God as an excuse

Tonight Katherine was so tired. She went to bed really late last night because we went to a concert at the Arboretum. Today she did not take as long of a nap as I would have liked and tonight we were at an event at church so it was another late night. We actually had a really good day but at bedtime she had a melt down. It took both of us to get her ready for bed. She chose to have mommy lay down with her. She was so tired that I made the mistake of turning out the light and skipping reading time. I did not realize how cutting out this small step would disrupt an over tired toddler. She was screaming at the top of her lungs that she wanted to read books. I kept telling her no.

...then she said, "Mommy, I want to read about baby Jesus in the Bible." Over and over she screamed, "I want to read my Bible". Did she really want to read about baby Jesus or did she know that asking to read the Bible would be something mommy would give in to? Well, the light came on and we read about baby Jesus. Who am I to deny my 2 year old from her daily quiet time. She also asked to read about the whale (Jonah).

Daddy's comment is that she is brilliant. Was I just manipulated? Probably.

If you read this tonight, please pray that she sleeps late tomorrow. She could really use catching up on her sleep and we have a busy weekend with lots of activities. Mommy needs her sleep as well and plans to head to bed pretty soon.

The photo has nothing to do with this post but was a cute photo from this week with Katherine and her pile of "stuff" that must move from one place to another in the house.

Trade in your BPA bottles

Yesterday I read on the Baby Cheapskate blog that many Babies R Us stores are taking back older bottles that contain BPA in them. The Freebies 4 Mom blog did a post about BPA free bottles and even has a link to a long list of bottles and sippy cups that are BPA free.

The comments on these blogs are varied as far as the success of returning the old bottles. Some locations give a gift card with full store credit, some will only trade for newer bottles without BPA and some do nothing. It is up to the manager of that store. I have a collection of barely used bottles that all contain BPA. I thought I would check out this opportunity since I am 7 weeks away from having a potential bottle user. I went to the Town East location with 6 Avent bottles and 6 Gerber bottles. At first they said I could trade them for other bottles which was fine with me. Then for some reason the checker decided it would be easier to just give me a store credit which I then could use for anything. It was for $35! This was for used bottles that were over 2 years old, with no receipt! I did buy one new pack of bottles, but I mainly used the credit to buy more safe sippy cups for Katherine since that is really what I need right now.



So, I encourage any of you out there who are concerned about BPA or those who have unused bottles sitting around to run to your nearest BRU to check it out. You might call first if it is a trip out of the way since it is up to each store manager whether or not they will take these back.

Finally Finished

Well, our bathroom remodel is finally over. Actually we are 98% done. The contractors are coming Friday for a few remaining items. It is very different and we love it. We are so glad it is done as we were quite tired of having people in our house every morning while we were trying to get ready, using the office bathroom, and trying to keep Katherine out of the workers way. It is not super easy to do a project with a toddler as they are so curious and workers are not always careful about what they leave out or cleaning up.

Here are the before and after photos. I made them smaller since there are so many but you can click on any photo for a more detailed view.

The before and after of the vanity area. They removed the furdowns and wallpaper then textured and painted. Choosing the color was not easy. I had a color in my mind but finding it in paint was a challenge. We have an unused gallon of paint that was the wrong color. We changed from a single sink to a double sink. I am do glad that we did. Now we have two lights and two mirrors which are much more decorative than what we previously had.

This is a view of the vanity area from the other side. We painted the medicine cabinet white and they are making us a new door. That is one of the remaining items to be done.

The new vanity is a free standing furniture piece rather than a built in vanity. We had to sacrifice a little in storage space to have 2 sinks but like I mentioned, we are enjoying the double sink area a lot.

The bathmat is actually the first thing I bought and what I used to try to find a paint color. The colors are dark brown and blue. If you take a look of Katherine's photo in the banner of the blog you will have a pretty good idea of the style of the bathroom. I just need to frame one of those pictures to complete the decor. It will match perfectly. I also loved the bath accessories in this line but they looked a little more aqua than the walls and the toothbrush holder was pretty functionless. The toothbrush would slide right out!

The toilet area is not finished yet so it looks pretty plain. We have not had the doors or shelves to the cabinet installed yet. Because the furdown was removed we will have about a foot more storage space which will hopefully help out with the vanity storage lost. The toilet paper holder was hung crooked so we are waiting for them to redo that as well.

The dressing room is gone and the craft room is awaiting the furniture. Gone is the floral wallpaper and vanity. We replaced the sconce lights with an overhead light.

