Potty Training and Dentist Updates

Jonah went to the dentist today. She gave him a free flouride treatment that wasn’t covered by insurance because she wanted his tooth that he chipped last year to have some extra protection. Other than that he did ok and everything looked good!

Potty training is going pretty well. He’s gotten great about telling us when he’s gotta pee, but still hasn’t figured out the other. He generally waits until he’s in a pull up (which he’s only wearing when we go out or he’s sleeping), which I guess is ok in his mind because it’s like a diaper. We’ll get it figured out though. I was proud that he went on a public toilet today cause they’re generally scared of that at first. And it was an auto flushing one no less!

He’s not sleeping nearly enough though. He’s pushing bedtime later and later with repetitive requests to “tee tee mores” and we can’t tell him no because when we get him in there, he DOES manage to produce at least a little most times. Then I guess because he’s feeling wet in the mornings now, he’s waking up even earlier. With Carly not going to bed till 1am or later most nights this past week, I’m really starting to feel like a zombie!

a rough night

ugh. very rough night. jason went to bed at 10:30 and so did i, but carly didn’t stay down. she of course stayed up screaming off and on till 1:15. then jonah woke up crying at 2:45 at which point i discovered he’d puked in his bed i got jason up for that one cause i told him “jonah just threw up and that falls outside the realm of cranky baby in the middle of the night. i need your help” and he got up and didn’t complain… well that was until jonah threw up on the bare mattress pad after we had already started the 1st puke laundry load, he was pretty pissed about that, but what can you do… and then once we got him back in bed and had just laid down ourselves, he got out of bed and stood in the window and puked a 3rd time. :-\ so we were back up changing jammies and cleaning up for a 3rd time. as we got back into bed at 4:00, carly started grunting like she was stretching to wake up (probably from all the commotion) so i laid there in our bed listening to her grunt for about 15 minutes, waiting for her to cry cause sometimes she likes to nurse at 4 anyway, but then i drifted off. Then she finally did wake up at 4:30. after she ate she didn’t go straight back down as usual (probably because jason had just asked if she usually did and i said yes. stupid murphy) instead she would drift off and i put her in the crib and got in bed myself only for a few seconds before she was screaming again did that 3 times before i finally lost my temper and just got her and went to go sleep with her in my arms on the couch at 5:30. then jason woke up for work and took her to her crib at 7:00 before he left for work. i kept sleeping on the couch until both kids woke up at 8:00. I haven’t even attempted to try to calculate how little sleep that was last night until now… 4.75 hours!?

sheesh. no wonder i am having a hard time keeping my eyes open.

Videos Galore

Trying to see if I can figure out how to upload videos to the blog. Just testing a few recent ones out…

My Time Has Come

I guess I couldn’t expect to NEVER have a claim on my car insurance.  I am probably pretty lucky that my first claim didn’t come until I was 26, but still… how do you explain away hitting not one, but TWO parked cars?!  

The best explaination I have, of what happened, is that I was turning left around the corner on our street and some checks that I had intended to go deposit slid from my console and across the passenger seat. I reached to grab them (still with my foot on the break from going around the corner) and I guess, in trying to keep the wheel straight while I leaned to the right, I over corrected because I continued to go left. I looked up and found myself sliding down the driver side of my neighbor’s red car and then coming to a stop in the back of their black car (which was parked just a little further away from the curb.) *sigh* This is no way to start out our Thanksgiving weekend. I guess all I can say is I’m thankful that I was still on my breaks and that it wasn’t a high speed impact, just a small bump. It definitely did some damage though.

the damage I did to the driver side of the red car

my angle of impact, down the red, into the black

the black car I came to a stop on

note my headlight pieces on the ground

my busted headlight

the black and red paint on my wheel well

The claims adjustor should be contacting me within 24-48 hours. We at least have full coverage on the van (we only carry liability on Jason’s truck) so this should be taken care of… we’ll still have to pay our deductible though.

