Our first of many...

We spent our first of many nights at our lake cottage on Friday night. The kids were excited all week, counting the days until we could go "camping" as they called it. All day on Friday, Ellie repeatedly asked me how many hours until Daddy got home and we could go. Unfortunately, of all the days of the year, Friday was about the second that Joe actually had to work late, so we got off to a late start. Then we decided to eat on the way up, and so we didn't get up there until 8, our kids regular bedtime.
The kids got to sleep in the "loft" room on special mats that Joe bought them for the cottage. Nate got a pack and play in our room. After the kids went to bed, Joe and I were able to get several projects done while the kids slept. When we went to bed Joe said to me, "I am so happy. This is what we have worked for for the past 2 years, so we can come up and spend the night with our family away from home." (I was thinking...darn, this bed is not very comfortable, but I didn't burst his bubble). After a night filled with listening to the baby snore and toss and turn and Michael waking us up several times and the kids waking up for the day at 6, Joe said, "Well I guess it is the first trip and we shouldn't expect the kids to sleep perfectly."
The nice thing was we could get up and we didn't have to travel up there (like we do every other Saturday). The not nice thing is that even though Joe assured me it was only going to take him 10 minutes to get the water heater up and running, after all day and 2 trips to the Home Depot we left without it working, so no showers. Apparently, there is an issue with the wiring, but we happen to know a great electrician who is coming to visit on Friday (my father)!

Great boys!

(Brag alert!)
We have some wonderful boys! Adam got straight A's again for the second nine weeks. He is very conscientious about his grades, and even "studies" when he has a big test coming up. Since he is so self-motivated in this area, we regularly remind him that he is doing great and that no matter what his grades are he is wonderful. Nevertheless, he pulled off straight A's again.
Michael also got a perfect report card, but since it is kindergarten, there are no grades...so we can only say great job. He did, however, get inducted into the Hall of Fame again for doing good things that got noticed by teachers and getting 5 stars! Great job, Michael! We are some lucky parents!

Farewell for a while to some great friends!

This week, our dear friends, the Dibbs, moved to Australia. They are there for Brian's work for a year to two years. I just wanted to write a little post about what great friends they have been, well, because they have.
Those of you who are married know how difficult it is to find friends who both the husband and the wife can get along with. Even if you can find agreement there, it is another step of difficulty to find friends whose kids are compatible with yours in age and temperament. We lucked out and found that with the Dibbs. Probably because Kim is more like Joe and I am more like Brian, so we complemented each other well...it worked well for us, especially since both Joe and I have strong, sometimes polarizing personalities. We eventually became quite comfortable as friends that we could say what we felt without fear of what they would think of us (okay, Joe does that already, but I got to that point).
Living so far from home, we can't just rely on our family to help us out when things come up, so our friends become our family. There are times when you really have to rely a lot more on your friends than you would normally rely on others, and we have many times used the Dibbs generosity for that. Anyway, I just wanted to say good luck to Brian and Kim on their very exciting adventures. I know that you will have such great experiences. Thanks for being such great friends!

Downtown Aquarium

Yesterday, Ellie's preschool class had a "field trip" to the Downtown Aquarium. It is a tourist attraction right downtown Houston that has several aquariums, a Ferris wheel, carousel and a train. Normally it is so expensive that it is not worth it to go, but their rates for field trips are quite cheap, so we all went. There were a ton of moms from our ward and the neighboring ward that ended up going, and we were about 90% of the people there, so that made it a lot more fun.

While there- Ellie got to touch a star fish. (Nate only wanted to splash when he touched the water, which was not at all what the exhibit was about).

Ellie and Nate both posed as scuba divers:

We rode the Ferris wheel. This seemed like a great idea at the time, but once we got to the top they stopped us to load more people and Nate got bored. If you look close you can see that above my shoulders there is nothing holding you in. In addition, the door to get into the Ferris wheel didn't latch so if you went to that part of the cage it was very easy to open and possible fall. Needless to say, when Nate got bored it was a challenge to keep him still because he could easily have fallen out and 10 stories is a lot to fall. Next time, we won't go with someone so little.
The kids really liked the carousel:

There was a train ride that drove into a tunnel under a large shark tank. That was fun to see all of the sharks, Nate kept pointing to the different sharks and saying "doggie."

Overall, it was a fantastic day. I've already begged Ellie's preschool teacher to do the field trip again next year, hopefully she does, maybe I'll pull the boys out of school to go with us.

Our Lake House Pictures Before/After Stage 1

We finally finished the stairs and the upstairs at our cottage on the lake. It feels like all we do is projects around here, some quite extensive...so if I have seemed a little less than social lately, it is probably because I am overwhelmed with these projects. The transformation is quite amazing. Here are some before and after pictures. First the stairs: before they were covered in some very old, very ugly carpet. The walls and trim were all a basic white color.

