Happy Happy Birthday to you!

Welp, it's true. Another year has come and gone and there is a little lady in our house that had a birthday. M turned ten. 10! I can't believe she's already ten. Time goes by so fast! I remember when she was a wee wee wee little lass and all she did was cry. I would cry with her and dream of the day that I would be a grandma so that when the baby cried I could hand said baby back to it's mom and I could walk away. Not to mention the poop and spit up that was launched in my direction and hit various parts of my body. Needless to say, that was not a good time. Now, she's ten and the crying and spitting up have stopped. We may or may not still have the poop issue. :) M is still quiet. She doesn't like to be the center of attention. We asked her if she wanted us to bring her treats or balloons to her at school. Panic covered her face and in an almost desperate voice she said, "No! Please don't!" I asked her if it was because she was embarrassed of us or she didn't want to be the center of attention. She said that she just didn't like to have everyone staring at her. So, we stayed home and didn't take her a treat or balloons at school. M is very gentle and loves to play. She loves her little brothers and loves to act like she's in charge. She doesn't like learning new things because she feels stupid that she doesn't already know how to do it. She is learning to snow ski and so far loves it. She can't totally stop and is working on it. B has told her to turn slowly and try going up hill to stop. Instead, she sits down and drags her hands behind her. At least she's able to stop and that's what's important right?! I know they're late in coming, but her birthday pictures are ready to be put up!

 Isn't she lovely? She just got expanders on her teeth to widen her jaw for the braces that are coming her way in about four weeks.

 I try to tell her that she should open her eyes more, but when she opens her eyes more, her smile gets smaller. Having her try is funny and sometimes I ask her to do it just to have a good laugh.Now, don't misunderstand, I'm not laughing at her or making fun of her. She laughs with me and then we refocus and snap a couple more pictures.

 Oh how we love our M! We are so happy and thankful that she's part of our family. I am so happy that she's the oldest. She is so willing to help. She is getting really good at cooking and if I need help with dinner I can ask her and she'll come help. She's made entire dinners by herself as I am helping K with his homework. She is my girl support since we are surrounded by three boys in our family. We talk about how stinky boys are and ponder on the reason's why. I truly love this sweet thing and I am so so happy that she's ours forever!

Oh dear what can the matter be?

 Remember this? Remember how impressed you were when you saw that we had taken the wet bar out, patched the hole, had it textured and then primed and painted? We were pretty pleased with ourselves too. And then

 This happened. We were downstairs brushing the teeth of the offspring when I heard B say, "I'm worried about that wall." I asked why and he told me to come look. When I first looked there was a lot more water. Seeing the water oozing from the wall did not feel our hearts with warm fuzzie's that's for certain. B sent a text the P who had helped us before asking if he knew any good plumbers. Oozing walls felt above our pay grade so we were going to call someone to come look at it. P said he could come look. We felt bad because it wasn't our intent to have him come look at it when we asked if he knew a good plumber. We just knew that he grew up here so he might know what plumbers are good and what ones to steer clear of.

P came over but because he doesn't have x-ray vision, he had to cut into the wall. Yes the brand new wall that had been done for less than a week. 

After getting back into the wall, they found that the black pipe was leaking. At first they thought that the water was coming up from the ground and that would have been terrible. We would have had to call someone to break up the cement to find the leak. It was all sounding like it was going to cost us our first born and then Heaven smiled on us and these smarty pants fellas discovered that it was the black pipe that was the culprit. The glue that has been used to glue the pipe together had come lost it's stickiness. We, and when I say we I mean P. He showed up the next day with the supplies in hand. Anyway, we had to cut the pipe in two, take out the non sticky part, put in a new piece of pipe and then connect it to the old pipe using pieces of rubber and screwing them in place. 

 Then there was a lot of measuring,

Cutting

Drilling

and mudding to fix the wall, again.

Not too shabby for a first timer. We still need to texture, prime and paint and then hopefully we're done cutting into the wall for a little while. Although B has come up with a great plan to add a projector that will shine onto this wall. I don't know what's involved in hanging a projector but I wouldn't be surprised if it includes cutting into this wall. I'd be even less shocked if they told us the best place to cut into the wall would be right in this here corner.Maybe we should hold off on painting until we know for sure!