Bathroom Update

10-10 Bathroom Stripped and 1st Coat On

As with any home improvement project, this one has seemed to grow as we’ve gone along. What was originally going to be “install a new linoleum tile floor” has turned into so much more when we discovered that our floor wasn’t exactly level and smooth, nor were the vinyl tiles sticking. We’ve been without our 2nd bathroom 9-8-08, so I’m ready to have it back! We decided since we were going to have to level the floor with a concrete patch, and the vinyl tile was ugly anyway, we would lay tile. And since we’re laying tile, and will have to have the sink out and trim off for that, let’s paint while we’re at it. Then while getting ready to paint, we realized that the GFCI outlet and light switches were all painted on and mismatched with their plates, so we should replace those too. Then as we tried to disconnect the sink, we discovered the shut off valves didn’t work, so we needed to replace those too, and while we’re at it, the nasty, bent up, and rusty wall flanges around the pipes. So once we had made about 4 trips to Lowes, we were finally able to get the first coat of paint on. It’s a “green” paint with no fumes, so no worries for the baby.

10-11 Bathroom Painting Finished

Although we had hoped to get the painting done, and the patch on the floor done over the weeked, we only managed to get 2 coats of paint on, with all of our other troubles. Jason rewired the GFCI and light switches later in the week, with yet another trip to lowes, because the house was wired with 12 gauge wire, and the switches needed to be wired with 14 gauge (smaller size wire). Then last Friday we finally got the patch done on the floor so we could start laying tile on Saturday.

We bought some tile and started to dry fit the tiles on the diagonal (to hide the wonky sheetrock job on the walls & because it looks prettier) but discovered that the tiles we bought weren’t good cause they were mostly all broken in the boxes, and the one we tried to cut broke too. Took those back, got some new ones, but they kept breaking every time we tried to cut them too, so we thought it might mean our blade was bad, so ANOTHER trip to lowes to get a new blade. Still didn’t work. So after breaking about $4-5 worth of tiles with no sucess, we decided to just lay the tile straight, instead of on the diagonal, cause it’d mean less (and much easier) cuts for us. As we were dry fitting the new configuration, we discovered that our patch job still wasn’t built up quite enough. After we pulled all of the dry fit tiles back up, we added a second coat of patch to the area that was still low and then had lunch. 

10-19 Tiling and Grouting Finished

Luckily for us it was a quick setting patch and we were able to get the tile in that night and grout the next night. Well… I laid the tile while Jason handed them to me, and then the next night he grouted while I supervised from the dry bathtub… he told me it wouldn’t be fair if I supervised while actually taking a bath!

Then on Sunday we decided to also start working on the trim, scraping the old caulk off so we could give it some touch up paint and reinstall it. Then we discovered it was MDF trim and a lot of it was too messed up to re-use (and look decent at least) so we went out and bought new trim instead. I painted that on Monday and Jason cut and installed it on Monday night, while I again, supervised from the tub. I’m usually too exausted by Jonah’s bed time to be convinced to work much on the room at that point. I did however, scrape tan paint off the old towel bar, and other fixtures during the day and re-installed them all before he got home.

10-22 Trim & Caulking Finished with Fixtures Back In

 

10-22 Note the New Electricals and Plumbing

 Now that all of that is done, we “just” have to re-install the pedestal sink and then the plumber guys will come back out and install our toilet (as part of what we already paid them for) on Friday! Then we move our tall, skinny storage cabinet back in and call it DONE! (until we get around to getting new non-70′s-era light fixtures in there! )

Great Value

Tonight's Ingredients

“We look like we’re from a freakin’ Wal-Mart commercial”, he says. We’ll just say that Jason doesn’t really appreciate the fact that when buying groceries for our family, I still go with Wal-Mart’s generic brands, Great Value or Sam’s Choice, whenever possible. He’s making a special dinner for me tonight, and upon getting out all of the ingredients he looks over and makes this snobby comment. Why yes, as a matter of fact, we DO look like a Wal-Mart commercial because money is tight on one income and I make due with “sub par” ingredients so that I/WE can afford for me to stay home with our son! :-p So yes, 7 of the 14 ingredients in tonight’s meal are Great Value, and as far as I’m aware, Great Value doesn’t make green onions, beer, saffron rice, or the 3 spices I have there, or I probably would have bought them from Great Value too! About the only thing I WON’T buy from Great Value is their grated parmesan cheese… yuck!

