Happy Mother's Day to Me!

Roman and cousin, Chloe, doing some tummy time together!

One of Roman's favorite spots is out on the back porch.  He loves looking at the trees moving in the breeze and the birds flying.  He's rolling so much now though that we have to keep a closer watch on him.

Our porch extension project is finally complete.  I love it!  Now we have room for our table and grill!

A college friend of mine couldn't wait to meet Roman and get in some cuddles on Mother's Day weekend!

Guess who had his very first swim on Mother's Day?  And, boy, did he ever love it!  We went to my sister's for the afternoon, and it was such a lovely day.

Look how tiny my little guy is!

Best. Picture. Ever.

Roman also had his first time in our backyard swing that was donated to us by a neighbor.  It was a hit!

 

The Home-Improvement Train

 Apparently, the home-improvement train is hard to get off of for my husband.  He replaced the laminate floor with a matching (matches the other floors on the main floor) hard wood floor.  He did it all in less than 3 full days which is pretty impressive.

Work in progress

Before replacing most of the furniture

Finished product

A month ago, I moved the toys out of the breakfast area and moved the mini sofa into that area.  We were tripping over toys and now the toys stay in the living room and don't seem to get dumped all over unless we have other kids over.  We all like it a lot more this way.  The kids love to read on the little sofa, and it is a great place for me to rest when I have a second when cooking dinner.

Kitchen sofa in action before the floors were replaced

New Around the House

Lots of changes around here!  Some planned and some unplanned.  That's the way home ownership goes, right?  Things break, sometimes MANY things break at a time.  The first thing to go was a pipe that connected to the city's main line.  It had shifted and so had a more narrow hole which caused a sewage back up.  This has been an ongoing issue for awhile since the plumber would say, "It's the city's problem."  As you can imagine the city would say, "It is centimeters away from our responsibility."  We had new plumbers come and say it would be $6000 and they'd have to rip out our giant Japanese Maple tree, and add again that it should be the city's problem.  And so on until we found a company in Baltimore that would fix it for half the price and spare our tree.  Deal.  We wiped our brow.  Phew, we paid the price of home ownership for the year and now we can rest easy for a while.

Wrong!  Bathtub leak begins by dripping on Hannah's head while she was on the potty downstairs under the tub.  Turns out to be a much bigger leak.  First plumber told us to replace the drain and seal.  Did it with no improvement.  Next plumber looks at it and cuts a big hole in our ceiling (in down stairs bathroom) to see if they could fix it.  No luck.  Another plumber comes and says it is a gasket that will cost us $300 to replace.  We are still waiting on a friend of Brian's' to come take a look and see if they can replace that gasket.  So showers all around for a long time now.  Judah is either in the shower too with someone or in the kitchen sink after dinner.

Somewhere in there, we had the power go out in the garage and all bathrooms, and it wouldn't come back on.  An electrician came and put in a new outlet so our fridge and freezer could stop tripping the breaker.  Plus, he put in a thing in the bathroom so if it trips we can just push the reset button.

The weekend of Genevieve's First Communion, I notice the floor is wet in the back corner of the unfinished part of the basement.  Every time it rained after that, water leaked in.  After meeting with several water-proofing companies we finally decided to take one of the company's advice and reroute our gutters first before shelling out a ton of money to water-proof that part of the basement.  Brian did all the work himself.  No leaks so far.  Everything is dry.  Please God, let it stay that way!

Next leak, kitchen sink!  After a new valve, a new kitchen faucet (installed by my increasingly handy husband), and a tightening of another valve, we have a dry cabinet under the sink once more!

And finally, not a home ownership related break, our computer totally died.  I am trying really hard not to add up the cost of all of these things that have happened recently.  I had to try especially hard not to think about it as we started our long planned basement laundry/craft room finishing project.  What happened to things breaking in threes?  I'll take three breaks over that string of bad luck any day.  Actually, now that I count it up, it was six things, so I guess that was just a double whammy.

On to the planned changes around the house...

The basement project which is not completed yet is coming along nicely.  (You can see a "before" picture of the basement here.)  First Brian and I (but mostly Brian) emptied out the whole room.  Then Brian tore out the built in wooden table and shelves.  They were sturdy, but bent up and unfinished wood.  He put in a new laundry sink.  Then Brian tiled the floor, and I painted the cinder block with a waterproof paint.

Brian's friend came over to help him get started on building the frames for the drywall and putting up a little bit of the sheet rock.

