Basketball hoop!

Adley tried basketball this year and I still need to get those pictures together for another blog post.  But first, I thought I would share that our sweet neighbors just happened to ask us if we wanted their very nice basketball goal! Why, yes! Here we are trying it out as soon as they brought it over.  The girls have been playing out on it every day.  They love it!  TJ may have already made us play two on two and a round of horse. :-)

Other Summer Activities. . .

Here are some of the other things we have been up to this summer. . .

Circus!  The girls enjoyed that for sure.

There has been a lot of this. . . . ugh.

Mosquito bites. . . This one got a little too close to the eye.  It wasn’t as awful as she is making it look here.  :-)

Playing outside!

Club house

riding!

Bubbles!

Me too!

Fountains at JB

Wheee!

No thanks!

Climber

Crazy cousins!

Play!

China Orphans

I meant to post earlier that our cousins Shannon and Makenna are now in China working with a group called Visiting Orphans.  They are visiting orphanages and loving on those babies who wait for forever families.  They have collected lots of suitcases worth of donations and even get to take the orphanage directors shopping.  Organizations have even donated much needed medical supplies and specialty wheelchairs and cleft-lip bottles.  Amazing what they were able to take.  Some of our friends from church are also on the team along with others from other states.  Please pray for them because it sounds like things just are not going smoothly no matter what they do over there.  They have had a lot of trouble and hassles.  You can keep up with the team at

http://teamchenzhou.blogspot.com/  on the side bar, you can click on the team members pictures to view their personal blogs where they are also each updating as they get a chance.

Pray, pray, pray!  They just want to help these babies!

Are we getting a moat??

This is what we saw when we looked out of our window a couple weeks ago.

Sorry for the bad blurry picture.

Yes, this is right through our driveway and all the way across our front yard.  Pretty, huh?

It looked pretty much like a giant moat across the front and we were trapped that day.  TJ was working from home and we looked out the window and there they were!  And there was a giant trench all the way across.  They are preparing to do work on 158 and a year or two ago, they came to talk to us about how they needed to move a line in order to do the work.  I guess they are moving the line now.  :-)  I thought I heard a knock on the door, but then I didn’t hear anything else.  I suppose they were trying to warn us that we wouldn’t be able to use our driveway.  I would think that they might have tried a little harder.  Good thing we didn’t have any where to go!  They did have it filled in by the end of the work day.  And now, I must say that their work is finished and they have fixed the driveway and covered the yard in grass seed and hay.  Stay tuned for more yard disasters in the future. . .

Pantry

As most of you readers know, our house is old and even though we have tackled quite a few projects, there are many more ahead of us. And then, there are always those projects that we have done, but never quite finished all of the way. Some little things here and there are usually left and never finished. Such is the life in this old house. There is also the matter of never being able to just go to the home improvement store and pick up what you need to accomplish your project because nothing in this house is standard size. I guess part of having home character means building character in the home owners by having them go to numerous home improvement stores and talking to as many clueless "helpers" as possible until you want to scream when trying to find doors and tubs and shelves, etc. that might actually fit in our house. We ALWAYS have to special order. Although, one of my favorite moments was when we were trying to order a tub and the "young helper" was going up and down reading all of the tub sizes in their store to find the size we needed. Obviously he didn't know much about tubs and had obviously not been through our "character training" because we were trying to tell him that we had ALREADY been down this road and NO ONE carries such a small tub and he needed to order it, which is why we were there to have them ORDER ONE!!!!!!! Ok, so maybe I need a little more character training. (We have also learned to just go to the local hometown home improvement store because they actually know what they are talking about.)
Ok, so now I have a whole post and have not even discussed anything regarding the title of my post. :-) Well, the pantry has been irritating me since we put the air conditioning in the house. They had to use part of the pantry to put duct work in and so my shelves did not fit in properly. Well, TJ was sweet and made a temporary fix for me. This not only involved character building for me, but great feats of balancing acts. Because there were only a few temporary shelves - not enough to hold everything AND since they were temporary, they were not really secure. So, I had to be careful where I put the bag of flour or how I placed the items on the shelves or they would all fall out. So, here is a picture of the pantry shelves at their worst.

Ok, this side is not at its worst. Just picture me standing there removing the flour to bake and these shelves falling out and dumping all of my stuff everywhere. I guess they were balanced here. Although, still missing the lower shelf.

This side is looking pretty bad. Notice shelves not going all the way across the back wall. Also the middle shelves had already dumped the contents onto the pile of stuff on the temporary plastic drawers I put in there. Ugh!!!

Well, my sweet husband finally took pity on me and scrounged up some time to fix the shelves so I actually had the full shelves and they would NOT dump all my stuff back out at me. Actually we went through the whole home improvement store thing again first. We were thinking we might actually get the wire shelves and get those in there looking all nice. Well, once again should I take you through the cycle. Ok, look at all of the stuff in the shelving aisle. Hmmmm, better check with someone first. "Helper" giving us a blank stare and walking back and forth staring at products. "What is your measurements???" Hmmmmmm . . . grab another "helper". He seemed to know what he was talking about although did not bother to look at measurements and see that we were "special". "Oh, just look on the website. You type in your measurements and it prints up the exact shelves, etc. that you need." Ok, we will try that. Sure! Of course, it is not for an old pantry that has air conditioning duct work running through the middle. It will only do that for boring regular pantries. But, we did notice that there were not ANY size depth shelves that could be fit in our pantry anyway. So, we add the pantry to our character building hall of fame and get the old wooden shelves out and recover with contact paper the old fashioned way. Handy husband works and works and cuts and drills and VOILA!!! I have a fully functioning pantry back. Yippee!!! You have NO IDEA what a relief and sense of joy that one can receive from returning a pantry from eight years of pitiful into a fully functioning pantry with ROOM and shelves that do not need super circus like balancing talent. Thank you, thank you, thank you!!!!!!
Hooray, an extra shelf in bottom and the flour can safely be placed in any position on the shelf!