After we pulled the carpet out, the stairs actually looked worse. They were covered in old staples from other carpet installations and several colors of paint and lots and lots of dirt. It was quite a project, but I decided that I wanted them to be painted wood when I was done. The cottage is in the middle of a very rainy very muddy forested area and to eliminate the carpet being destroyed by dirt, we only put it in at the top of the stairs. To restore the stairs, I had to pull out all umpteen zillion staples. Then I had to use wood filler and fill in all the gaps in the stairs and the sides of the stairs. Then I painted the stairs. It ended up being about 6 layers of paint, but we were still using the stairs, so as I did it I had to paint every other one and then hope that everyone paid enough attention to not step on the wet stairs (there were so many footprints I had to paint over). I think they turned out really cute.


(Close up of the dirt after the carpet was removed.)

I think they turned out really cute. Joe also replaced the door to the closet next to the stairs and put up the trim around the doors and on the floor. We also painted all of the walls in the house a tan/green color.


The view from half way up the stairs towards the upstairs.Upstairs was one room with carpet in horrible shape, very dirty with a half wall on one side that served as a divider for a closet area that had a water heater in it. Here is the half wall.

Looking to the right of the stairs. All the walls and ceiling upstairs were painted white.

Looking from the right of the stairs back to the length of the room. The wall on the left is the half wall.

We ripped all the carpet out and the half wall out. Joe took out the water heater and he will reinstall it downstairs (an upcoming project). We started by painting the walls. The walls don't have sheet rock on them, they have some kind of board that is very similar to bead board. It is cute, but it required that we hand paint every groove specially with a paintbrush. The boys loved to help with this.

Joe put a permanent wall in at the top of the stairs immediately to the right. It created two rooms upstairs, a bedroom and a loft room. He put in new molding for all of the baseboards and trim around the new door (which he also installed). We painted everything. Joe and my father moved the lights so that they were in the middle of the new rooms as well as a few switches. I changed every plug and switch. What do you think?

From the top of the stairs immediately looking right toward the new room:

From the back of the loft room toward the stairs and the new room. The room also extends to the right about as far as from the door to Nate.

The new room, to the left of the picture is the new door.

View from the top of the stairs toward the loft room.

The carpet is all from our current house, we upgraded carpet immediately after moving in (well most of it) and saved the old carpet to have it installed here. Now we can spend the night up here, hopefully soon with hot water!

'00-'09 The Last Decade, A retrospective

(One of my friends did a review of the last 10 years and I realized that so much has happened to me in the last 10 years, so I thought I'd do one too!)

During the past ten years, I finished my master's degree at ASU at the same time Joe finished his undergrad:

We moved from Arizona to Chicago, where we lived right next to the John Hancock building and the law school.

Joe went to Law School at Northwestern and studied hard:
...while I was an embryologist and made many babies:

..and we spent every winter freezing to death.
Joe and I spent two summers apart, and then finally I got wise and had my first baby, Adam:
..and we moved together to Texas for the summer and then back to Chicago for the last year of law school. I adjusted to being a stay at home mom and in the meantime fell in love with this little guy:

And we got used to being a family of three:

Then Joe graduated:

We moved to Texas to stay and Joe took and passed the bar. He started work at Fulbright and Jaworski as a lawyer. We had our second baby, Michael:

and built our first house together.

We adjusted to two little boys:

...and being a family of 4.

We had baby #3, Ellie, our princess,

and suddenly our lives became a lot pinker. We adjusted to being a family of 5:

Joe got his dream job as in-house counsel and we bought our second house in Texas.

We all really enjoyed having a princess in the house,

and having three perfect children.

We bought a few acres on a small lake 1/2 hour away
...including an island.
Joe got himself a tractor (to work with of course)

and then we had baby #4, Nate.
Nate is the perfect end for us and so we are adjusting well to 4 kids.

We bought our 3rd house in Texas and then sold the first two. We also bought a weekend cottage on our lake property...

and have spent every spare second since then fixing it up.

Some of the statistics of the past decade for us. I have spent about 35 months looking like this:

We have moved 8 times. Two of us finished school and 2 of us started school. I had 3 jobs, Joe has had 10. We went from 2 cars to no cars to one old car to two years of heavily buying and selling cars to 3 years of the same cars.

The kids have been involved in many things: t-ball, soccer, swimming, gymnastics, jiu-jitsu, dance and piano:

We went on some amazing trips:

And have gotten to know some of the most amazing friends in the world.

We have grown a lot and learned many life's lessons.

We have learned to appreciate our family.

We feel so blessed and lucky, look at all of the blessings that we have. We can only hope for as much in the next ten years.