Watching Boogie Grow

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Quickly Growing into Mommie's Shoes

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The baby princess..

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Monday, February 28, 2011

Its Electric Boogie, Boogie, Boogie....

So this weekends big project for the attic rebuild was to have a new larger breaker box put into the house.  Jon has a friend that is an electrician and he was going to come over and help us out. I mean this is Jon and large amounts of electricity and well that is not a safe thing usually.  Jon is a bit accident prone and we have been to the emergency room for things like 3rd degree burns and almost sawed off fingers.  With that track record having an electrician come over to do this project  was a definite must.  The only thing is that the electrician never showed up and Jon decided he could do it all on his own. *Sigh*

So it was off to the big HD we went to get our supplies and then home to hopefully no burn the house down or electrocute ourselves.

The first thing to be done was to cut out a hole for the new electrical panel.  Most of these things live in a closet somewhere but since this is an old house there is no such panel which means it lives in the middle of my hallway.  You will obviously notice that the new box, is considerably larger then the old box.  Ce la vie....


 You will likely notice that the hole has grown just a bit, but not unreasonably since Jon had to chase wires.  I could live with this cut and Jon lured me even further into his thinking by promising me a new outlet on that wall. The old one was put in in 1950 when the house was built and pulled out of the wall every time you unplugged something.
 The other tantalizing promise that he made was that he would relocate these wires inside the wall rather then through the back of the girls closet.  Well he did get closer, now they at least enter the wall through the baseboard and not the middle of the closet.
 Then things started to take a turn for the worse.  You will notice that the new box is in place, but Jon forgot to feed a wire through the side into a breaker and sooooo the wall had to be opened again.  I was assured that this would be a very easy and seamless fix....Oh brother....

 Then there was the hammer incident...while pulling off the baseboard to put up the new drywall the hammer slipped and took a chunk out of the wall.  Jon decided the "easiest" thing to go was to just replace the drywall on the whole wall.  *Sigh*
 Another view of the carnage that was suppose to be an easy installation.  Notice that my telephone nook is missing, it came back.  I made Jon promise me that he would put it back, its one of the little charming things that I LOVE about our house.
 Here is the new outlet that was suppose to help me get over all the carnage that became my hallway.  It was really not quiet enough, but I have other ideas for Jon in the future that will make me feel a bit better about all of this.
 At least nothing blew up and nothing caught fire and no one was electrocuted.  The power came back on and everything works so at least the prime objective was accomplished.
 The girls and I ran to get groceries and when we came home, Jon  had put up the dry wall and got it mudded in, so at least the hallway was starting to look sort of normal.  It will stay like this until we are ready to do all our painting as we will have to remove the attic steps here and replace the drywall in the ceiling as well as reposition the light.  Seems like the best idea is to do all of that at once.
So for now my hallway looks like this with its giant electrical box in the middle and cute little telephone nook back in its proper place. The spackle is unfinished and needs to be touched up but by the time this project is nearing an end this hallway will look spectacular. 

My only issue is what to hang over that electrical box?

Friday, February 25, 2011

THANK YOU!!!

That is really all I have to say.  For an extremely long time I have been wishing for people to stop by and read my musings and just type a few little words of hello.  My dear SIL is very good about this, and keeps my spirits up with her glowing yet I am sure unbiased praise of her favorite (only) nieces, but its been a little lonely around here from time to time.

I can not tell you how excited I was this morning to open my email and see....comments sent to me from my blog.  Woo hoo!!  If I wasn't 28 weeks pregnant I might have done a cart wheel, never mind the fact that at 34 I still don't know how to do a cartwheel, for you I would have figured it out.

So thank you all.  I know a comment, or following a blog may seem like a very small thing, but in my small little world it was a gigantic gesture. Thank you!

Thursday, February 24, 2011

Spacial Insanity....

If you have visited my blog recently you know that we are unexpectedly expecting another little Princess in May.  It took a while to wrap  our heads around this idea, I think I have said that before, but we are not anxiously anticipating our new addition. This go around things have been a lot different for me as my other two pregnancies were, but this one has been really pretty easy. 

The first trimester should never count, because your just getting into the swing of things, your body is completely screwed up with this new little invasion in there and so it does horrible, horrible things to you in retaliation.  However once I hit about 12 weeks or so I started to feel pretty good and now that I am almost at 28 weeks I am feeling pretty great.  Grant you my iron is low and I do get tired, but I also work full time and have two children, a husband and three dogs, not to mention a house to keep up so that might have something to do with it too. 

All in all though I have to say that little Princess Trifecta has been pretty good to me.  I feed her and she takes all my weight, I drink as much water as I can force myself too and she attempts to no jump on my bladder that much. Its a give and take relationship that we both seem to be pretty comfortable with.