Shelves all the way across the back, full shelves all the way down. I even have room for MORE! :-)

Oh, that was a happy day in this old house. Who needs Norm? I have TJ. Hee hee!

Bathroom

Just in case you wondered, the linen cabinet is in and now the baseboards are in. I think all that might be missing is the window treatment! Hooray! Stay tuned for final pictures.

More Bathroom Progress

We have finally made huge bathroom progress - and just in time! With 5 more weeks before baby comes, I can stop waddling down the stairs to pee at night. And we can finally start to get tubs of towels and cleaning products away from beside the bed and get the baby bassinet upstairs in it's place. TJ worked hard throughout this week to get the tile finished and the grout finished. Although, we still need it sealed. And he got it all painted so that Super Tim could put in our toilet and sink this weekend. So, now, all that is left is all those finishing touches. But, right now, I am just thankful I can pee in there! :)

Moving along. Tim and TJ and his dad worked together to get the floor finished.

Jaylyn was very excited to help paint.

Jaylyn enjoyed painted for about 5 minutes

Paint!

Baseboard heat put in by my dad. And potty by Tim!

View from window.

Shower

View from door

TJ cleaning up

Heater and Walls

Bathroom Update:
My dad was able to successfully change our radiator over to the baseboard heat. Yippee! I know he had lots of fun with that project. Right, Dad? :)

Oh, and notice the new window is in!

Our great friend, Tim, who has been helping recommended a friend to help us finish off our walls. He worked a couple hours one evening and a couple more the next night and voila, all done! Hooray! On to the floor and paint. . .

Bath Tub Made It In!

Well, it was a little worrisome if the surround would actually make it up the stairs and in the bathroom, but it made it. They just had to take the stair rails and 5 doors and frames off. :) Here are some pics of it in. . .

Hooray!

Yippee!

Tim the Plumbing Pro

Poppy and his helpers taking the stair rails off.

Having Fun

Haven't been updating much, but we are all doing well. I am definitely lacking in energy now and I am getting a lot of comments on my belly. We will still wait and see if this little girl will continue in the path of her sisters of being a good sized baby. I am praying she does not exceed Adley!

Today was our second to last MOPS meeting of the year. Things are wrapping up quickly. We had a great meeting talking about the meaning of Easter. I will be stepping down as co-coordinator for next year, so I am kind of sad about that. But, at the same time, I can feel the relief coming. :)

The bathroom is coming along slowly. We can really only work on it on Saturdays so far. Last Saturday was kind of a loss, but the tub is at the store and they will be bringing it on Saturday. Progress is coming!

I am trying to sew my girls' Easter dresses! Am I crazy? Yes! This is my first time sewing from a pattern since I was in junior high. I have actually finished Jaylyn's, although I need to make a couple adjustments. Adley's is started and I am moving MUCH faster with hers now that I have done one. I know what to do now! But, time is running out. . . You will all have to wait and see if I can do it and if they are actually wearable in public. hee hee!

Here are some pics of the silly girls. . .

It was a hat day!

Jaylyn has been in such a creative mood lately. She is coloring and cutting and pasting like crazy! She has even decorated our front screen door with lots of notes for all of the traffic to see. A friend who lives in town asked me what all those notes were all over my front door! She thought it was an awful lot of info to leave for a delivery man. :) Here she is in a creation she made a few weeks back. She wanted to blend in with the wall so no one could see her. Except, she just had orange for her hands. She did it all herself, except I had to help her with the one hand since she had already taped up the other one. She is so funny.

Adley is just plain silly.

Bathroom Update

So far, TJ has been able to work in the bathroom on Saturdays and today my dad is here to help with the radiator part of the project. Such a FUN part that I'm sure he is thrilled with tackling. He has it out and is working on rearranging the pipes below the floorboard to work with a baseboard heater instead of bringing the radiator back in. He is definitely making a lot of noise up there. :)

Here is the progress Tim and TJ had made a couple Saturdays ago when the dumpster was here. They ripped out the rest of the wall and got the exhaust fan started.

Notice what is missing?? No more radiator! And you can see some of the dry wall Tim and TJ got up last Saturday. They also finished the exhaust fan. Moving right along!

My happy Dad so excited about this radiator project. Nothing is ever simple with our house and there are plenty of difficulties in changing that radiator to a baseboard system. But, I think he is making progress!!

This Old House-part 2

Here are some updated photos from the day. They have pretty much removed everything except for the radiator so far and more of the wall tile.

No more toilet, sink or mirror/medicine cabinet

This is a picture of where the pregnant gal cannot use the bathroom anymore. . .

The girls are very excited.

Yes, the sink, tub AND toilet are now out in our yard. :) Feel free to come by and plant flowers for me, Shannon. Ha! Actually, we are just waiting to get a dumpster because we also still have the old kitchen sink in the garage. Should we haul it out to join its friends?