A Tall Order?

See that?  That's my receipt from IKEA.  We've decided to take advantage of their 20% off deal and we're redoing our kitchen!!!  I am SO EXCITED!  (and exhausted)

to be continued...

Excuses, Excuses

Sorry about the hiatus...  Between watching my two nephews Friday-Monday (littlest cousin A somehow didn't make it in the photos...)

Catching a stomach bug and dealing with it in the two cousins + Peach  (we went through soooooo many diapers last week...)  The whole weekend would have been pretty fun, otherwise...

"Luckily", I was up all night with it the night before mothers' day, so I had extra reason for Jay to let me sleep all day Sunday...  However, this bug partly caused this

A clogged main pipe, which caused a leak from out master bath through to the ceiling below, right by the front door.  (which means we get to explain what happened a lot...)

Then, Jay was gone when the kids ate breakfast and didn't get home until after they were in bed because he hosted a computer science conference at BYU last week,

so I never really got caught up last week.

Hopefully I can get back on the posting band-wagon :)

Absurd Electricity Bill in December

I just LOVE putting Christmas lights all over the house.  It's like living in a fairyland!  (Oh, and I decided to leave up some of the baby shower decor.  Doesn't it kinda look like snow?)  The Frog even got a strand in his room as a special Christmas nightlight.

Welcome Iris!

We've been really busy getting things ready for our Japanese foreign exchange student.  We have decided to call her "Iris" on the blog because, though her name has no meaning, there is a Japanese homonym for her name that means "Iris".  

The main project I've been undergoing is changing her room from a nursery to a girls' room.  This will be Peach's room once Iris is gone, so it is a bit young, but I tried to keep it mostly white so it wouldn't feel like it's too too young.  I realized that I never took a real picture of how the nursery has always been, but I do have this picture of when we briefly had a toddler bed up for The Frog in the same room.  You can kind of see the end of the changing table just to the left of the doorway.  Normally the tall dresser would be in the corner where the crib is here, and the crib would be shifted along the wall where the toddler bed is (you can barely see the foot of it.) As you can see, my photography skills, though still aren't that great, they have improved somewhat in the last year.

I changed the curtains for some long white ones I found at Down East (and I lined them to make them block more light).  I tried to keep it pretty spare because I wanted Iris to be able to have her things around to make her more comfortable, and I had no idea what kinds of things she would be bringing with her.  I thought that mirror would make a good little place for putting on jewelry, because there are pegs below you could hang necklaces on and i put a little PB jewelry box my older sister gave me a long time ago on the shelf next to it.  When Peach moves in next year, I will lower the mirror to her height.

 The white bed and cupboard were refinished by me- thanks to my awesome neighbor lending me their sprayer.  That bed was IMPOSSIBLE to brush well.  I plan to eventually embroider something in the white embroidery hoop (yet to be determined) but for now, it stays like it is.  The fabrics on the wall match the quilt I now only need to finish hand sewing the binding.

 NW exchange sent us a few family photos of Iris and I framed 3 of them for the room.  I also used my Silhouette to cut out her kanji.  Doesn't it look like a work of art?  (thank goodness I am not Japanese- my handwriting is sooo bad already.  I can't imagine having to write kanji legibly...)

 Some flowers from the yard.

 Iris got in Friday morning and we've been keeping her busy and feeding her lots of typical "American" foods- hamburgers, spaghetti, pizza...  Iris brought us Japanese gifts.  Here are the kids in their awesome pajamas!

We've been having fun trying out some Japanese snacks.

 For some reason we thought it was a good idea to hike the Y on Saturday.  The Frog walked about 1/3 of the way, and then I carried him on my back the rest.  (I am quite sore today...)

 Iris was a trooper and didn't complain nearly as much as I did :)  I couldn't believe how out of shape I was!  I also couldn't believe how many people passed us who were RUNNING it!  We stopped to rest a LOT and one of the bends had this huge rock.  A couple of girls were posing on it for a camera and when they got down, The Frog said he wanted to pose too:

 Here we are at the top:

We decided to reconfigure the kids so we wouldn't have to constantly stop for every rock The Frog wanted to examine and "hide" somewhere.  As you can see, he wasn't pleased.  He ended up on my back again, about half way down the mountain.