Canning for Dummies

So yeah. I seriously know nothing about being a gardener. It apparently helps to check the internet before just ASSUMING that all figs are the same. I was asking my grandmother what they were supposed to look like when they were ripe, and she said brownish, but if you can leave them until they turn purple, they’ll be REALLY good. Well, come to find out via Google, I have a completely different variety that is fully ripened at golden yellow. Unfortunately, I picked mine at golden yellow and let them continue to “ripen” until they started to turn brown. And after almost a week now, they HAVE turned brown and purple in some cases, only draw back is that they are now fuzzy. Yeah. Fuzzy. I’ve wasted over 2lbs of figs now because they got rotten! Stupid figs were already ripe when I picked them! *sigh* I just hope I have enough still out there that I can at least muster a FEW jars of fig preserves. I’ll let ya know how that goes. I’ve never canned anything in my life, even though I’ve got 2 sets of grandparents who do it and my parents even have. I got instructions on the general process from my grandmother tonight, over the phone, but I was really hoping to go up and visit her to learn how to do it first hand. Unfortunately, that trip to the farm was cancled when Nana passed away. I’m hoping I can get some time to go up there soon though. They’ve never even seen my little man walking and he’s been doing that for months now!

The Sandbox Part 1

I decided that the rinky dinky sandbox turtle I was originally going to get for Jonah was just too small and the lid would probably vanish with the first big wind storm. So my solution? Build one of course! It IS, afterall, my “career passion”… to build furniture and stuff. And by “career passion”, I mean… one of the few things I would think about trying to make a living at some day… if I had to, or got bored. So anyway. I designed a neat little sandbox that’s got a storage bench and an arched lid that doubles as a see-saw rocker!

I bought the materials to start building it a couple of days ago and finally decided I better get them out of my car before they started to warp, and just build the darn thing. So right at 12:00, when Jonah went down for his nap, I started working on it in the garage. You wanna talk about a hot box! Freakin’ 90+ degrees outside and i’m in the garage sweating like no tomorrow! I, unfortunately, was one board off in my estimation of how many boards it’d take to “deck” the outside of the arch. probably cause my autocad drawing was just a sketch and i used actual 1x4s when a 1×4 is actually only .75″ x 3.75″. Anyway…. that and a drained cordless drill battery are the only things stopping me from attaching the last two hinges and last two boards to be able to call it fully assembled. I still need to go back and sand all the rough edges too, but that’s definitely going to be another day! I am completely sweaty and gross and I am ready to do something else for a while. Maybe I’ll indulge the boy child in a bath. He only asks for one about 20x a day!

Money Money Money

I know we’re not the only ones with money concerns with the economy in the position it’s in, but seriously… this sucks. Don’t get me wrong. God has provided us with money from some unlikely sources… a $1000 refund from our previous house insurance, a $60 refund from our previous cable provider… just seems like we can’t get ahead though. With repairs that needed to be made, like the disposal and now the ac… and with being over in several budget areas. I am just feeling increasingly stressed about it all, and being limited so severly on our cell phone minutes doesn’t help.

The cell phone thing is like a whole other beast unto itself! We have a meer 600 anytime minutes per month… no family talk, no mobile to mobile… every call charges us (and probably acutally charges us double minute usage when we call each other) So why don’t we get a new plan with better features? because we only pay $39.99 a month plus the $9.99 add a line. they don’t MAKE a plan that cheap any more. We’ve had this plan since we started college 7 years ago! I really should call and complain or something, cause I’m like 95% sure that when we started this plan, we DID have family talk between us… but with all of the ATT turning into Cingular and then back again, we’ve lost those features. OH! and get this… now it’s 20¢ per text message to send OR recieve! they didn’t bother telling us that they jacked the rate up (it used to only be 10¢ to send, and free to recieve), so we now have $13 in text message charges from this month! I’m really at a loss, other than to tell everyone,  if you want to call us, do so after 9pm or call us on the weekend!

I’m trying my best to save us money where we can, by using coupons and buying generics, cancled my blockbuster, launchcast, and our gym membership accounts. I’ve been trying to sell a few things on craigslist to help make a little extra money too. Moving here has helped a good deal though, in the gas department. Jason only needs one tank per month since we’re 3 miles from his office.

I know it’s all going to work out. God will keep providing for us in times when we least expect it, and all will be well. I just have to vent sometimes.