Growing Grass

You may remember this post over a year ago discussing our sad little yard. We worked on it last year, but it's still in bad shape. Bryce has been working hard at improving the lawn this year. He has aerated and thatched and seeded and fertilized and drug sprinklers all over the place. Somewhere along the line I wrote about how we have a sprinkler system, but we could only find a few heads in the yard, and the neighbor said that 5 or 6 years ago there was a leak, and the previous owners turned off the system and never turned it back on. Well, we were finally brave enough to give it a try. Bryce had to replace the big piece coming off the main water because it had a big crack in it. He is only trying to make the front yard work for the time being, and last night he turned it on for the first time. We had 5 sprinkler heads pop up and work! He found the other sprinklers by digging in the big puddles that formed in the yard and he thinks that he has found them all. Today he is buying new sprinkler heads and we are hoping that the big leak was not in the front yard. It will be nice to at least have the system working out front!

The Church that we attend has a community garden and this year they decided to take out more lawn to expand the garden, which means we were able to get new sod to fill in the "wading pool" in the back yard. It looks so amazing! The yard looks WAY bigger and the dogs are far less muddy when they come in on a wet day. Here is Thisbe helping Bryce put the sod in, only two days after Dietrich was born.

We have also started to give Thisbe pills that are supposed to help neutralize her "business" so that we won't have huge burn spots all over the backyard. It may take a while but the yard is starting to come along. Now if I could just find some time to buy and plant some flowers, trees, bushes...

Here He Is!

Clearly I have been away from the blogging world for a while. And if you read my blog you probably know it's because our little one arrived! Dietrich Allan joined Our House on April 9th 2010. He was 9 lbs 2.5 ounces and he came to the world pretty quickly, only 8 hours of labor.

We have been spending this last month figuring out how to take care of our little baby. He is a very good boy, he sleeps well and he's very happy. He is a mellow baby and we try to be mellow parents (try being the key word here!). He has recently decided that he likes his bouncy vibrating chair which is why I am finally able to write a blog post. We have experienced so much in this past month, learning about cloth diapers and diaper services (what a great gift!). Nursing, a clogged milk duct (mommy nearly died), circumcision, sleeping arrangements, and lots of visitors. As well as learning how to grocery shop and how to get out of the house and do stuff. Still working on that one.

Now that I have convinced Dietrich that the bouncy vibrating chair is a fun place to be perhaps I will be able to update this blog a little more often! Of course you know that Bryce could not spend a week off of work at home without doing some sort of project :)

Why Wait?

Nesting is the greatest thing I have experienced so far in pregnancy. Oh, well you know, besides those really awesome things like hearing the heart beat, and seeing them on the ultrasound, and feeling them move. I guess I should say that nesting is the greatest thing our house has experienced in this pregnancy!

Today I decided the floors in the kitchen needed a really good scrub, a hands and knees kind of scrubbing. It took me about half the day to get to this point because I felt that things in the kitchen needed dusted and cleaned before I could move to the floor. But I spent the majority of this afternoon on my hands and knees scrubbing the floor. The really great part was it was so obvious where I had done it, there was a visible line down the floor. Sadly, my floor was dirtier than I thought, but fortunately I feel very accomplished! I also discovered that there were quite a few places where paint had splattered on the floor when we painted the kitchen...A YEAR AGO. One spot was very obvious and whenever I mop I scrub it with the mop, but it still had not gone away. So today, during my scrubbing, I also scraped the paint that had splattered on the floor. The big obvious spot took about 5 seconds to remove...why on earth did I wait A YEAR to clean that up???

Baby Room

We have been in our house just over a year and this is the first room to be re-done again. This is the small upstairs bedroom, and if you have been to our house we usually referred to it as the purple room. You can see what it used to look like here. I did love the purple room, but since we do not know what we are having and even if the baby is a girl, the purple wasn't really a baby room purple, I decided re-painted the room a pale green, called "Aloe Vera." I think it will look great with pink or with blue and browns depending on if this little one is a boy or girl!

The crib that you will see in this next picture was the crib I slept in 27 years ago! And then my brother slept in it 21 years ago, Bryce has been working hard to refinish it and stain it. It has traveled from Alaska to Seattle area and then to Ione, and now to Spokane! Bryce recently discovered that he will have to rebuild the drawers that go on the bottom of the crib because they have not held up too well over the years. Check out what the crib looked like before here. The crib mattress and sheets are in the mail, so they should be arriving soon (thank you Grammy Laurel!)
The changing table is a hand-me-down from our friend Tana who received it from our friend Jen, so lots of nearly-related babies have used this table.
And here is the bassinet that was my brother's, it is all ready for baby's arrival with sheets from my Aunt Sarah and a sweet teddy bear from my friend Megan's mom.
After baby arrives we will pick out colors for bedding and get some pictures on the wall. I want to be able to decorate in a gender specific way so not much decorating is taking place just yet. We will also be getting an area rug because the carpet in this room is pretty stained and has a big bleach spot in the middle of the room. Only a few short weeks (at the most!) and we will meet the little one and start using all this great stuff!