French Guest

This week we have decided to purge. It's felt SOOOOO good. So far we've been selling movies and books on Amazon, and other household things that I don't want anymore (mostly home decor and baby stuff) on ksl classifieds online. It's been awesome to get more freedom AND a small amount of cash with it.

Also, I decided to buy myself one of these thanks to an awesome deal on a blog I read and some Christmas money from my very generous in-laws (and some I've been saving as well). I have been experimenting with it the last couple of nights and I am SOOOO excited that they just announced that they have developed some fusible interfacing that allows the Silhouette to cut fabric too!! Ohhhh baby. The more I play with it, the more ideas I have for it! I can't believe the precision too. I was able to cut out very ornate shapes that would fit inside a 1"x1" square. Seriously, this thing is awesome.

I'm realizing that I haven't shown any progress made on our house since being put back together, and I think that's because I'm waiting for everything to be really "done" (whenever that will be), but I now have a wall next to our kitchen table that I'm trying to decide what to do with. I know I definitely want something white there, to lighten things up, and maybe I'll hang some plates, but I had a fun idea to cut out some white vinyl (that came with my Silhouette) to put there. My initial idea was to put the word "eat" somewhere and have plates hanging. I realized it would be really easy for me to test what it would look like by just cutting out paper first, and I could even do mock plates! Well, when I was cutting out the plates, I cut out concentric circles (just to test it, right?) and I couldn't help but think they looked like eyeballs. Several sheets of paper later, we now have a guest in our home.

We are calling him "Jacque Français" and The Frog got a real kick out of him this morning.

Notice the "eat" too. I think it's kind of cute, but Jay is not a fan. Oh well, at least our wall won't be empty until I can find something else. :)

PS I'm in the process of recovering our bench cushions. I'm totally aware of how bad they look with the green walls :D

Update

I haven't been the best at posting lately (as you may have noticed). We finally have the use of our main floor now, although all our doors are gone (getting painted) which is a bit trying at times. We had a The-Frog-meets-furnace-incident which is luckily fixed now. (2 cold days and $75 later...) We were supposed to get our doors back last Friday, but have now been promised them tomorrow. I'm beginning to loathe that word (tomorrow) lately...

Anyway, Jay and I have been staying up late every night trying to get organized and somewhat clean. There is soooo much dust. EVERYWHERE. It's amazingly thick and noticeable in even the most discrete locations, but I guess this is good because my house will (hopefully) be really thoroughly clean in a few weeks time. This is forcing me to get down and scrub things I usually ignore. However, the things I normally clean regularly are really suffering. (shhh)

On top of this, The Frog has been pretty sick. He now only has a cough and runny nose, which is good, but I'm ready for him to be well so we can spend more time outside. Tomorrow is his last day of antibiotic! :)

For some reason, The Frog has detested sleeping more intensely than usual (my guess is it has something to do with his ear infection?) and so we've had to be a bit more lax about where he sleeps. I had the "brilliant" idea of setting up his little play tent and tube in his room so he could have a new form of indoor entertainment, and he has decided to put up camp there when he sleeps now. I come to find out that Jay was apparently very experimental in his choice of sleep locations until he was about 13. He mentioned to me his closet among others. How odd.

Peach is doing well. Though she's been a bit congested, she's holding up well and still being as cute as ever. I think she's ready to start eating solids, but I'm dreading it because nursing is just sooooo much easier. (and cleaner!) It's funny how wide Peach opens her mouth when any object approaches her face. She also should be wearing size 2 diapers now (as of about a week ago) but her cheap mom refuses to let her wear them during the day until ALL the size 1s are gone. We should finally exhaust them tomorrow :D Also, we tried her out in the exersaucer. She is really excited about it, but looks kind of like a bobbing buoy in it, so we try not to make her spend more than a couple of minutes at a time in there. She has also mastered the tummy-to-back-roll.

Another excuse for not posting is because I've been using my spare moments in the evenings to study Japanese, but I'll do a separate writing log to expound upon that.

