Baylor conquers his fiends

Every month Beck and Baylor's classes send out electronic newsletters describing the upcoming activities for the month. I just got Baylor's newsletter for April:

To celebrate our theme for the month of April, the Hugger’s class will be learning about how our bodies grow and develop. The overall theme for this month is, “All About Me.” The weeks and their topics are as follow:



• Week of the 5th: My Body


• Week of the 12th: My Fiends


• Week of the 19th: I’m Growing


• Week of the 26th: My Family

I don't know why, but the thought of 2 years olds sitting around discussing their "fiends" made me laugh out loud.

Carrom anyone?

I was doing a little spring cleaning in our garage/basement today and look what I found...

And the flip side:                                               

Yup- you guessed it, it's a Carrom board. Judging from the looks of it, I would be willing to guess that it was purchased by the original owners of the house, several years before I was born.  Rob and I Googled how to play it, but were left with more questions than answers. If anyone is a Carrom expert and knows where I can buy some Carrom-men that are "ICF-sanctioned pieces with a diameter of no more than 3.18 cm and no less than 3.02 cm, and must be between 7 mm and 9 mm thick, with an edge that is round and plain, and a weight of 5–5.5 g." please let me know. If feel like if our old college friends were around we would find some way to make a Carrom drinking game that would probably make about as much sense as the actual games rules.

Kitchen Pictures

So, I finally got around to doing the kitchen and I would say it is 90% finished. I am extremely proud to say that I laid the flooring completely by myself. I also cut and installed the baseboards and quarter round and painted. It was a lot of work, spread out over a week's worth of nights. I ended up with a lot of little cuts and bruises and a sore back, but it was completely worth it.

We basically went with the least expensive flooring, so it didn't turn out to be exactly what I would have otherwise chosen, but I've come to view this house as my practice house where I am here to learn all of the lessons of home improvement and maintenance. We went ahead and had professionals fix the drywall and tear the wood paneling off of the other walls, but I feel like maybe I could have done that myself too.

They tore off the old painted-over wood paneling that covered the bottom the kitchen walls, and replaced the drywall under the window, which had gotten wet and rotted.

 I think this is a vast improvement on what we had when we first moved in. 

Before

After

 

 

 

Some Updates

I know it's been awhile since I posted anything new. We are finally getting around to doing some fix-ups on the house. On Monday we bought a new Heater and Air Conditioner, since the ones we had were 20 years old and we got a really good deal on a new set. Obviously I would rather spend the money on things you can see (like new floors and windows), but we are hoping that we will be able to save some money on our bills with this new system. 

After putting it off for the last few months, I decided it was time to go ahead and paint the living room/dining room. I chose a shade of green that I thought looked nice, bought a test jar and painted a small area to make sure I liked it. I thought it looked great. SO I went and bought 2 cans and started painting. Everything was going smoothly until the paint started to dry about 3 shades DARKER than I had originally thought. I went ahead and finished up the first coat and stood back to look at it. I decided that I hated it and would have to prime over it and redo it with a different color. I went to bed feeling defeated. But when I went downstairs in the morning and the natural light was shining through the window I decided that it really didn't look that bad after all. That night I went ahead and did the second coat, and it made all the difference. The color is still not exactly what I wanted, but I am learning to love it.

 

 

 

Now all we need for this room is some new flooring, a new light fixture (something from this century) and some furniture. The boys will be really disappointed when their soccer/scooter/running around in circles room becomes an actual living space.

Fairly unusual for Alabama, we got some snow last week that actually stuck on the ground. The boys were elated and wanted to stomp around in it and eat it.

 

  

 

When the snow melted Beck said "Oh, I wish it was winter all the time and there was always snow on the ground." Sometimes I think it's funny that neither of the boys have ever been any further North than Tennessee. Beck would freak out if he ever saw the kind of snow that Rochester or Madison gets.

My birthday was last Monday and Beck helped Rob make my birthday cake.

