No Tricks, Lots of Treats

Another Halloween. The new neighborhood was great. The kids went bananas.
Asher went as Ash Ketchem from Pokemon. Ella was a pop star (obviously), and Marley was a ballerina with a big fat coat. Look at Asher's bag in the bottom picture. He actually had to transfer his candy to a backpack. Amazingly, there was less candy in the morning. Very suspicious.

Turn the baby!

See the smile? The baby has been breach for a while, but not any more. Yesterday we went to the hospital to try version. Version is the medical description for "pushing really hard on the baby." We had this with Asher and it caused her water to break. We were a little worried, because need another two weeks to get things ready, and we weren't ready to deliver the baby yesterday. This doctor was smooth though. She knew her stuff and turned the baby without much effort. So it looks good for a term delivery. 18 days and counting...

House Guests

They weren't expected, but a swarm of fruit flies decided to pay us an extended visit. Apparently they have never heard Ben Franklin's axiom that "House guests and fish both stink after 3 days." The kids left the door open one evening, and a cloud of them moved in and spread out.

So what do you do about 500 fruit flies? You have the swatter of course, but they are so small, they fit through the holes as often as I could squish them. The vacuum is effective. We bought a new canister vacuum, so I felt a bit like an anti-aircraft gunner trying to knock them out of the sky. Fly strips had limited success in the short term, but work ok over a few days. Another slow but extremely effective strategy was to fill cups with apple cider vinegar and soap. The flies love it, but the soap doesn't love them. After a few days, there was a big pile of flies in the bottom.

Stef and I spent days fighting this unwanted visitors, but they kept coming back. Where are they coming from? Could they already be reproducing in the house. I remember from biology that they reproduce quickly. Apparently, it takes 2 weeks to hatch. Maybe they are in the wall? Maybe they are in the pond. We looked, thought, pondered. It only took 4 days to realize that maybe they were coming from the fallen fruit under the apple, peach, and pear trees in the side yard. Of all the strategies we tried to get rid of the flies, picking up the rotten fruit seems to have had the best effect.

Pumpkins

We went to the pumpkin patch the other day. It is called "Field of Greens." This has become our tradition. The hay stack obviously captures most of their attention.

My hero.

My wife is a champ. Straight out. I need to publicly give her proper respect. Look at this picture. This is her kitchen. Actually, this other picture is her kitchen, but she is having to make due with a kitchen that used to be the family room until we finish the real kitchen. So she makes dinner on a plywood counter over the fireplace using a toaster oven, an electric griddle, and a microwave. The dishes are washed in a makeshift sink in the corner, and all our food is stored on metal shelves from the garage the we set up for a pantry.

Now this might not seem too bad. I have heard of people doing dishes in the bathtub or cooking in the garage. It certainly could be worse. It just seems extra hard with 3 little kids and being 8 months pregnant. And really, there is no end in sight. See, I can't really tell her when she will have a real kitchen back. But she doesn't complain and faces it bravely. So Stefanie vaults to the top of my hero list. It is probably bad form to brag about my own wife, but I am ok with that. I think she deserves it.

Blink and you miss it.

Obsession. I will be the first to admit that I have severe obsessive tendencies if left unchecked. I like to call it focused attention, but Stefanie flat out laughs at that. I am lucky that Asher has the same problem because it diverts some of her ire from me. Combine our all-consuming house with my obsessive nature, Stefanie's current state of nesting as she expects the baby, and my fear that the baby will come too soon, and I am focused like a laser beam.

I took a break from home improvement and finally got around to downloading pictures from my camera into the computer. On one hand I was impressed that with all we have going on, I had taken so many pictures. On the other hand, I was depressed that the pictures were like foggy recollections. "Oh yeah, Ella started Kindergarten... We went to San Diego... What is that one? I think I remember something about that..."

Although it is out of order, I needed to post some pictures of Ella and her first day. Unfortunately, I can't recall much about it. I know she went; I have the evidence. I also can say that she was mostly excited about dressing for Kindergarten. She planed out her outfit a number of times for days before her debut. You can see here right before we walked to school how cute she looks. This was actually the dressing up dress rehearsal a few days before Kindergarten.

I find that if I keep my head buried in the walls and attic of our new project, I will miss the most important part of my life. My resolution is to take some time for my family, pace myself on this project. After all, when you own a home there will always be something to do. No sense rushing through a job that never ends. Farris Bueller said, "Life moves pretty fast, if don't stop and look around every once in a while, you might miss it." It seems that is especially true with your family.

The rest of Ella's pictures: http://picasaweb.google.com/jsutter11/EllaSFirstDayOfSchool

The Past Few Months

What have we been up to the past few months? Well, most of you probably know that we moved. We moved less than a mile away, but the house is bigger, the lot is bigger, and the neighborhood is a bit nicer. I do have pictures. This is the outside of our house:

And this is the inside of our house:
Yes, we decided to gut the thing. After all, anyone can move into a new house the week before school starts, while you daughter is starting kindergarten, 2 weeks before you leave on a week-long trip to the Carribean, and while your wife is 7 months pregnant. Only the stupid... I mean stout-hearted will gut it before they move in.

The house was a foreclosure, so we bought it from a bank. The previous owners had put in new carpets a year ago. They looked good, so we figured, live in the house for a year and slowly change stuff. When we started to move in, we noticed a peculiar smell. We decided to pull back some carpets and noticed that the owners didn't really enforce the "peeing outside" concept with their animals. Every floor in the house was full of pet urine. Before we could move in, we began the tedious job of ripping out the carpet and treating or replacing the subfloor (one of the worse sections pictured here). Meanwhile we started living in a single bedroom at our friend Alma's house. It was quite a lot of togetherness.

The long and the short of this story is that the last few months have been a lot of work. We had a lot of "Might as well a..." as we started working on the house. Since we needed new carpets, we might as well a texture the ceilings and walls upstairs and put in a new banner. Since we are going to do new floors in the kitchen, we might as well raise the ceiling. You get the idea.

On the positive side, when things cool down, i am going to market my new weight loss program. Here is the recipe:

2 parts stress
3 parts no sleep
1 part physical exhaustion
2 parts Monster soda

I swear this works. But keep it under wraps until I develop a marketing strategy.