I'm starting to think about our 10-year high school reunion for next year. I can't believe it's already been 9 years since I graduated from High School! I was a class officer, so I get the lucky task of planning it, so if any of you out there have any brilliant ideas, I'm all ears. I may try to recruit some of you fellow classmates to help, so watch out if you see my name on your CID in the next week or so :D

Did ballet for the first time this year at an attempt to start my exercise New Year's resolution. (I started a bit late because I've been sick too.) I admit after only 20 minutes, my legs felt like jello and I decided 20 would have to be enough or I may not be able to stand to make breakfast. It felt really good though :)

As you can see, a lot on my plate right now, but for some reason, I'm feeling very energized by it! I think the minor improvements on the house are helping me cope with the inconvenience, and new goals always get me feeling motivated.

Not much picture taking going on around here. I'll try to be better about that.

New Year's Resolutions and House Progress

It's been more difficult than usual to post anything because my computer has been in use by The Frog all week. We are still living upstairs and he has come down with an ear infection, conjunctivitis (goopy eyes), and a cold (sore throat, cough, runny nose), so I've been letting him watch movies nearly all day, in hopes of helping him relax. For all you who have Netflix out there, I stumbled upon a clayamation called Pingu that The Frog thinks is hilarious. (I don't really get it.) In fact, this morning he was drinking some milk while watching it and he actually laughed so hard that milk squirted out of his nose and all over my computer! I had never heard of that actually happening (in real life) before!

Well, it's that time again. Time to make New Year's Resolutions. I have a few, but I think the biggest one is that Jay and I are going to learn Japanese together. I have committed to spend 30 minutes every day (except Sunday) studying it. Right now I'm memorizing Hiragana. Jay found an awesome website that is basically digital flashcards for pretty much anything you could possibly want to memorize. I especially like it for this because you can hear what the sounds are supposed to sound like. I'm going to start working on the Katakana next week, and after that I'll do the 2000 most common words. Jay and I both have a Japanese textbook and work book that we are going to try to go through, in addition to memorizing these flashcards, so we can learn actual grammar. We might be crazy to think we can learn a language without knowing anyone who can speak it to us, but I'm really excited to try! I have been wanting to do something like this with Jay since we got married, but he never had any interest until he started wanting to play imported Japanese video games. :) He's going at it a bit more whole-heartedly-- planning to spend 2 hours a day studying, and he's even switched his computer and phone to be in Japanese, as well as his email, etc. He's going to try and read a Japanese comic strip for kids, as well.

I also want to keep my Hungarian going, so I'm going to try to learn 5 Hungarian words a day. (using the same site) I think that picking something to work on memorizing has helped my memory in general, and that's been exciting for me as well. I feel like my memory has really gone downhill since high school, because I haven't had to blatantly memorize large lists of "stuff" (useless or not) since then. Perhaps there was some value to it after all? Maybe next year I'll try to memorize all the countries, or go through all the SAT words or something, just to keep my mind working in that way. :) With my iPhone organizing my life, I have little need to remember many things these days.

Some other goals I have are:

-start exercising again (weekdays) either 30 min of ballet or walking with the stroller (when it warms up again)

-grow out my hair (this might sound like an easy one, but I frequently get strong urges to chop off my hair)

-I helped a neighbor HS kid with his calculus homework the other day and I think I might like to do one math problem every day. I seriously had sooo much fun thinking about related rates again. I still haven't picked which book I will go through though. (I have waaaay to many math textbooks. It's not even funny) I think calculus would be a really fun review, but it might be good for me to do something I was never as good at, like number theory or abstract algebra.

-I am going to be better about labeling my photos as I import them and also RATING the goods ones, so I don't have to sift through them all the time. All you with iPhoto out there know what I'm talking about.

-I also want to get completely caught up on The Frog's photo albums and Start one for Peach. I meet with some girls in my neighborhood once a month to do that, and I'm going to work on it one other night each month.

-I would like to improve my posture, but I'm not really sure how to measure progress with that, or how to consistently work on it. Any ideas?