 

It was lemon cake with white frosting, my favorite. Rob and Beck are both big chocolate fans, so I think they were both a little disappointed with my choice. Beck ate off all of the frosting and left the cake part on the plate.  Rob and I went out to celebrate and found a new favorite hang-out, Dram Whiskey Bar in Mountain Brook. 

Beck has been super cute with Baylor lately, giving him lots of love and affection. He's always saying things like "I love Baylor" or "Isn't he so cute?" We really couldn't ask for him to be a better big brother, we feel very lucky.

Beck has gotten more into his homework lately, he seems to enjoy the math problems much better than the handwriting. Since both Rob and I both had (and still have) terrible handwriting, I think it's a given that Beck will never have perfect penmanship.

 

  

A few weeks ago we had our friend Kat and her two kids Victoria and Aleksey over to eat pizza and watch Shrek. Aleksey is in Baylor's class at daycare, the "Huggers" room. 

Our next big project for the house is the kitchen, I'll post before and after pictures soon!

Seasons Greetings

Well it's been a little while since I've posted anything, as the weather gets colder and colder I seem to get lazier and lazier. We did have a nice extended holiday with both Grandma and Nani coming to visit, so the amount of wine and good food was considerable. Up until Christmas it was still pretty warm here, and one day we took the boys for a walk at the Botanical Gardens that are right down the road from our house. We go there fairly often since it is a 3 minute drive, you can feed the fish and turtles, and best of all, it's free!

Here is Bay looking out at the lake...
                                            

 

                                                              

 

 

 

In preparation for Kindergarten, Beck's teachers have been giving the class handwriting homework that is due every Monday morning. Even though he has several days to do it, Beck generally rushes through it every Monday morning quickly before we leave. Hmm, reminds me of my own homework habits as a child. Although he doesn't care much for handwriting practice, he does enjoy coloring and drawing.

Here is a picture of a dragon, can you tell?

Grandma came to visit for a few days over Christmas and the boys had a great time with her. This was the first Christmas where I really felt like Beck understood exactly what was going on, i.e., the meaning of Christmas, the story of Santa Claus, giving gifts to others, etc...  Of course all of that went out the window once he got a look at his Christmas stash!

As is the tradition in most families we let the boys each open one small gift on Christmas Eve. Beck got a new dinosaur puzzle and Baylor got the stuffed Spot dog that he always tries to snuggle with whenever we go to Barnes and Noble.

 

 

 

Baylor's alter-ego "Sock Hands"

 

Christmas Morning

Reading Wild Things w/ Grandma

 

                                                                    And a quick snuggle

 

 

 

 

 

Baylor had almost no interest in opening presents, he preferred to run wildly around the house, giggling, and stopping occasionally in someone's lap for a snuggle. 

 

                                                                                    

 

 

Their big present from Santa was this dragon castle, which is kind of an updated version of those Fisher Price castles we all used to play with as children. The boys have not stopped playing with it.

 

They have done a pretty good job playing with it together, Beck is generally very good at sharing and being kind to his little brother. Sometimes Baylor will do one of his crazy little Baylor dances or just come over and start snuggling and Beck will look up at me and say "Isn't he so cute?"  It's very sweet to watch these two at this age. 

 

 

 

                                                                  
                                   Nani came for New Years, and we did the whole thing all over again.

                               

 

 

 

Thanks so much to everyone for all the wonderful gifts and especially to Grandma and Nani for babysitting!

My next big project for the house is to paint the Living/Dining Room, so after Christmas I took everything out of the room in preparation. I was walking down the stairs to go the kitchen and saw this.

A lonely Brontosaurus was sitting peacefully in the middle of the room, I'm not sure who put him there.

Here are a couple of more "before" pictures.

 

I picked out a light green color for this room and hope to get it finished by the end of the month. After that we are (eventually) going to replace the carpet in here with wood flooring.  For now it will remain the boy's soccer-ball-kicking/running around room.