I am going to be putting a scrapbook armoire in this room. I am so excited. There is a scrapbook convention in town next weekend and I saw on the website of an armoire company that their floor models are available at a discount. I called and pretty much was able to customize the floor model to be what I wanted to order down to the wood finish and knobs. As a floor model I get money off, free shipping and extra products saving $500. I look forward to being able to craft again without toddler hands trying to play with all of my fun supplies.

As with any home project it takes on a life of its own. We decided that while the contractors were here we would add a few things to their list of things to take care of. It was great to cross off a lot of items on our list. It has been hard for us to pay others to do work since we (and I really mean Sam) are capable of doing most of this work. We have hit a point though where our time is pretty valuable and we were not getting these projects done.

Old and new hall light

Old and new oven.

Old and new dishwasher

Old and new ceiling fan in the den

My grandmother's chandelier which Sam hung now has electricity!

We also put vent fans in all three bathrooms and a new faucet in Katherine's bathroom. We also had a new bonus of new locks for all of our doors because one day the foreman lost our key and we had no idea if it was on our property or elsewhere.

So, we love our new bathroom. I hope you enjoyed the tour. Come by and take a look next time you are in the area!

Memorial Day

We had a great Memorial Day weekend filled with a mix of family time, friend time and house project time. We are almost finished with our bathroom remodel. Sam and I were finishing up the painting this weekend and there are a few tiny details that the contractors will hopefully finish up on Thursday. I will post pictures as soon as I clean all the painting supplies out of the room.

Monday afternoon we went to Wade and Janna's for swimming and cooking out. Robert is one of Katherine's best buddies and she loves their daughter Laurie Jane so she was excited. She and I were there on Friday swimming so she was excited all day. When we were talking about it at lunch I asked her where she was going swimming today. I expected her to say at Robert's house but instead she looked at me as to say "duh" and replied "in the water".

Ready to swim
Playing with daddy in the water.

Robert is more adventurous than Katherine
Laurie Jane happy in her Grammy's lap
Ben was more timid than I would have expected. He had fun with the tractor and tools though.
Ethan enjoying watermelon

Janna did a great job of getting Katherine more excited about actually swimming. Last summer our lessons were cut short when we went to Norway but they were pretty pitiful anyway. Katherine tolerated the pool last year. This year she has fun playing on the steps and on the floaties but still is hesitant to go underwater. Hopefully we will spend a lot more time in the water and she will get even more comfortable in the water and enjoy it more.

Sunday fun

A few weeks ago I thought Katherine looked so cute for church. She was wearing a dress from last year that still fits though it is a little shorter and she actually let me put a bow in her hair. That is a rare event these days.
I went outside to give Hooligan water and Katherine followed me out there to play so I snapped a few pictures.

When we got home she wanted to look for "roly poly polies" so she plopped down on the driveway in her Sunday best to collect bugs with daddy.
She is absolutely fascinated by whatever we can catch. So far it has been roly polies, lady bugs and ants. We have attempted to catch a lizard but it was just too fast.
With a mom who was a science teacher and a dad who is an engineer and a chemistry major, we love this inquisitive mind and love for nature. We want to do whatever it takes to cultivate that interest, even getting down and dirty in her Sunday best.

27 months

Has it already been another month? It seems that time just flies by and I am writing my monthly milestone post every week.

Katherine, you continue to learn so much and you are so funny that daddy and I are always laughing at what you say and do.

You continue to be very verbal and sometimes it gets you into trouble. The other day you had a negative mark on your daily sheet at school. When I asked the teacher about it she said that she kept telling you to go down the slide and up the stairs. You replied, "No, I want to go up the slide, not down the slide". You were then put into time out for your disobedience. Many of the other kids are not quite so precise in their language so their response would have either been silence or maybe a "no" but it is quite obvious that you not only understood what Ms. Kristin was telling you but you were knowingly choosing to disobey. The problem with having such a large vocabulary for your age is I think sometimes more is expected out of you. You can say so much and sometimes I forget that you still lack maturity in other areas.

Here are some of your sentences and phrases of the last month:

• Mommy, may I have a Kleenex please, I have a booger? (so polite about it too:)
• Mommy go peepee, good job mommy.
• Mommy is Christy, Daddy is Sam.
• Don't get out of your shoe or get a spankin. Obey Katherine! (Said to her toes in the car)
• Come on guys.
• Wait a minute.
• Stay right here.
• No big deal.
• Be right back.
• I run fast
• Ready, set go!
• Cars can hurt you (a common warning I give when we are walking in a parking lot)
• Time for a zerbert (for Squeak of course)
• I run up the hall, I run down the hall.
• Mommy, baby's tired and wants to watch TV (who do you really think wanted to watch TV?)