As for the house- we are still not completely painted, nor will we be until next week-- hopefully Monday, but I'm learning not to get to excited about the deadlines we keep getting from the contractors. Just about everything has taken longer than expected... ran out of moulding, ran out of carpet pad, carpet gets here and is 1 inch too short, forgot to paint the doors, painted one room the wrong color, kitchen cabinets are in, but lost the pegs for a shelf and the garbage pulls in and out veeerrrry stiffly, etc. Once the carpet is all put back (was supposed to happen today, but now they have to get more pad and the right size carpet and come back tomorrow) we should be able to let The Frog play downstairs again!!! I can't wait!

We probably won't be staying up until midnight tonight, as everyone is somewhat sick. (though, The Frog definitely has the worst of it) But we are getting indian food to celebrate!

Wishing you all a Happy New Year!

Fortunately, Unfortunately

Fortunately, we now have our kitchen cupboards, sink and dishwasher back!
Unfortunately, our old faucet had so much corrosion that it was filling in some gaps and keeping things from leaking. Removing it broke all that off and it wouldn't stop leaking when they tried to reinstall it.
Fortunately, that means we HAD to get a new faucet. It's a pull-down. LOVE. IT.
Unfortunately, when the plumber filled the sink to test the seals, all that water draining made us aware of a minor clogging that caused our shower to flood with nasty, smelly, yuck... where our hallway rugs just happened to be drying.

Fortunately, it's now fixed and the rugs were probably already ruined anyway.
Fortunately, we got our walls patched up!
Unfortunately, the sheet rock delivery unplugged the freezer in our garage and didn't tell us about it.
Fortunately, the water pouring down from the ceiling was landing right next to the freezer and caused a lot of internal ice chunks, which means most of the food was nearly still frozen, even days later.
Unfortunately, a lot of food was frozen INSIDE large chunks of ice, and the ice needed to be removed.
Fortunately, because of all the ice in there, I was going to have to take everything out and defrost the freezer anyway.
Unfortunately, all the food in the garage freezer doesn't fit in our kitchen freezer.

Fortunately, since I had a baby recently and we had just been out of town, a lot of our normal freezer stash had been depleted and we had room for everything except some cream puffs... which means I HAD to eat them :)

Unfortunately, the mudder guys who were going to tape the sheet rock seams and fill in the drill holes didn't come on Friday like I was expecting.

Fortunately, the mudder guys DID come on Saturday, which I wasn't expecting, because I was told they don't work weekends.

Fortunately, the guy who plastered our ceiling was wearing sweet stilts.

Fortunately, our project manager thinks our house can be painted by Christmas!!!

Looks like the Fortunately's win :)

This and That

Our kitchen is not yet back to normal, BUT the wall is now fixed, second coated, and sanded. Because the sanding is a messy process, but necessarily needed to take place inside, they tried to tape off the area to keep the dust spreading to a minimum. I didn't realize this was going to happen until I went downstairs to get some milk for The Frog and I happened upon this:
Does anyone else think of ET?

And unrelatedly, we all gathered in the bathroom while The Frog took a bath tonight, and I couldn't help myself but see what would happen if I put the largest flower clip I own on Peach's headband.
I think she's astonished that I would give in to such a thing. (it was just for the camera, we didn't actually GO anywhere like this)

Colorful Thoughts

I delight in reading through the Sherwin-Williams paint names. The people who come up with them must have so much fun. I think I'm going to use

Downy, Biscuit, Agreeable Gray, and Radish.

Some of my favorite names are Something Blue, Frolic, Inventive Orange, Enlightened Lime, Lusty Red, Well-Bred Brown, Relentless Olive, Useful Gray. Some clever hue names are obvious- Envy, Cloudless. Some not as much- Hopeful, Noteable Hue, Ponder.

Some have caused me to refer to Wikipedia. Nasturtium, Saguaro, or Frangipane, for example.

I thought one of them said Battlefield, and thought, "How gruesome!" but then I noticed that really said Butterfield. I guess that would make more sense for yellow...

Some colors play out a scene in my mind- Potentially Purple.

