Chalkboard!

Over Christmas break I cleaned and threw away and reorganized Emi's room to change it from the "spare 'oom" to a fun play place for the kids and a nice place for her to sleep.

I'll show you the fun parts of her room one at a time to draw this out, but this is one of the kid's favs!

Garrick stole borrowed repossessed  this piece of old heavy slate from his parent's house and then made a beautiful chalk tray and frame for it. We are using sidewalk chalk on the board right now, but actually it works better since they are always dropping the chalk all over the place..

 Emi likes to stand there and make thousands of little vertical lines. Peter is a little more productive. He l ikes to decorate drawings that I make, draw his own "race tracks" and trace letters that I make in dots. He is also starting to make the letter 'P' and some shapes on his own up there. He also likes to drag a parking garage over to the board and drawing in the upper upper corners of the board as well. I'm really surprised at how much he likes to do this. He normally doesn't really like to draw and write

Also- do you see how tall they look? 
1. Peter is really shooting up, he looks like a giant next to little Emi.
2. Emi is also shooting up, I knit her those little brown pants this week. I thought I had measured her right to make them long enough but maybe she grew? Not to sure about this.

Starting Projects

We started to build our deck this weekend! The first project of the summer, the shed, is just waiting for me to put a second coat of paint on the trim and then it will be done, done done! Lots of the garden stuff has been moved in and garage is getting a *little* less cluttered...

Garrick and Mike (our next door neighbor) drilled the holed, dug them out a little more and set the concrete pads into them for the posts to go on.

Pete and I supervised.

And checked to see how deep the holes were- pretty deep!!
We got some of the posts set last night and the rest will be in this week!

And since it's been a while, here I am with my belly at 33 weeks- just a few more to go- we can't wait to meet this little baby.

A journey...

(there are 2 posts for today!) 

This was our starting point in our kitchen. Cool old cabinets that had a really low counter top, stains and a awesome old sink that was impossible to keep clean and unrealistic. Walls had never been painted and had grease stains and was the darkest and smallest room in the house. From this point we painted, fixed the sink so that it wasn't draining into a bucket (instead it drained into the basement floor drain via a sump pump hose) and put brighter lights in. This was useable for quite a while. THEN...

The cabinets were pulled out and put into the living room as our entertainment center.

We gutted the entire room (and the room above).

And things started to get put back together- we got a new sink, a dishwasher that you had to hold onto when unloading/loading dishes so that it didn't tip over and had a few little tables to use as our counters. This worked really well. All of those nights that I was working at the Blackhorse waitressing and bartending Garrick was working in the basement (or was at Menards hopefully spending less than I made) building me a beautiful kitchen. He also took down a 3 story chimney and ripped out the wall between the dining room and kitchen to make one huge beautiful room and added french doors going out to our fenced in backyard and has refinished all of the floors! (See post: My husband, the stripper)

This is the final set of cabinets that were installed this week. They still need doors, but they are SO nice! We just need to add a backsplash, a half-million doors and a few shelves above the stove.

Here is the almost finished product- (mom I realize I should have cleaned up a little before I took this pic, but oh well! I'll clean and get fruit and flowers when we are featured in This Old House)

Pretty nice, HUH?

Also, this was made for my ease so that I am no longer climbing up on the counters...

How lucky am I that I have a husband who can do all of this?

New Fence

After a few busy weeks, Garrick has our fence completely finished! This weekend, my parents are going to come and we are going to build steps from our patio doors to the backyard. Scout was running laps around the yard by himself last night- he is pretty excited that he gets the WHOLE thing now! That was our Thanksgiving Day, my parents were going to visit, but dad got sick so we will see them this weekend instead- it was good to get so much work done!

Last weekend, as always, we went to the Holey House for Lesfe Night. Garrick and I have helped for a long time now with the entire process. We go the night before to cook and rice potatoes, then Linka makes a million balls the next morning with flour and butter and the potatoes. After that, she has all of their friends over and they take turns rolling out the balls and cooking them.

Pete supervising...

We also put the the Christmas lights up for them.

This year we had to re-wire the reindeer.

WOW!!

