Catching up!

Thanks Megan for the inspiration to do a little catch-up!

Easter was spent in Tucson, and it was a lot of fun hanging out with family. Megan pretty much sums up the events, so I'll just include a couple of pictures.

What's with that face??

Megan played around with a picture she took and I thought it looked really cool!

We've been continuing to go over to the house nightly to work on it and have made some really good progress! A whole lot of priming and painting has been going on, and the kitchen is coming together. We've hit another one of those crappy projects in getting ready to lay down the wood floor. We've had to tear out a bazillion square feet of glued down linoleum and have yet to find a way to remove the glue. We've tried everything in the book...hot water, glue remover, chemicals out the wazoo and a WHOLE lot of elbow grease but apparently 30 year old glue doesn't like to come up. Jared's currently over at the house with some huge machine that's supposed to take care of it...I guess we'll see!

This picture is a little dated, but it'll give you an idea of what it looks like.

Eva's still her normal, goofball self. Her favorite thing to do is laugh or make others laugh, followed by a close second of SCREAMING. It's pretty much constant. She screams when she's happy, when she's mad, while she's playing...constant screaming. Which is added on top of inheriting her momma's red-headed temper. FANTASTIC.
She's ALWAYS wanting to help, which I'm sure I'll appreciate some day, but it creates a lot of trouble. She thinks if we're doing something she should too. Due to this she has her own painting clothes and mini roller now. I'll have to snap a picture of that some time. Very cute...extremely messy.
We've been spending a lot of time at the Riparian Preserve next to our library. She thinks the ducks all want to be hugged and she also seems to think that they like to eat rocks. The ducks don't helps this problem by pecking at the rocks she offers them. She also seems to think that turtles like to have rocks dropped on their heads. Poor things. Anyway, I guess that's a wrap! I'm impressed if you've made it to the bottom of this novel!

Raise the roof!

.....or the ceiling in our case. Raising the dropped ceiling has been the project that has REALLY put us behind schedule on the house, but thankfully, it's DONE. The ceiling was dropped in the kitchen, for no apparent reason at all, and in the hallway, which was chock full of all the air conditioning ducts. Thank goodness Jared knew how to raise all that stuff....and that he didn't complain about going over the the house at 5 a.m for TWO weeks to work on it before work...and that he didn't give me a hard time about ME being the one who wanted to raise it in the first place. I'll admit, when he wanted to move the wall between the laundry room and kitchen 4.5 inches so that the kitchen sink would be centered....I complained...and that only took an hour or so! (That was BEFORE he had to spend all this time on the ceiling. I've kept my mouth shut since.)

The kitchen and dropped ceiling before:

The new kitchen ceiling! (thanks for the help Andrew!)
Workin' away on the hall ceiling....

That's my little cheese monger!

If I had to choose a profession outside the home, one of my first choices would be a cheese monger. Those lucky people get to eat cheese all day and get PAID for it. I guess Eva must take after me in that area, because Jared offered her a cube of mozzarella today, which she promptly put back in the drawer and brought out my holy don't-even-THINK-about-touching-this-stuff parmigiano reggiano. Since I wasn't around, he gave her the whole hunk and she was in HEAVEN. Jared thinks 98% of cheeses are too strong, so I'm excited to have a buddy to share good cheese with! Eat up kid!

She LOOKS like she's gagging, but she was saying "MmmMMM!" the entire time.

Look at those bite marks!

The House

ALLLLright....

I have to admit something. I'm really truly embarrassed to show pictures of this house. Don't get me wrong, I'm ecstatic to have it, but quite frankly, it needs a LOT of work. I'm just worried no one will come and visit if they see the before pictures! It's a plain old 3 bed 2 bath ranch style house about a mile and a half from where we currently are. My favorite part of the house is that it's on a 1/4 acre, which probably doesn't seem that big, but it's huge for this area. We hope to take care of the kitchen, hardwood flooring and main bath prior to moving in (in May), along with a slew of smaller fix-ups, but the rest of it will have to slowly be done over the next year (or two). Anyway, here it is! I'll post more pictures as projects get completed.


I insisted on a picture in front of the house, even if it is cheesy. I mean you only buy your first house once right? I hope to get that brick arch thing taken out.....

Here's the kitchen upon moving in:

And here's the kitchen 3 hours later....


Here's Eva telling us all about what the backyard needs. :)


And finally...a picture for my dad. He wanted to see a picture of our oranges! There are two orange trees and a lemon tree in the front yard that have been sorely neglected, but produced some of the best tasting oranges I've ever had.

106.7

That was Eva's temperature tonight when we took her to pediatric urgent care. When the nurse told me how high her temperature was, I did what I do best....I started crying. We waited 2.5 hours in the lobby and within 2 minutes after taking her temperature people started rushing into the room to check her out, followed by hushed phone conversations just outside the door. Needless to say, I started FREAKING out. Thankfully it just ended up to be two nasty ear infections and pink eye. I don't think it's fair for kids to get sick.

Baking

I don't know why I always seem to think baking with Eva will be such a fun activity for the both of us. But inevitably I always try, and it usually is lots of fun and a huge mess!


At Tim and Megan's a few weeks ago, I was rolling out the pizza dough, when she popped up and wanted to help. It started out fairly well with just one little hand patting the dough......

Which rapidly progressed to both hands SQUEEZING the dough.


And finally...more eating of dough than anything else.

Yesterday we tried again with chocolate cookie dough. I caught myself several times saying..."don't eat the dough!" and then seconds later forgetting what I said and sampling it myself. :) Eva at the end of the cookie dough adventure. I'll bet I looked pretty similar.

By george, we got it!

Just wanted to share the good news: we found out over the weekend that we got the house! I guess it took so long to find out because there were several offers. They liked ours the best, but we were the only FHA offer. Apparently they can't sell houses that are missing bathroom floors and toilets to first time home buyers, so they had to find out how much they would have to pay to put those things in before they could accept our offer. Anyway, they accepted all of our terms and are going to put those things in for us. We can't wait to get in there and get to work!