Inspired by HGTV

I love to watch the fix it up shows on HGTV. I love to see the before and after pictures of the things that they redo. I watch them take out walls or redo a kitchen and I think, We could totally do that! Now, we all know that when I think," We can do that," what I mean is, B could totally do that and I would love to stand by and take pictures. Well, we have this here wet bar in our basement.

Since before we moved in, we knew that we wanted to take this out. We feel like it's such a waste of space. The couple that sold us the house were so happy to show us the,"really nice wet bar area downstairs." We're not really the drinking type though, so, although it is nice down there, we didn't really have a use for it. We're trying to save our pennies so that we can redo the flooring throughout the whole house. Can I just say I was truly shocked to find out how much money it is going to be? When the guy at the flooring store gave us the quote I couldn't help that my mouth fell open and I had to say, "whoa, that's a lot." Anyway, we're working on it. One night as I was thinking about the wet bar and the cool things we could do once it was gone, like not have a wet bar, I had an epiphany. We need to take the wet bar out before we do flooring so that we can take out the nasty tile that's down there and lay soft wonderful carpet in it's place. I shared my epiphany with B and he agreed with me. Next thing I knew I was pulling up YouTube videos on how to take out cabinets. I was quite surprised to see how easy it looked. I know, YouTube is full of liars that don't tell you how hard and how long it really takes, but the guy said that cabinets are just screwed into studs, so unscrew them and the cabinets should just come off the wall. I think I was able to wait 18 hours before my excitement got the better of me and I wanted to try my hand at cabinet removal. We put the offspring to bed, strapped on our tool belts and set to work. Ok, we didn't really strap on tool belts. Truthfully I was already in jammies. First matter of business was to break out the wine racks. I pushed on them and they wouldn't move. I threw in the towel and told B that maybe we should hire someone to do it. He pushed on them with little to no effort and they broke away from the cabinet. Sweet! My hopes of easy cabinet removal returned. My job was to unscrew the little wine glass holder things on the bottom of the cabinet. Once those were off and the wine racks were broken to smithereens, it was time to located the screws that were holding the upper cabinets up. B pulled out his amazing 10.5 volt drill and went to town. He got two of the four screws out before his amazingly powerful drill died. That's when I heard for the one millionth time,"I need a new drill. This is ridiculous!" While his poor sad drill was charging, we set to work on the lower cabinet. I popped the tile off that was along the wall. Not, gonna lie, I was pretty pleased with myself when all the tile were off. I was pleased with myself until B stood up from where he had been under the sink and pulled the whole sink out of the cabinet. In the amount of time it took me to take the tile off, he had, disconnected the little water heater that was under the sink, undone the plumbing, which included cutting pipes, and had figured out how to take the sink out. Nothing like a giant slice of humble pie! We checked the status of his drill. The little guy had charged enough that we could go back to taking the upper cabinet down. B unscrewed the screws, while I held it up. I was surprised that when he took out the last screw, the cabinet really did come away from the wall! There was no damage to the wall and I was standing on the counter holding a cabinet. It. Was. Awesome! We took the cabinet out to the garage and went back in the basement to tackle the lower cabinet. B grabbed hold of the counter top, pulled up and the whole thing came away from the cabinet. Getting the cabinet out was tricky, they had put the tile right up against the base of the cabinet, which I assume is normal, it just left a little lip that we needed to lift the cabinet over. I have about 0% arm strength, so I wasn't any help as B was pushing and pulling on the cabinet to get it over the edge of the tile. With as much strength as I could muster, I pulled with him and we were able to get it over the ledge! We hauled it up the stairs and out to the side of the house.

This is what it looked like at the end of night one. I was so happy that I could hardly sleep! The reason for the giant hole in the wall is because there is a black pipe that was hooked to the sink in the counter. They didn't cut the studs back far enough for the pipe to rest inside the stud, so the pipe stuck out farther than the wall. We think that whoever put the wet bar in  thought that it didn't matter because there would be a cabinet in front of it, so it wouldn't matter that there was no wall. Well, B talked to a guy at Home Depot about what to do. The guy told him that since we don't have the sink anymore, we don't really need the pipe. He said to cut it until it would fit behind a new piece of sheet rock. He showed him how to plug the pipe and how to patch the wall. Clearly, the wall patch didn't go on at the end of night one, but the pipe was cut.

