the wind sent the paper to bending and crackling, "it's almost like a real tornado."

Later he told Steve, "I think tornado's are FASCINATING!"  We watched a couple you tube clips to help confirm his opinion. :)

KG Mother's Lunch

Had Mother's Lunch with Cara and Cody today.

There's maybe a couple of disadvantages of having to share your Mom...you give the same recipe book and you both want to be the one to reveal it, you both have a super cute "all about me" booklet that you want to look through with Mom but time and eyeballs are limited.  

But there are also some advantages of sharing your Mom.  You figure out some problem solving pretty quickly (Cody, you read the boy's recipes and I'll read the girls'). You learn that sharing your Mom with your best friend "twinner" is just a special thing that not many kids get to experience, you can take pictures of each other so you both have pictures of yourselves pinning on Mom's corsages, and when you both sit opposite of Mom on the teeter totter you get a pretty decent ride that other kids cannot get when they try to teeter totter with their mom on their own.

Pretty weird to think "the babies" are almost finished kg (probably around only 20 school days left) but VERY thankful for this special afternoon together.

I used to go to town with 5 and get "you sure have your hands full!!!" Today, my arms were full in that kg classroom but they weren't anything compared to the fullness of my heart!

One New Window

The most finicky one.

The window on the back wall on the left side of the picture is from the "babies room".  :)  That draws a decent amount of protest these days as it's now called the "lego room" aka constant mess and don't go in there with bare feet room. Well, this window was a) cracked from one very hot summer day a few years ago when the glass expanded to the point of exploding and was b) in the way of the new wall. So, Steve had to move it over.  Before he could do that he had to rip all the stucco off that wall and cut a new window hole.

 But he got that all done and got the new window in without too much fuss... or at least I think it was easy enough.  He didn't call and ask me to come help :)

So, the newly framed and insulated section on the left is where the old window sat... notice the lack of paint where the trimi used to sit.  The new window is a tad shorter.  And yes, the beautiful blue color under where the chair rail was is the color this whole room was when we moved in.  The chair rail and doors and trim were lime green :)  Almost forgot about that.

 That's where it's sitting tonight.

May 3

 September 22!  Quite a change!  Ps.  now I also know how many ants were crawling around under the stucco, under the kitchen window :S