First two walls up

Last wall up

We still have to mud and sand it, paint the walls, find used kitchen cabinets, paint the cabinets white, and install the cabinets.  Then more frames have to be built for the two parts that we want partitioned off and then more drywall. And mudding.  And sanding.  And painting.  We are hoping to have it mostly completed by the start of the school year, but as long as we get to the cabinet installation part so we can empty out the finished basement of all the stuff to be stored in those cabinets I will be pleased.

On a less drastic note, I also changed up our fireplace mantel a little after reading The Nesting Place.

Our Newest Addition

 Bye bye, keyboard!  Hello, piano!

Our newest addition is an upright piano! 

Isaac can't wait to start learning to play too.

It took some serious measuring to find the perfect spot for it, but it was given to us.  We only had to pay for it to be moved.  Brian didn't want it to crowd our main living areas since our house is kind of broken up and not a wide open space.  I was afraid of crowding us in the school room, but in the end I think it does fit best down in the school room.  I just had to shift a few things around.

The Finished Product

 I finally got the pictures on the walls.  Here is our new and improved living room!

We love love love the couch even though it is a tad big for the size of the room.

This is the only place the white wainscoting (that I worked so hard to paint) shows in the whole room. We're keeping our old chair for sentimental reasons, at least for now.

We had some family over and almost filled up the whole couch watching my uncle's slideshow of pictures from his trip.  We fit six adults and all four kids with some room to spare!

Too Big for Our Britches

We bought a new couch recently when we decided that we were tired of having no where to sit especially when we had people over to watch football.  We also moved our TV onto the wall above the fireplace to make room for more couch.  The couch we had was as old as Hannah and was really cheap as far as couches go.  We decided it was time.  

This is an old picture of the living room from when we first moved in.

In choosing the couch we really had a great time with the whole family sitting on every couch in the entire store.  Everyone had an opinion.  Drew's opinion was, "Keep the stroller moving and the snacks coming and I'll let you guys keep me locked up for this nonsense."  The kids especially liked the couches that had buttons to move the seats, but that's a little too fancy for us.  We wanted a curvy "L" shaped couch to seat a lot of people.  We found more than enough of those.  We found the right one for us, bypassing the 100% real leather one that I really wanted and went for the more practical polyester fake leather.  My mantra to keep my head on straight was, "We have a cat and four kids."  I just kept repeating that to myself and had Brian say it to me more than a couple times.

We had one week to get the living room ready before the delivery.  We used the storm to do just that.  I painted the living room while Brian installed the TV on the wall and rewired and reorganized the electronics.  We put a baby gate up and let the kids run wild most of the week which left quite the mess to clean up multiple times a day so I could retain my sanity.  We finished by Thursday and moved out the entertainment center and the old couch on Friday.  Saturday while I was picking up the kids from German school, I got a call.  The couch had arrived, but it was a little bigger than we thought.  :)  Oh no, we didn't measure.  Don't judge.  Live and learn.

No pictures on the wall yet!  Sad thing is you can't see the wainscoting that I painted white except for on the other side of the room because the couch is too tall.  I guess I should have figured that.

Saturday football!  Superbowl party, here we come!

But we LOVE the couch even though it fills up the whole room.  It is super comfy and our whole family plus some can fit on it.  Much fun has already been had on the couch by the kids although I could live without the playing with the recliners. I joked with Brian that I didn't know why I was so excited about getting the new couch since I would rarely get to sit on.  This is obviously not because there isn't room, but because I just don't get to sit much.  However, I have found a few good excuses to sit on it this week, and they are called reading stories to the boys and doing Isaac's reading lesson on it.  Oh yeah, mommy's going to sit on this couch.

I'll get better pictures up when I can get the pictures on the wall.  I need a couple of frames before I do that so it may be a week or so.

Excuses, excuses!

 I have been really having a hard time keeping up with my blog lately.  If I don't write things down really soon after they happen then I usually can't remember them later.  This means that if I get so behind that I haven't even been getting notes down in my drafts that things get lost forever.  I don't like that, so I am going to make a concerted effort to get back in the business of daily blogging.  Not to make excuses, but to give an idea of what I have been doing instead of blogging, here is a picture history of the last few weeks.  Not that I haven't been posting at all, just not much, because I have all these projects going that I keep waiting to post about until I am finished.  Instead of waiting for total completion, I will post the pieces.

Redoing my bathroom took two weeks instead of the one weekend I intended to spend on it.  I had to put plaster/Sheetrock on all the walls, sand it, prime it, and then paint it.  It took longer than I thought and I will get a better picture up when I have a chance.  I love it though.

Of course, I have been schooling as always.  Things are going pretty smoothly, especially since I stopped rushing them and just laid out consequences for wasting time.  They have to pay me (through chores) if I have to spend time teaching them outside of our regular school hours.  No stress for me this way.  I was stressing because I had a million things to do, but now I know that if I have to spend extra time teaching them because they messed around that they will be doing those chores that I was anxious about for me.