Day two brought a new sledge hammer and a great way to get out some pent up frustrations! When B bought the sledge hammer he didn't know how heavy to go. He knew he needed it to try and get the counter top off the other set of cabinets, so he thought a 16 pounder would do the job.

It only took a half hearted swing to pop the top counter top off. He was so happy that one swing was all it took!

It took a couple full swings to get the other counter top off. you can't tell from the picture, but he was having a great time destroying this thing. 

He got the counter top off and it was HEAVY! I was the only help he could recruit. 

I was so happy that we only had one set of stairs we had to walk up with this blasted thing. After we carried it outside, we went back downstairs. Together we were able to knock the cabinet loose and I asked if we were going to carry it outside. He said no way. It was way too heavy, we were going to need more help. If my memory serves me well, I'm pretty sure he told me that he would need a guys help, because I would be more of a liability than an asset. Rude! Too bad he's totally right. That night we had gone to K's Christmas concert. On the way home we go pass the church. It was a Wednesday and I remembered it was youth night, so the church would be crawling with  young men. We stopped and I ran in to see if I could find three or four that wouldn't mind coming to our house to help lift the cabinet up the stairs. The young men had gone to do a tour of a funeral home. That's odd. One of the young women leaders suggested that we call the missionaries and see if they could help us. Genius! The poor missionaries, even if they don't want to, they say yes! We called and they told us they could be here in five minutes.

 I think it's so funny that the bigger missionary had the littler one doing the actual lifting and he stood beside it to keep it balanced.

Look how awesome they are! Up the stairs they went like it was no big deal. It only took them a few minutes from when they showed up to when they were telling us goodbye. We were so thankful for their help!

This is at the end of day two. The extra space was already awesome! Now we just needed to move the outlets from counter height to closer to floor and fix the hole in the wall.

He had to make the hole square so that he could put in a new piece of dry wall.

End of day 3.

Next, he moved the outlets. He moved them like it was no big deal. I would hate that kind of a thing. There were so many steps and of course with electrical stuff you want to make sure you do it right. He moved all of the outlets in one night. He was ready for the dry wall!

P from our ward, the same P that helped with the lights, used to do dry wall for a living. He found out what we were doing and told us that he would come help. He showed up and helped B hang the new dry wall.

Then he textured our wall for us. He is so awesome and he spent a lot of time at our house. B says that watching him do it, he was really thankful that P was willing to help. B says that he had the general idea of how to do it, but if he had tried, he thinks he would have ended up really frustrated. The guy he talked to at Home Depot had made it sound so easy, but it took P a long time to do all of this for us. Having him help was an answer to an unspoken prayer.

Neither of us were excited about the painting part. It takes forever. Because the color was so dark and we wanted to go way light, we were told we needed two coats of primer. B started on the first coat and I came behind him doing the second. We were doing the entire basement, not just the wet bar area so we knew it would be a several night project. Nothing says date night like priming the walls in ones basement!

 Saturday morning dawned and all three kiddos were so excited to learn that our plan for the day was to paint. Truly, they could hardly wait to finish eating so they could go downstairs and help. They were a huge help actually, it just took about a million times longer with them helping. Little B was most insistent that he do it by himself. He did keep the roller on the wall while it was his turn and only left one hand print in the wet paint . His cute little hand only played in the bucket of primer three or four times and he only destroyed his pants. I would call that a raging success!

I don't know if I can tell the walls are really light gray because I know they are really light gray or if it's because you can tell the we painted them a really light gray. Once it was all done, M looked around and said,"It feels like a whole different room down here. I know it's not, but it seems bigger or something." We told her it was because of the paint color. We love the lighter color and we are so thankful for the help we had along the way. If it weren't for the missionaries and P from our ward, we know there's no way our wet bar area removal would look as great as it does.

