Wisc in May

Now that it's almost July, I thought I might need to get the G'parents Wisc. trip up. Den is out somewhere in the middle of the country, playing booth bunny.

We had a great time with the g'parents. I shopped at my favorite local stores, Eddie and Josie enjoyed their close-up encounter with the cows at a dairy farm and Den got the chance to relax and disconnect. G'parents also got their kid fix (for a short time anyway).

I started a parenting class yesterday. I'm pretty excited about it. Some people can 'get' how kids are and for the most part can figure out what to do with them. I am no more equipped to be a teacher than the man in the moon and since the 12 books I checked out from the library are still unread, I thought this approach might yield some results. We were given a homework assignment for the week and my first time trying it, it worked!! I don't expect it to work everytime, but yipee!

The Tormentor and the Tormented

Despite the happy faces in these pictures, I'm a bad mom. I will likely think this up until my child wins the Nobel Prize or I die. I can not for the life of me figure out how to manipulate, I mean bring out the best in Eddie. I know that it is my problem because I am the only one to experience the behaviors (Den does on ocassion). It's gotten pretty bad in that Josie and Eddie fight more than they get along, which saddens me.

Josie has certainly figured out how to push Eddie's buttons. He has a toy garage in his room with these little tiny cars. They are too small for her to be playing with, but every now and then she is allowed to when I am there--until she puts them in her mouth. Eddie is very possessive of said cars. Last night she waited for her chance, reached in and in one fell swoop grabbed a handful of cars and bolted from the room. He ran whining after her.

Tonight, while he was trying to get me to read stories, she would grab a car and then hold her hand out as if to give the car back, only to pull it away. When this didn't grab his attention she walked back and forth in front of him waving the car right in his field of vision. It was such odd behavior to see in a 14 month old that it was almost kind of funny, but not really.

I feel immense guilt that the first 2 years of his life, to save on childcare, I squeezed in work around the edges and never once took Eddie to a playgroup or other group experience. He always seemed too young, but now I understand why those experiences are so valuable. I know his personality is a large part, but this new whining and crying out every time his sister walks by is getting really old. What happened to my sweet, happy child?

We played in the pool this weekend and Josie just loved getting herself in and out and Eddie loved filling it with water--he's become quite proficient with the garden hose.

On Monday, while Josie slept, Eddie and I enjoyed a couple of drumsticks. He didn't want to finish his (!) and so I got what I think is the best part of the whole thing--the very bottom of the cone.

Construction Woes

So the construction is going really well. Our contractor still thinks we'll finish on time, if not early--yipee! In between all that we've found that somewhere between the lack of detail in the architectural drawings and the contractor's interpretation of the drawings, we will lose 2 inches off the side of our dining room where they will have to 'pad' the wall to account for the placement of a beam (or we can have a little nudge in the dining room wall. Wouldn't be a big deal on the long wall, but this makes the dining room that much shorter and when you are talking about 11 feet, 9 inches, becoming 11 feet 7 inches is a bit of a bummer. Esp. when...

The screen porch you envisioned was 12x12. For whatever reason it will be about 11.5 by 10 foot 6. Partial contractor error, partial architectural error. This coupled with the fact that one of us (who shall remain partily nameless) really wanted a larger porch to begin with. I bet you can't guess who. That will be the part of the project I obsess over wishing we'd done differently.

Oh and the little closet we had in the family room is even smaller than planned thanks to the ductwork for the HVAC system. HVAC ducts seem to have taken over our basement and emerged in the most bizarre locations on the main level. Our contractor has had to move ducts out of the back of closets and figure out other fixes.

On the bright side, we are going to have a HUGE basement. We'll probably have it filled up in no time flat, but it's gigantic--really glad we decided to remove the entire back wall of our house! Plus, we'll have a first floor powder room --the benefit of which you don't realize until you are potty training.

We really do like our contractors, were it not for the porch error. Grrr.

The above picture is from several weeks ago, but it's the view from just outside the powder room to the dining room--nice straight shot, but we were kind of limited, so we'll have doors between the DR and family room.

Don't know if I mentioned this, but our beloved Nikon that we forked over enough to fly to Australia for bit the dust. Thankfully we bought it with a credit card that doubled the warranty. So, we're able to get it fixed and it's working again. We can't figure out what went wrong except that Nikon seemed to have so many problems with this model that this discontinued it not long after the model debuted.