All Saint's Day is coming up, so the mad rush to sew the costumes is on this week.  I'll make you wait to find out who everyone is going to be.  We have a carnival at church this weekend that they get to wear their costumes to as well as an All Saint's party for the homeschool group next week.  This year since I don't have a newborn I am sewing all the costumes from scratch.  Even Drew is going to be a saint!

Then there is keeping this monster out of trouble.

He loves to climb on the stools. He did a facer off of one this morning, in fact.

After dinner, he was ready for his bath, but Isaac was still eating and not paying attention to where he set his milk cup.  I almost got there in time, but...nope.

Really the main reason I have been MIA is that I have not gotten my Large Family Logistics act together this school year.  I just realized that we are on week 8 already, and so I guess I better figure it out and get started again.  Our schedule is different this year and I have been unable to commit to a new schedule for the housework due to the change in days we are out of the house.  I need to just make a decision and stick with it or change it if it totally fails.

A Few Home Fix-ups

 I would first like to say small bathrooms are hard to photograph.  Brian and I redid the basement bathroom a couple of weekends ago.  He tiled it and I painted it.  

Brian even took out the toilet to do the floor.  I was impressed!

 

 The other project that Brian accomplished recently was adding a patio right outside our basement door.  This was all his doing.  I had no part in it at all unless you count holding down the fort while he worked from sun up to sun down a few days.  

These photos do not do it justice since the lighting wasn't great at the time took them (not to mention the leaves and pine needles), but I wanted to get Hannah and her daddy playing chess on the new patio.

Hopefully, we will be able to have a few school days out there since we just have to walk right out the door of the school room to get there.

Hard Working Family

Brian is on a mission to put in a patio in our backyard where the basement door is.  So he was in the throws of his project while Hannah was making money scrubbing our dining room chairs.  She only finished 3 before quitting though.  Isaac just played in the dirt/sand Brian was dumping into the hole.

Here is a view from our deck of Brian's project in progress.  I'll post pictures of the finished product when it is actually finished.  Rain stopped the progress this weekend.

Hannah earned a quarter a chair.  I made the payment low per chair so she would do them all, but in hindsight I should have made it a payment for all the chairs.  You do them all or you get nothing.

 The weekend was not all work and no play.  When the rain started, so did the sword fighting.

Brian was a lazy Captain Hook.

Drew was cheering them on with clapping and excited screaming!

And just because my little Batman is a cutie, I'll post a gratuitous photo.  Isaac was waiting for his oatmeal to be ready on Sunday morning.

It's so nice to be home again!

 We finally made it back to the east coast and are home at last.  My poor husband had to drive from Colorado back to Red River, New Mexico on Saturday.  Then Sunday he drove back to Dallas, Texas.  Then early Monday morning we left to head home.  We stopped in Tennessee overnight to visit one more time with cousin Sophie.  Tuesday we drove to Roanoke, Virginia to have lunch with Brian's aunt and uncle.  We finished that day, finally, arriving at home in Maryland at 7pm.  The neighborhood welcomed us as we stretched our legs and unpacked only the necessities for the night.  One neighbor brought over a giant box of our mail for Brian and I to go through when the kids were in bed.  We survived the trip, and now we have hit the ground running with unpacking and household projects that need to be accomplished before the official school year gets started.  Here are some pictures from the last week.

The girls made Drew this "cage" with cushions and pillows at my parent's house.  He liked it and played in it until he didn't, at which point he scaled the walls and escaped.

Here is the promised picture of Drewy in his football onesie I made him.  He's so cute I could throw him!

The girls were thrilled to see their cousin again, and even more excited to have a sleepover on the living room floor.

 On Wednesday, we had to unpack the 12 passenger rental van, vacuum it out, reinstall the car seats and boosters in our van, return the rental van, go to the grocery store twice because brain-dead mommy forgot the milk the first time!), and then complete project number one on my summer list...

This was my first project to tackle...painting and organizing the kitchen pantry.  I painted the kitchen right when I found out I was pregnant with Drew, 1 1/2 years ago, and left the pantry for later.  Well, later came and went and I still hadn't found the time to do it.  So since it was nearly empty (due to our long absence) and it was on my summer project list, I decided this was a good day to do it despite the task of unpacking looming over my head and under our feet. 

I should have taken a "before" picture.  The shelves had plaid contact paper plastered on it from the previous owners.  It looks so nice and crisp now.  I keep opening it for no other reason than to peek at the orderliness of it all.