Let there be light

So I woke up one morning and it was the beginning of December. I blinked at some point and all the sudden we were yelling,"Happy New Year!" December came and went and I only did one post. I am shame faced and I hope to be better. December was full of cutting holes in our ceiling, hanging dry wall and painting. Not to mention the fun stuff like choir concerts, where a certain 7 year old told us that he didn't need to wear Sunday clothes so we made sure his jeans didn't have holes in the knees and off we went. Only to find out that he was one of only two children that weren't in Sunday clothes. Not great. Anyway, there was a choir concert and painting of ornaments and staying up way too late the entire two weeks of Christmas break. It was wonderful and amazing and it went by too fast. Let's start at the very beginning, a very good place to start. If you aren't singing the song from Sound of Music now, you need to stop reading this and go watch it. I love that movie! I digress, there is a guy in our ward that has been telling us since September that he was going to come over and put lights in our living room. He's super busy. He's in school full time and has a lovely wife and four littles. We get that he's busy and were thankful that he had offered to help, but figured we would just save up and pay someone to come put in the lights. Our home teacher owns a lot of rentals and he gave us the name of the guy he uses. He's a retired electrician and does things like install lights for $25 an hour. We thought it was an answer to prayer. B texted the guy to see if he would be interested in doing the work. A few hours later the guy responded by saying, "Thanks, not interested." At least we knew exactly how he felt about doing our lights. B was home one Tuesday because he was post call, so he had the day off. His phone rang and it was P, the guy from our ward that had said he would put in the lights. He said,"I'm coming over right now to put in those lights." I love that he didn't ask, he just told B he was coming. Come he did. He had B make a list of the things they would need to buy at Home Depot, made a Depot run and were back to start cutting holes in the ceiling. I can't believe I forgot to take a before picture. Just imagine the ceiling without holes in it.

 Seeing the pictures makes me feel like cutting holes in the ceiling should have been so fast, but it took a long time. They had to measure and stud find and measure again and move the pencil outlines of the holes and measure one more time just to be sure. Then they were able to cut the holes. Talk about a dusty project. When they were done our tree looked like it had been flocked. Did I take the time to dust it you ask? Do you know me at all? Of course I didn't dust it. I hate dusting! I make the two year old dust. But, since the two year old isn't allowed to touch the tree, it just sat there in it's pretend flocked glory. We shook it semi good when we took it down to get some of the dust off. Good enough for who it's for right?!

Look how dark it is in there. Hence the light installation. P is the guy on the ladder. He taught B everything including how to put the wires in the cans.

Then he taught B how to shove the cans up into the ceiling. Since B is taller than P, B did a lot of the higher work. P got here at around 11:30 in the morning and they didn't get done until just after 5:00. Can I just say the Youtube makes everything look so fast and easy.  Liars! 

Ta-duh! The finished project. B and I are so thankful that P was willing to come spend his entire day at our house. It's still a little dark in the corner where the Christmas tree is, but don't panic. When we took the tree down the day after Christmas(because I'm crazy and that's the day it comes down. Honestly the day after Christmas when we get to take everything down might be my favorite day of the year. Fact.) Anyway, when we took the tree down, we moved the lamp over into the corner and now it's perfect! We love it so much!

Thanksgiving

Even though B is the low man on the totem pole, he was able to get the entire week of Thanksgiving off! The only bummer is that means he's on call Christmas day, the day after Christmas and the day after that, so, that's not great. But, to have him home for the week was truly amazing! We had planned on going to my beautiful older sister's house for Thanksgiving. As an added bonus, her daughter, B was getting baptized the day before Thanksgiving. We were going to be able to be there and that was awesome! We were going to leave Tuesday morning to make the six hour drive to their house. We decided last minute to leave on Monday night and go half way. B and I decided, while the kiddos were at school,  to leave early, so they had no idea that we were going to leave that night. When we told them that we were leaving early, it took them less than an hour to get all their clothes ready and eat dinner. Since we were going half way it meant that we got to stay in a hotel. Best. Day. Ever! The hotel had a pool that was open until 11:00, so we were able to go swimming. Now, when I say we I mean that B took the kids and went swimming. I "forgot" to pack my swim suit. I blame it on the fact that we were trying to be so fast leaving our house. It couldn't possibly have anything to do with the fact that I hate swimming because pools are always freezing cold. Not to mention, someone has to be on picture duty. How else would we document that we were there?

 It's official, Little B is a total bum. When in a picture, if you get him looking at the camera or smiling, it's by total accident on his part. He makes goofy faces like that on purpose.

Isn't she lovely? I love this sweet little thing so much!

What's not to love about this little fella? I don't remember what he was laughing at, probably something gross, but it made for an awesome picture!