Mom hue talking to little hue: "One day, if you're good, you can be purple too."

I wonder how different the color-name makers' lives are from my own.

"Oh I just love Country Squire on you, it really brings out your eyes!" Are they constantly on the look-out for good color names? I imagine they could never use regular old "yellow" and are instead forced to explain what kind. Friendly Yellow. Lively Yellow. Glad Yellow.

Tell me, if it's only Virtual Taupe, what is it in actuality?

Jay and I agree that my skin is closest to Spun Sugar. No wonder I'm so sweet :D

We're Dry!

Even though we weren't completely dry by Monday, we were able to get rid of 6 fans. 9 more left yesterday and today we were able to remove the remaining 10 fans and the two dehumidifiers. Our home is so quiet now! It's sooo nice! We begin reconstruction hopefully today :)

Flood Update

Well, we've found out that it's going to be a lot more painful than anticipated. We had to leave our home for 24 hours for them to spray for mold. Luckily we have awesome neighbors and have had offers from 4 different families for us to stay with them if we need to. So Wednesday night, we packed up for an overnight stay at our generous neighbors' home. Since the flooding was likely soaking in for days, there is a lot more moisture than originally anticipated by the "drier dudes" and it was deemed that most of the walls on our main floor would need the bottom 2 feet to be removed for drying purposes.

After some testing, they discovered that we have lead paint in the original layer of paint and so it would not be safe for our family to be around during the "demolition" (shudder) as they called it. So we packed up again, and slept away once more.
They had to bring in a storage unit so they could remove our lower kitchen cabinets and store them there until it's dry behind them. Because we no longer have a kitchen sink, by insurance standards, our home is deemed "unlivable" and we could stay in a hotel on their penny. We opted for staying home and letting them pay for our meals out instead. We are extremely grateful to all our neighbors who have invited us over for meals and dropped some by. It has made this ordeal so much happier for our family.
This is the room that took the most damage- all the walls are nearly completely removed, the carpet is gone, and the ceiling is almost completely gone. You can see through to the garage now.
Here's a view from the garage, through the theater room (as we lovingly called it). You can see the library behind.
On the plus side, we will get our entire main floor repainted on our insurance's penny! Also, they anticipate that everything should be dry by Monday and the reconstruction will begin Wednesday. We are basically going to completely redo the room with our TV in it, and I'm kind of excited/nervous. This is my chance to make it JUST as I want it. Any advice?

PS we're all fine and well :)

At a loss for words...

After a slightly delayed flight home from Boston on Monday, we pulled into our driveway at about 11:10pm and opened the garage door, greeted by this:

Zooming in we can see this:

So, then we opened the door to the house and stepped in about 1 cm of water. It was hard to see how water got into the house, when there was a steady stream in the garage, until we looked in the last room on the first floor:

Notice the "alien pods" on the ceiling:

We turned off the water, started taking photos (for insurance), made some phone calls and put buckets under the waterfall.

All our carpets were soaked through
and puddles gushed out when stepped in.
By midnight, we had 6 of our neighbors 3 or 4 wet-vacs, mops, flashlights and a truck to get things dried as much as possible and the larger debris hauled away.
(I felt like maybe this wasn't a smiling occasion?)
The next day we noticed all the condensation. (and my hair remained frizzy from the increased humidity)

This is the desk mat under Jay's desk- sweating with water trying to evaporate.
This is the window outside the room that took the most damage. You can see the large icicles that formed on the nearby tree- probably from gushing water from when the ceiling collapsed.
After working all day, the plumber had fixed the problem and we were allowed to use our water and all electricity again.
It seems that the pipe from our water heater (which was uninsulated) was running through the ceiling of our garage, which is not heated or insulated. The first two days we were gone had a high of 21 and lows of 12 and 7. We think that one of these days froze the water and split the pipe. There were 3 breaks, one above the garage, one above the TV room, and another between the two.

Now we're living in this until our house is dried

They've already started drilling into the walls and under the cupboards so that they can shoot air behind them to prevent mold and rot from destroying our walls.

Thank goodness that nothing priceless was ruined.