First Day of Summer

First Day of Summer
Originally uploaded by JenJeff

Mmmm $1.00 breakfast! Well actually more like $21 after all of the upgrades. Not the healthiest breakfast but sure is convenient! Not only do we get fed but we get to spend hundreds of dollars at Ikea!

So the first "official" day of summer for us begins. This is "Dad" reporting. We have an extremely long list of things that need to get done in the house and the summer is already filled with activities (which include 1 week of school where I'm doing some administrative work... at least it will help fund the home reno projects!)

Amanda and Sam seem to be quite a handful these days. Sam's new tooth has caused him to walk around with a portable version of the Niagara falls. It just sits below his chin. I think we'll go shopping for some super absorbent clothes for him later today. Kinda like the ones that that guy in the paper towel commercial. Amanda asks about 1 million questions per minute. I think that we should have a new game show called, "Can You Survive 5 Minutes with a Curious 5 Year Old?" It will be a hit amongst parents. Or not...

Day 1 seems to be going well. Not much is getting accomplished but that is what summer is all about! Enjoy.

Saturday Acquisitions

Newly acquired by Jen & Jeff: almost $300 worth of paint and paint accessories. Now we will really need to get moving on painting our kitchen and upstairs! Ack! (I should note that we will get 30% of the paint cost back, since Home Depot had a mail-in rebate...but we probably won't get it for 6 - 8 weeks). I hate buying paint - how does anyone ever know that what they're buying will work?? It gives me serious stress.

Newly acquired by Amanda: a serious case of whininess (is that a word?). She's been really great lately, but I guess we all have our bad days and today was not stellar. However, by evening she was in a great mood and chatting up a storm in the car on our way home from Home Depot.

Newly acquired by Sam: the ability to blow bubbles! Thanks Jeff for teaching him that one. Now his normal drooliness has been amplified by about 10X.

Newly acquired by Jeff: a MacBook, for school (yeah right, just for school). Jeff and Amanda have been having much fun playing with its cool features:



Newly acquired by Jen: sadly, not a new computer. However, I have inherited Jeff's old laptop and will finally have an upstairs computer of my own! Not that I couldn't use the laptops before, but they were never set up for me. Now I can sync my iPod and have all my programs installed upstairs! Whoo hoo! Yes, it's sad what makes me happy...

And So It Begins!!

Over the past week or two I've visited with several friends who have recently undergone renovations to their houses, and finally I've been inspired to start some of the jobs that so desperately need doing around the house. It seems that since we moved in 5 years ago there's always been a long list of reasons/excuses why nothing gets done: lack of time, lack of money, and difficulty in prioritizing the long list of things that need doing being at the top of the list.

So I'm determined that we're going to get a couple of smallish jobs done before the holidays. I decided that the only way to make sure this happens is to take drastic action...so I started peeling wallpaper off our kitchen wall. :)

Yes, anyone who has been to our house can now rejoice - the ugly ivy wallpaper is gone! (I'm just in the process of taking off the backing paper, but it's going pretty smoothly). Now we just have to choose new paint, prep the walls, and paint, all before the holidays...umm, so now I know why I don't usually jump into these things so aggressively...

Keep yourself tuned in to see whether we can pull it off!!

A little blast from the past here...did we ever mention that we can now post short videos on Flickr?? When they added this feature we went back and added a few old favourites into our photostream. Here is a video of Amanda at about one-and-a-half, with the ivy wallpaper featured prominently:


ETA: I forgot to mention that Amanda was a bit distressed about the removal of the wallpaper. However, we managed to appease her by snipping a piece of it for her to keep in her photo album. It's hard for us to remember that as much as we hate the wallpaper, it's been there since before she was born and it's all she remembers!

A Word to the Wise...

...if you have one of those drain thingies in your driveway? And it's been kind of plugged up ever since you moved into the house? And it drains slower and slower as time goes on? And a heavy rainfall warning has been issued, along with a forecast of steady rain for the next several days?

Call a plumber. Just a suggestion...not that we have any personal experience or anything.

(The plumber should be here tomorrow...and we expect our bank account to be drained even more than the driveway. Bleh!)