His picture is so dark because I couldn't give the camera time to adjust to the light. He was looking at me and telling me how happy he was to be swimming, so I snapped the picture. These three littles make me so happy!

The next morning when I woke up to work out, I walked out of our room and saw white stuff falling from the sky. We had looked at the weather before we left and it said there was a chance for snow. We had hoped they would be wrong. They weren't. 

I have a lot of anxiety in general, but especially about driving in the snow. When K was a baby I was driving to a family Christmas party and it was snowing. On the freeway, our car slipped, I hit the van next to us, bounced off, and hit the cement barrier. Our car spun in a circle and we stopped facing on coming traffic. It was truly terrifying and increased my anxiety about driving in snow. The offspring was excited about playing in the white stuff with their cousins, I just wanted to make it there alive!

B has no fear and so to drive in the snow was no big deal to him. I am so thankful that he was there to drive us because heaven knows I would have freaked out and it would have taken us months to get there because we would have left the car at the hotel and walked the rest of the way to Montana.

I will say that it's beautiful. I am happy that we had left the night before. The rest of the drive should have taken us three hours, but it took close to five. We saw one car that had flipped over onto it's roof. The ambulance was already there and they were putting the guy on a stretcher. Not great! Hopefully he was ok and able to spend Thanksgiving with family and not in the hospital. 

We got there Tuesday afternoon and every day we were there, four crazy children bundled up and played in the snow.

They made this awesome tunnel that they loved to play in. I don't know what all they did while they were out there, but they would play outside for at least an hour, sometimes longer. They would come in the house, have some hot chocolate, warm up for a few minutes, put on their snow gear again and go back out.

They had so much fun playing in the snow, but they especially loved that they had cousins to play in the snow with.

Little B was so convinced that he wanted to go outside and play. We didn't have any waterproof gloves for him to wear. We tried telling him that his hands would freeze. He still wanted to go. B put his coat on him and took him out. He was out there for less than five minutes. He slipped and tried to catch himself. Once he felt the snow with his bare hands, he was done with the snow. When B showed me this picture I asked why there were tears. When he fell, he started to cry, B wanted a picture of him in the snow. Since they didn't have time to take the picture before little B fell, they took it after. Poor little thing. I don't blame him, snow leaves me in tears too.

B is from November to May older than K. They have always been friends and I am so happy that even though we haven't lived next to each other since they were two, that they are still good friends. B's baptism was amazing and I am so so happy that we were able to be there for it.

Thursday brought crafts and good food. I really don't like turkey, I never have. It seems dry with no flavor. My sister is truly a culinary genius and her turkey was truly amazing! Her's is the first turkey in my whole life that didn't taste like turkey! She had soaked it in a magical brine and it was truly amazing. One of my favorite things to do when we are with family is to play games. Thursday night was game night.

Not all of us were up to playing games. Little B climbed up in my lap, folded in half and went to sleep. I didn't want to put him to bed because it was only 6:30. I didn't think that he would stay asleep for very long like that anyway. I was wrong. He slept for three hours. We didn't think that he could be very comfortable. B picked him up and left the room. I went to find them a little while later.

 Thanksgiving wiped out more than just the two year old. 

My sister and her husband own a sporting goods store. We had never been there, so on Friday we went. Little B found the helmets and was in heaven. I think he looks like a bobble head. Their store is pretty sweet!

We had so much fun at their house and on Sunday morning when it was time to go, I cried. A lot. No matter how long it's been since we moved away from family, saying goodbye doesn't seem to get any easier. I was the last one to get in the car. I heard sniffles from the back and turned to see that M had  her head in her pillow crying and K was trying so hard to not cry, but finally gave up and let the tears come. Seeing them so sad made me even more sad. We loved spending Thanksgiving with them. My sister is hot a lot, so is their oldest, C. I had no idea it was so bad until we got to their house and found out that their heater, when it's on, which isn't often, is only set for 50. I truly thought I was going to come home with frostbite as a souvenir. Now that we know that we'll be more prepared next time. I know I could have asked her to turn the heat on or gotten another blanket or another coat, but if I had I would have looked like the kid from A Christmas Story, and not been able to put my arms down. Being with family is so amazing and we truly loved every second we were there and can't wait to go back!