A Full Year!

We have officially lived in our house for a year as of March 1st! We took ownership on February 24th of 2009, but we didn't move in until the next weekend. It is incredible to look back over this blog and see what we have accomplished in just one year. There are months where I cannot believe how many little projects we have done. We have painted every room in the house except one, and I'm currently re-painting the room that will be the baby's room.

We have rebuilt, replaced, repainted, and cleaned everything! There is still much to be done, but at this rate we will get there soon! For those of you worried that we will finish everything and get bored, do not worry! We are already looking at projects we have completed and thinking about how we could redo them to be even better :)

DIY vs. Pay a lot of money

We usually do it ourselves. So far we have not paid anybody to do anything to our house, well other than install carpet I guess, but very few people try to do that on their own.

We have a few big things that we are considering this year. The first is a new fence. This we are in desperate need of, I haven't posted pictures of our fence much, other than the one where the fence had fallen down...but you get the idea. Pretty much every side of our fence has at least a few spots where we have used t-posts and smaller pieces of wood to hold it together and keep it standing (mostly). We know this is a spendy project, it will probably be several thousand dollars to get all the supplies plus at least one weekend of coaxing friends to help us with promises of beer and food. Our original plan was to do one side of the fence every year to keep the costs down a bit, but two sides need done pronto and the third side is the one where the neighbor has already offered to go halfsies with us (yay neighbor we love you!). So I get the feeling we will probably be attempting to finish the whole fence this summer.

Last weekend we decided to have collegepro painters give us an estimate on how much it would cost to paint our house. I've been getting a hard time from family and friends about not doing it ourselves, but it has not been painted in a long time and there is much scraping, priming, and climbing of ladders involved. I'm pretty sure to do this myself it would at least take all summer and I can just see getting to the top of the ladder and then the baby crying and going back down and never getting anything done...So I had high hopes from this estimate from the collegepro painters. After walking around our house and discussing what needs done I really began to see just how much work it will be to paint our house. And then he came back with the quote, and while I feel that it is very reasonable for the amount of work being done, "reasonable" does not matter when you do not HAVE $3000. That's right $3000 to pay someone else to paint our house. If only we had that $3000 for the house painting project lying around. But we don't. And we definitely can't do both the fence and the house, and one of them needs done a little more desperately than the other...so...

It looks as if we will go another year before attempting to paint our house. I hope by then that $3000 magically appears because I am telling you people, this is one area where paying someone that much money sounds pretty darn worth it to me. I am all about doing it ourselves, but this is one area that I would really like to watch someone else do all the work...

Other than the house

House, house, house, that is all we talk about anymore! But there are lots of other crazy things going on in our lives besides our crazy house!

We went to my mom's last weekend and the dogs got so sick while there that they are definitely not welcome back. Rico threw up 5 times (count them 5! I did at 4 in the morning, only I missed one that my mom found later). And where did he throw up? On my mom's BRAND NEW carpet and BRAND NEW comforter. We cleaned and cleaned cleaned and mom says that she can't really tell anymore. Seriously, the woman is not going to let our dogs back in her house, thankfully we will have a grandbaby for her soon, or she may have decided to not let us back in.

So then right as we are getting ready to leave Thisbe has diarrhea, the kind that shoots out of her before she has any idea she needs to go. Fortunately, it was on the cement floor in the breezeway so mom did not actually have to kill us, or Thisbe. Unfortunately, Thisbe was out sick for the next two days, although she seems to have recovered now.

I recently started to PANIC! about the fact that I have not decorated our baby's room. This is because we did not want to find out the sex of our baby because we thought a surprise would be so fun! But I also do not want a yellow or green room and did you know that most baby things that are supposedly gender neutral are pretty much boy? So I don't really want to decorate the room but I kind of feel like a bad person for not having this room done before the baby arrives. Of course the crib will be set up and everything for baby will be in the room and that will probably make me feel much better, but this week I've been feeling like a bad person about it.

I am taking two classes for my masters this quarter and I cannot believe how overwhelming it is. Even being home all day I feel like I barely have time to get all the reading, posting, and papers done. I only have two more weeks of this, but of course the last two weeks have all the big papers and assignments so it will be a busy two weeks. Then I will be taking time off to HAVE A BABY! After that I will have two more classes that will be done by August.

Since we are done with the kitchen cabinets, Bryce and I have really been enjoying each other this week. We get to sit down and have dinner and then putt around the house working on organizing rooms for the big rearranging that will take place here shortly so that we can start setting up baby's room. We've taken the dogs for extra walks in the evening, watched a couple of movies, and played some Nintendo. It's been so nice :)

Bryce is incredibly busy at work, he can barely get everything done in 8 hours, and most days he is in a little early or staying a little late. We hope that all the hard work will pay off in the means of a promotion into an engineering position.

So there are a few of the other fun things going on around here. It's always a bit busy and crazy but it's just the way it is for us I guess!