A month ago..

Can't believe these were taken a month ago. The project is so much further along--we have been fully under roof for a while, the electrical is almost done, the HVAC is just about done, and the plumbing is just about done. Contractor thinks it will be 5-6 weeks more. Yikes!
A couple weeks ago, I was fine with it all, saying it was no biggie. Now, I am so ready to have the project done and my house back to normal. That said, these guys are the nicest in the world and we love having them around. They seem to really like kids, which is fun.

They are good consciencious workers. On Friday, one guy spent over 2 hours just cleaning the worksite. It's amazing. Granted, we still have some time left in the project, but you hear such horror stories about contractors and these guys have been anything but. We'll see how I report in 6 weeks...




A month ago this bike arrived in the mail. After extensive research, I settled on this 'balance bike' for Eddie. Well, if I dind't make him wear a helmet, he'd ride it, but he doesn't want to wear a helmut, so no trike, no balance bike, no anything except chaulk and baseball.

Josie meanwhile logged a couple turns on the bike. Right now it is buried in the garage as the workers continue on our project.

The kids are doing well. Enjoying trips to the pool and the warm weather. Getting ready for a trek to the beach. Yay!

The Camera, Part II

Here are some more photos by Eddie. I love the angle he has on people. It's fun to hand him the camera and then see what he photographs. He has yet to see the photos on the computer though.

I call this his self portrait--there are a couple of these--he loves taking photos of himself, but hasn't quite figured out that he is supposed to hold the camera at an arms length. As a result, there are a lot of closeups.
Eddie remembers the color and description of both g'parents cars and I'm sure is waiting for the time he gets to take a spin in this one.
Eddie took this photo--all by himself. I only cropped off the top to hind all the stuff on the counter.

Figured out the timer. Took a couple shots for me to realize I had to tickle Josie to get her to think about smiling.

Hi daddy--on number 1 of 3 trips this month.

Eddie's New Camera

G'parents Ohio came out for a quick visit--less than 48 hours--and for the record stayed at a nearby hotel, as there is no room here. G'ma had moved on from wanting to buy Eddie a bike and had decided he needed one of those fisher-price style cameras: http://www.amazon.com/Fisher-Price-Tough-Digital-Camera/dp/B000QUJKFU

Noticed this link says 'new version', I didn't realize they had an old and new version. But I'm guessing the reason there is a 'new' version is that previous reviews said the camera at $70 for the old version took crappy shots. So G'parents Ohio bought him a real live Cannon camera for not much more than the 'new' fisher price version.

At first he liked the purse they brought J better than his camera and J liked Eddie's camera more, but soon enough Eddie couldn't be stopped...recording the world from 3 feet high. Above are a couple pictures he snapped.

Have I mentioned that it's been hot here the last several days? J has just eaten either watermelon or strawberries to cool off--or both.

And happy day--our contractor says there is a chance he could finish up early! That is if we would hurry up and pick the electrical components of our project.

Every Day Could Be A Post

I've been looking for a swimsuit for about 5 months--really ever since they lauched them in the winter. I don't want much--a skirted bottom that doesn't hit my knees and a tankini top so you can't tell I have 2 kids and no drive to exercise. Oh and I need the top to be adjustable in tightness. And while I'm on swimsuits, why is it that I'm a size 6 in a swimsuit and a size 0 in clothes. I know I've been over the size 0 thing before, it just blows my mind each time I shop and get frustrated that nothing fits. Spent some quality time in the mall this weekend...



G'parents Ohio came to visit for a quick weekend--they were here less than 48 hours. While here: Josie had a very upset stomach that meant lots of diaper changes. Eddie showed off how he can melt down in an instant and yet charm you in the next.



Last week we had some major storms rip through our area and we lost power Wed. afternoon. At least we got it back by Thurs. night, unlike several thousand people, who in nearly 100 degree heat, have no power.

The Last Wall To Go...

May 14th they started in on the last wall. You can really see the composition of our walls here--it's a hammerdrill they are using (I finally remembered the name).

This is right above our existing master bath and into our attic that they are cutting here. By now (being June) the bottom part of the roof is gone, but it was funny to walk into the attic and look down into my old bathroom, which now has a thick layer of broken tiles on the floor.