You love to tell stories. Sometimes I can figure out what you are telling but you have been known to babble nonstop for over 5 minutes in the car. It is so cute. when you tell a story and talk about what you said you always repeat yourself in a high pitch voice. It is really funny.

You are quite the helper. Anytime I am cooking you bring over your stool or chair so you can watch and help. We made banana pudding for a friend who had a baby (along with more stuff). After stirring it you took a test. You liked it! I had to take it away though so you did not put your fingers back in.

You also got to help mommy put together a new bookcase for your big girl room. You used the screwdrivers to help turn the screws and you used your stuffed hammer too. You were so proud of the finished project when daddy came home.

Your eating habits are funny some days. You are doing really well at eating what we eat. This month you have enjoyed salmon, chicken (in all kinds of sauce), meat loaf, shepherds pie and quesadillas among other things. I love that we can go out to eat on a whim without worrying that I did not pack you a meal and that I do not have to prepare you a separate meal each night. The main frustration is that for some reason you will not eat leftovers. You will love something for dinner and I get so excited but then you refuse to eat it the next day. It is very frustrating. You also will love a food one week and not touch it the next. It makes it very hard to pack your lunch for school. You have discovered that you really like ice cream and you are not a huge fan of chocolate.

You have quite a collection of stuff that you like to haul around. The funny thing is that the pile might change from day to day so I never know what the essential stuff for the day will be. Usually it includes baby, her carrier and her blanket along with other dolls, blankets and toys. You have an amazing memory of here your stuff is and go around the house collecting your pile. In the photo you are going to read to your "stuff" but you have so much you can't really even open the book.

As with all 2 year olds you can have a very strong will. I do not worry because you are doing things that are developmentally appropriate like exploring your independence and testing limits but sometimes it is just not much fun. It is good to know you are on track but it is so hard sometimes to know how to discipline and guide you as you are learning about the world around you.

Sometimes you are very adventurous and sometimes you are very cautious. At a new playground you amazed me that you learned how to climb a pretty high ladder with no help so that you could go down a very tall slide. Yet the next week when we were at the spray park you just played in the small sprinklers not really wanting to get all the way wet.

You are so lucky to have some great friends. I love this picture of you and Robert in a chair reading together. Every day you will ask if you can play with one of your friends either at a park, at Katherine's house or at their house. Almost every day you are lucky and you are able to play with your friends.

This month you learned your last name. It is soooo cute when we ask you your name and you say the whole thing. The funny thing is when we ask you our name and instead of Christy or Sam you say Mommy ____ or Daddy ____ even though you know our first names.

Speaking of names, we still don't have a name for Squeak. When we ask you what we should name baby sister, your most recent response is "mommy" or "daddy". Silly girl. Tonight we tried to tell you we were going to name baby sister "Katherine" and your response was "no, Fafrine right here".

Speaking of "Fafrine", that is still how you say your name. I am working on clearly pronouncing the "K" at the beginning of your name and having you imitate it. You do it correctly sometimes. (Don't worry Heather, I do it without a stutter though it is hard to emphasize a /k/ without a stutter).

Your big girl room is almost 100% complete. Now we have the bookcase in, we need bins for in the bookcase. The only two other things I need to do is repaint the red shelf that was in there when it was a guest room and I need to sew the curtains shorter. Another new addition to your room this week is mommy's old desk. My Nana (your Nana's grandmother and your great grandmother) bought it for me, I think when an old school house was selling things they were no longer using. My mom (your Nana) painted it green (most of my childhood room was this color), put my name on it and covered the drawing surface with fabric and contact paper. I have decided to keep it the original color with my name on it but I need to replace the dirty fabric and put new contact paper on it. It is perfect for you and you love to sit there to draw.

You have a few new habits this month. You have started to twirl your hair. It is getting really long and it is still curly on the ends. I love it. When we lay down for you to nap or sleep at night you often fall asleep twirling your hair. One of my favorite things each day is snuggling with you in your big bed. I thought that I would miss our evening story time in the glider but replacing it with snuggle time in the big girl bed is so much better. There have been many times that either your dad or I have fallen asleep with you. You love to read a few books and cuddle up with us. I try to treasure these times as I know it will be much harder to snuggle and take a nap with you when Squeak arrives.

Another new obsession is washing your hands. Don't get me wrong, I thing that good hygiene is very important and washing your hands after you use the bathroom is very important. But, you have a routine where you wash your hands with your blue soap (which is a foam) and then you want to wash your hands with your Johnson Buddies soap bar. Then you want to use the soap bar to wash the counter and sometimes even the floor. Of course this is all while the water is running. Then you need a towel to dry your hands and the counter but sometimes if I am not looking you get the towel wet and use it to clean the counter even more. There have been many battles recently over washing your hands but at least they are clean.