We didn't think ahead far enough to take before pictures of the house, but here are how the floors turned out! It was a lot of work- this was BY FAR the biggest area (two times!) that we had ever tried to do, but we are getting better and doing it. We have learned not to use wood stripper, but to use a paint scraper on all of the edges (my job), how to use the edge sander better- glue the sand paper on (Dan's job), and to go diagonally longer with the first grit of sandpaper (Garrick's job). Don't they look amazing? We said our upstairs USED to be great, but now they also need to be done...

Lots to share this week...

SIGNS OF SPRING...

It is starting to warm up and we have been spending more time outside this week- it is supposed to be in the 60s by this weekend for Easter. We have been getting more stuff done around the house and are finishing up some projects that we had started. I am pretty sure that since I have lived in our house, the back door has never had trim around it- we had gutted the whole thing before I moved it- so it is so neat to see the entire thing FINISHED. Garrick worked so hard on all of the renovations in this room- building all of the cabinets, tearing down the wall, putting in the doors to the backyard and refinishing the floors. I am so lucky to have such a smart and talented husband!

I got all of my seeds started inside that I am going to start. We are going to grow most of the usual this year, tomatoes, peppers, beans (to Garrick's dismay), peas, cucs, lots of squash. Hopefully, enough will grow that we can use it to make food for Pete... this is ambitious... we will see if it happens. :) At least we can have good things to eat this summer while it is growing and we can share it with our friends.

I took Pete while he was still a "tiny baby" to JC Penny to get his pictures taken. They did a really nice job, I wish they would have taken a few more, but he was a sleepy little guy and didn't want to wake up. That's okay, its what he does most of the time anyhow. (He is up to about 9 pounds I think- we weigh him on our bathroom scale. He isn't such a little squirt anymore!)

This weekend I did my first race- The Fool's Five in Lewiston! It was so fun to get out an run again- and i was still pretty fast! Peter and Garrick came and watched- here is Peter in his chariot cheering mama on!

And Here we are after the race- it was a cold and snowy and windy day... I found two guys on the way back to "draft off of" so that I didn't have to run into the 30mph winds! (It worked- i won my age group!)

AND Peter is learning to suck his thumb- we were reading a book the other day and this is what I looked to down see! Then I yelled- Garrick come quick with the camera!

We are starting a baby swim team. Finn came swimming with us at the Y the other day. Just as his name would imply- he quite the little swimmer! He did a great job and we are looking foward to going with them again!

Finally, I realized that I haven't been putting up his pictures with his bear... These are the 2 latest ones. One Month (in white) and 6 weeks (in yellow).

Like I said, this is quite a lot- but we had a good week here- Also- we want to send out good vibes to our friends Liz and Brian who are quickly approaching their due date for a quick and safe delivery! We can't wait to meet your little one! Happy Easter my parents are coming to visit on Friday and Garrick's mom is coming on Monday- it should be a great weekend!

our new dance hall!

Well, we- well Garrick- has finished the dining room floor- we feel like the space is so big that it would be able to be used as a dance floor with the two rooms connected and finished the same. It was a long weekend and week of work for him, but it looks beautiful- it is also nice to have our house back together without our kitchen table in the living room etc... Here are some during/after pictures.

One thing that happened was the handle of the sander somehow wiggled loose, it ran away from Garrick and smashed into the wall... The way that we looked at it was we were really really really glad that it didn't run into the patio doors and ruin that wood or break the glass- that was less that a foot away... this will be mostly covered by our baseboards and then can be just touched up after that.

AND here we are at 34 weeks. Kermit is getting bigger, people have finally said that it is clearly obvious that I am preggo and the kids at school are getting excited. They went sledding the other day and could not figure out why their dare-devil teacher wouldn't go with them! I just kept saying- "babies don't sled!" But it is getting tight in there... 6 weeks to go! We are getting a crib this weekend and then are going to set up his room so that we are ready in case of an early appearance!

work work work

We have been working hard on our dining room now that our kitchen is so beautiful. We added french doors that go to our backyard and a new ceiling becuase the old one was so cracked. We are almost ready for a coat of paint (first we just have to pick a color for the room.)

Scout got a new toy that he really really had fun with for about one day... ( I tried to upload a video of him playing with it, but I think that I didn't give it enough time! I'll try again with a different video at some point.) This is what happened after the first day of fun with it!

Finally, this weekend we went to LaCrosse to see the Christmas lights like we always do. It was real cold this year and we weren't dressed for it... so we just walked through real fast and took a few fast pictures...