Mothers Day 2008

Everyone got dudded up for Mother's Day service at Church. Then Josie fell asleep on the way home.

This also coincides with the day that we realized our camera really was breaking and it wasn't a fluke or something we were doing to cause all the error messages that kept popping up. Our beloved Nikon is dying, a slow painful death. We're going to send it in, because thankfully our credit card extended the warrenty. Apparently our model was so bad they stopped making it...



Cookie and Den have really been working with Ed in the kitchen. He now can crack an egg and does a nice job of mixing ingrediants. He has almost inspired me to take a cooking class. Almost.

Support Systems

Clearly there is something about the cross section of the house that interests me, but here it is again. Also, here is the steel beam they inserted in the middle of the house. For not being into this stuff (more for a lack of understanding), I seem to be equally as fascinated as the rest of my family.

May 6

In a previous post I alluded to their being a 17 inch issue. Well, turns out the architect failed to remember that our bedroom is up 2 steps from the main level. We had a couple options, the easiest of which was to build up the existing area by 17 inches. Too bad it wasn't caught earlier, because then Den could have had a higher ceiling in his workroom. Let me just say, the contractor quote is not firm fixed price, so if we had wanted them to pull up the flooring and build up, it would have cost us. Ugh. Enough that I have added 2 windows and am trying to add a third.

So the architect came over to discuss the issue and she and the foreman exchanged some words. Long story short, we are bumping out the dining room and she had mentioned that we'd have a beam. She did not mention that it would be protruding from the dining room ceiling. Bit of an issue in our book. So thankfully the Contracters alerted us to that before they did any work on it. The Foreman, Mr. D, I'll call him, thought he could engineer a solution and the architect got a bit snippy about it all. She also got snippy about the windows I added in. I can understand how she could feel wedded to her design and all, but it was an interesting exchange to say the least.

The owner of the company (it's a small firm), finally got up the nerve almost a month later to email the architect about making the changes in the drawings so that we could submit for code.

Josie has 2 bottom teeth and is working on the top 2 with a waterfall of drool. She loves to brush her teeth when Eddie does.

Almost a Month In

Sorry, no kid pictures on this one. It cracks me up though that I had visions of a separate blog for the house when I can't even keep my kid's blog up.

So these were taken on May 5, about a month into the project. We ran away to G'parents Ohio for the weekend because we were so worried about what it would be like when they did the 'demo'. That is, when they removed the back wall of the dining room and basement and ultimately the master bedroom back wall. We were so worried that we stayed down the street with neighbors who had an apt. in their basement on Sunday and Monday nights only to have NOTHING done with demo, yet we had packed up ourselves and the kids and trotted down the street. Big Waste of Time.

We were not disappointed when we returned from Ohio--the DR wall was gone and part of the basement wall was gone. Turns out instead of a jackhammer, they use a drill of some sort--Den has one--so maybe he could have done this project? :) Well, maybe if he had taken a year off of work. The foreman really pours over the drawings to try and stay one step ahead of the workers. Interesting to watch them work.

Anyway, when we got home, this was what we found. Den's computer has the pictures of the kids at g'parents Ohio. Surprisingly, we didn't see anyone (any friends) on the trip, as it was pretty quick, but the kids had a great time with the g'parents.

The top two photos are the 'main' level of the house with the 16+ foot tall wall supporting the back of our house. This picture is of said wall and a micro-lam--some kind of replacment for a steel beam or something that is supposed to be really strong--at least we hope.
16 foot tall wall and the back of our dining room. Based on construction stories from everyone else, we were prepared for the worst, but these guys are so conscientious that we had almost no dust in the house. They put in a temporary wall, cover it with plywood, then fill in the gaps with insulation and then on top of that put up plastic. The back of our house has survived many a rain storm open to the breezes.

This is a section of the basement wall. The good news is our house is REALLY solid. There is a layer of brick, then of block. But interspersed with the block are bricks and the foreman said that usually you just see a brick every now and then turned in, but with ours it was throughout the whole wall. They were able to remove the brick and they block wall would remain. It really did kill me to be taking all this away, but the house is going to be great when it's done.

This is a close up of one of the beams holding up the back of our house...more on those later.