We are about to have to do another bit of baby proofing by buying a new kind of lock for high up on our door. Yesterday you told mommy to wait when we were going outside so you could get your stool. You brought it over to the front door and used it to unlock the deadbolt. You also unlocked the bottom lock but could not get the door open because it sticks a little. Yikes, that sure scared mommy.

Katherine, you are such a joy. Though you take a lot of energy out of me while I am 8 months pregnant, I love every day that we spend together. I love seeing you learn and grow. It is always an adventure.

Tax Protest

I am feeling quite proud of myself. We received our housing appraisal for property taxes for next year. As usual, they went up a lot. This is good in some ways because it shows that our home value is increasing. But, since we are not looking to sell our house for awhile it means that we are out more money for property taxes.

Every year since we have moved here our property has been reassessed and every year I have driven downtown to fight it. Every year I have had it reduced. This is an area where my type a personality and my math/spreadsheet abilities benefit me. I actually have a spreadsheet that I use every year with the information from every house on our block. It makes me quite mad when I plug in the numbers and analyze the data. This year the value of the land went up on every house. At the same time, the value of the actual houses went down on every house but 4. Guess whose house was included in those whose value went up? OURS! Not only did it go up, but it increased by 28%! The other houses that increased only increased by about 5%. I was baffled at why our house increased so much more than any other. We are not the largest house or the nicest house on our street and we had done no improvements on the property since last year. Not only that but our house's value per square foot was $25 over the average value per square foot for our street. Something is not equatable here.

So, I went in to the appraisal office with my spreadsheets, along with the list of homes that sold on our street in the last year. I had figured out what our house would be valued at if we were assessed at the average value per square foot for either the block or the homes that sold last year. I also had information that one of my neighbors had already fought his appraisal which started out higher than ours by 10K and he got them down lower than ours last year. That was the nail in the coffin for the appraiser.

The first year I went in with my data the appraiser jokingly offered me a job because I was more thorough than they are. This year they were also impressed. There is a lot more that goes into the appraisal process than just having an equatable average for your street but with my data and the information from my neighbor, I was able to get our property value down 22% which will save us just under $1000 in taxes this year.

So, I encourage all of you to do your homework and fight your property taxes if it seems you are being assessed higher than your neighbors. You have until the end of the month to do it. Email me for more details or websites to look at if you need to.

Last Day of School

You would think that as a person that takes photos of everything their child does for the blog I would have thought to take photos of her first day of school. NOPE. It did not occur to me at all. I guess I was just so ready for a break after 14 weeks in Norway that it skipped my mind. That or the fact that I worked there last year and it is in the same classroom that she is in on Sunday so it did not seem like a big deal at the time.

So, I decided to commemorate the last day of school. Katherine went two days a week to the Mother's Day Out program at our church. It took her a little while to adjust but I think that was just going through separation anxiety all over again after our return to the states. By the end of the year she would run into her classroom and never look back.

Katherine loved her teachers Ms. Janna and Ms. Kristen. She talks about them at home. She is really excited because Ms. Kristen lives in our neighborhood and babysits every other week for our community group. These two ladies do a great job with the kids. I could not imagine being with 10-12 kids for 10 hours a week with only 2 adults. They love on the kids and the kids love them.

Knox, Court, Katherine, Abby, Andrew

Jack, Evan, Kaitlyn and Noah (Evie escaped in this photo)

This is Katherine's Monday class. About half of the kids also attend on Thursday along with about 5 other kids. It sometimes would confuse Katherine that Holden will be at school on Thursday and not Monday, whereas Evie is there on Monday and not on Thursday. Add that to the fact that she is also up there for church, community group, MOPS and special events and she never knew who she was going to get to play with.
Katherine started saying the names of her friends from school after just a few days there. Abby kept being mentioned. She is a cutie and apparently those two girls loved to play together. The teachers said they would climb into the rocking chair and read books. I am bummed that this photo is a tad out of focus but I was sneaking it fast before the moment passed,
Here is Katherine in her favorite place, reading books in the teacher's lap.

I am quite sad that school is over for the summer. There will be a few weeks before Katherine starts a summer program at a church near our house. With a new baby arriving mid-July I knew that I would need some breaks. Next fall we will be going to a MDO program closer to home as well. We had no complaints about the one at our church, we just decided that we wanted something closer. Also, there are weeks that Katherine is up at church 5 or 6 days and she gets a little tired of it. I really want her to enjoy church and one week she said she just wanted to stay home.