So now that Jon and I are physically pretty ready for her to be here and mentally prepared for her to be here, we are in no way spacially prepared for her to be here.  This is where I feel like a horrible procrastinator, we have to physically make room for this little one and that takes lots of planning and time, so its a slow process and we have about 8 weeks to get it all done.  With both of the older girls I am pretty sure that there was a nursery up and ready to function by this point, this go around we don't even have a bassinet ready (we do have a car seat though) and it makes me feel uneasy.  We are getting there but it is again slow going, and well with nesting instincts starting to kick in a bit, I am not really into slow.

So to keep me a little more focused and less crazy about the speed of the Attic remodel I am going to post photos of our progress for you to see each week and tell you what we have had done.  Might not be extremely interesting, but it might keep me from going insane.   So without further ado here is the introduction to this project.

We are converting 1/2 of our attic space into a kinda loft/extra room for our 4 year old, otherwise she would have to sleep in a tent in the back yard when the new baby arrived.  So today I just wanted to show you what we are starting with.

We will call this "Some place Dusty and Dark"....

This is the current and original 1950 opening into the attic.  It squeaks and its a little scary to say the least.  This will disappear in the future.

 Since we live in such a small house we use our whole attic space for storage. We have since this photo cleaned out the entire space and re boxed the important stuff and did away with the unimportant stuff.  It looks much bigger now.
 There used to be two boys that lived up here at one point so there is some outline of a room but we are going to completely revamp it starting with the AC.  You will notice that as it is now it is really really in the way, so it have to be repositioned.
 The room has decent head clearance, and great floor space, especially for a child.  Boogie will probably end up with about 300sqft of floor space once we put in the bed, a little seat and a closet.  She should have plenty of room to grow  a bit.

This is something that we thought we were going to have to move which would mean doing drywall work on the ceiling in the living room.  Now we are just thinking we might make it a little seat or something and disguise it a bit.  Its just the beginning  but at least the project is going.  Hopefully this weekend we will be updating the electrical, and doing some demo on all that beautiful paneling. 

Have a great day everyone!!

Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Wordless Wednesday...Light

While I really love the light in these pictures, they are some of my favorite of my girls.  What I really meant by my title is that these two, and soon thier sissy are the light of my life.  So no matter how they are lit, they make everyroom they enter just a little brighter.



Monday, February 21, 2011

Me thinks Spring is a comin....

This weekend we were blessed with some absolutely gorgeous warm weather, so of course we took advantage of it for a little while.  The last time we took the girls to the park PJ was about 2 months old, so it was definitely time to go again. So late in the morning we loaded the girls up in the car and headed up to this great park in Smyrna.  Not only is there a fantastic playground, but plenty of beautiful green space and a nice little walking trail as well.

I think that everyone had a great time and really enjoyed the warm sunny weather.....

Okay there was one moment that we had to get through when Boogie realized all the swings were taken, but it rapidly got better.

 Seeeeee here is how it rapidly got better, a swing opened up.  LOL!!

 Even PJ got a turn on the swings, and I think she might like to try it again.


 Boogie really really just loves to swing and the higher the better, you can't go high enough for her.

 See this says swing me higher then that...

 This says...Oh yeah daddy, rock on!!

 This is just a favorite picture of mine....

 This is what happens when you have too much fun and stick your finger in a light  socket. (JK)



 Once we were done on the swings it was time for a nice leisurely stroll....

 Yep nice and slow around to the fountain...no way does it look like PJ is saying  "Whoa horse, I say WHOA!!!"

 An of course once we got to the fountain she just had to get out.

 Still had to fix the shoes and then WALK over to the fountain.

 Practice, practice, practice...

 Whew we made it
 Big sissy joined us and we all did percussion on the fountain top.  PJ thought it was fantastic.




 Then after a while of playing she went and got all serious on me, and it was time to load of the stroller and head back to the play ground, for just a bit more fun.

 Boogie insisted on pushing, but that didn't last too long.

 I would really like to know when those long thin legs got here.  I know where she got them from, just look at her daddy,but where are my little girl's chunky legs?

 On the way back we had to test out the grass with some marching.....

 and twirling....

 and of course flying, there must always be flying.

 We had just enough time left to do some sliding, and boy can Boogie slide.

 She loves the super fast slide....

 I like all the movement and her expression going down the super fast slide so its a win-win. :D

 PJ decided that she wanted to get in on some of the slide action too, and soon....

It was a friendly competition between sisters.  I have to say that Boogie looks the most concerned about the outcome of this race.....

 In the end though, we called it a tie. 

This was definitely a great way to welcome Spring!