Joe the Plumber

Well we had another fun round of house projects a few weeks ago. It's a good thing I let the dust settle (literally) for a couple of weeks before posting because, seriously, this one was a doo-hoo-hoooozy. It involved tearing out old plumbing and putting in new plumbing for the entire house (I'll let your imagination run wild for a moment...)

I'm going to give you list of random things/places and I'll let you guess what they all have in common:

-friend's house
-neighbor's house
-church
-local grocery store
-Best Western motel
-bucket

Have you guessed?








**TMI Alert**








Yes, that's right. Those are all places I went to the bathroom over the course of about 30 hours during this project. Now onto the good stuff...

So the day started out fine. I took the kids and ran errands all morning while Glen and our neighbor across the street went to work. In my extreme naivete, I believed (probably more like hoped) that by the time we came home around 1:00 they would be close to finishing. Mmmmm, no. When I came through the door, the kitchen looked like this (the kitchen sink is moving to where the big hole in the wall is):



The bathroom sink was here:



And the toilet was here:



That's right, no running water, and no toilet in the house. I said a little prayer of thanks that Caleb is not potty-trained, and also that I had decided to use my friend's bathroom before I left her house to come home. So at this point I decided to attempt to put the kids down for a nap and hope that they sleep through all the sawing, banging, and grinding. Not likely, I thought, but what could it hurt? Miracle of miracles, they both slept for like 2 hours!

I was amazed because (totally unrelated side note) we seriously CANNOT sneak into these kids' rooms at night when they are sleeping, because they wake up. Every time. Without fail. We live in a very old house, and the floors and doors make all kinds of loud cracking noises. This has always upset me because, is there anything more precious than watching your children sleep? I think not. And I wish I could do it, but alas, creaky doors do not sleeping children make. It's like that scene from What About Bob? when Dr. Marvin tries unsuccessfully to wake up Bob by yelling and shaking him and jumping on his bed. But then his little alarm clock goes off and Bob wakes right up. It's like that. I digress...

So Glen and neighbor are working for the rest of the afternoon and neighbor goes home at around 5:00 p.m. Glen continues to install plumbing for the rest of the evening. At around 9:59 p.m. (Saturday night), an extremely panicked Glen runs upstairs, grabs the phone and frantically dials the phone number to Lowe's. Turns out there was one little bag of small parts that Glen needed more of to seal off the pipes. Lowe's closes at 10:00 p.m. (along with all other hardware stores) They would not sympathize with our situation (didn't really expect them to, just hoped), and we were stuck. No running water. No toilet. Tomorrow is Sunday. Meetings for Glen at 6:30 a.m. Church at 9 a.m. No showers yet that day.

So at 11 p.m. I drove over to the Best Western motel down the street and rented a room so we could at least shower and get ready for bed. Glen finished up whatever he could do without those parts, then took his turn at the motel and checked out. We both got to sleep around 3 a.m. Alarm went off at 5:40 a.m.

So after church Glen's doing tithing and the Bishop says to him, "Why aren't you home getting that ox out of the mire?" Glen comes home, makes a trip to Lowe's (no judging, please) and by about 5 p.m. on Sunday, we had running water and a toilet!

Here is a picture of Glen with his Dad on the cell phone talking Glen through how to install the toilet:


Well we survived that one, but the projects are far from over. Here are some before and afters (note- the afters are not finals)




Before (the toilet was on the opposite wall behind the door):












After (or better, "in progress"):

(that's a $300 pedastal sink we got on Craigslist for $75!)







Here's sort of a "current" (I'm going to stop saying "after") picture of the kitchen. The sink is now in front of the window instead of in the corner like in the picture at the top. The cabinet and dishwasher have actually switched places since this picture was taken. We like playing "musical cabinets" around here. In the end, we will have new cabinets, flooring and windows, but this is where we are right now.


If you actually made it through this entire post, I'm very impressed.

Say, "Cheese"...then, "Ouch"

This is what happens when your 3-year-old gets a hold of the camera:



I actually kind of like this one (part of the piano):



Bum shot:



And lastly, my favorite:



I didn't even know he had taken these pictures. I was scrolling through the pictures on our camera and cracked up when I saw them. He took like 10 or 12.

Also, sometimes Caleb likes to walk around with his eyes closed. This is the result:



I was actually walking two steps behind the poor little guy when he walked right into this corner (please ignore ripped wallpaper). Ouchers.



He wanted to look in the mirror at his "owie." I took him into the bathroom and he took one look at it, turned away and said, "No, Mommy. Turn the lights off, I don't want to look at that!"

I will not nurse her....I will not nurse her.....i will not nurse her....

So I thought I would post a little update on our weaning progress over the past couple of days. Sorry to those of you who could care less. Here is a picture of Grace yesterday before naptime. Eating lunch, spreading food in her hair, and looking mighty pleased with herself:



Here is a picture of her after naptime. I will post captions under the pictures that tell what she would have been saying if she could talk (also, I'm sure she would wear a different shirt that replaces "love" with "hate"):


"Um, okay this has been a fun little experiment, Mom. But SERIOUSLY, I'm ready to nurse!!"



"Why are you just standing there making dinner, you insensitive fool?! I'm THIRSTY!! WAAAAA!!!"

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And then we have today. Here is how she was beginning immediately after her morning nap:



"Pleeeease nuuuuurse meeeeee! What is this white crap you're trying to give me?!" (notice the sippy cup of milk that she angrily tossed aside)



"Are you freaking KIDDING ME?!?"

She (and I) was pretty exhausted after all that crying:



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So after her nap today, I caved and gave her some apple juice:





"Thank you, Mom. Thank you for not making me drink any more of the that death juice (AKA milk)."

La Leche

A lot of you know that I have been breastfeeding Grace exclusively for the past 13 months. *Gasp!* I know. I. KNOW. When she was 2 months old, nursing was not going well at all, and I decided I would give it another month and if things hadn't improved, I would wean her. Well, 3 months rolled around, and I tried to introduce a bottle. She would have NONE of that. We tried for the next 6 months to get her to drink a bottle, and she REFUSED. Every. Single. Time.

Let me explain how stubborn she was about it. I would plan an outing, and Glen would stay home with the kids and try to feed a bottle to Grace. The first time we tried this she was probably about 4 months old, and I was gone for 7 hours. She drank nothing. I tried it again about a month later, only this time she went 9 hours. Nothing. We tried every kind of bottle and nipple that exists. We tried different kinds of formula. She would not drink it warm. She would not drink it cold. She would not drink it from a cup. She would not drink it down or up.

The reason that nursing does not go well with my children is because they are born with the most sensitive stomachs that I have ever seen (or that their pediatrician has ever seen, for that matter). They have an extreme aversion to all things flavorful (in my diet). For the first 6 months of their lives I cannot eat ANYTHING. No garlic. No onion. No chocolate. No citrus. No tomatoes. No chocolate. No dairy. No spices. No flavor. No chocolate. No nada. If any of this slips into something that I have eaten, the children will scream at me for next 48 hours. While this does aid considerably in losing the baby weight, I start to go loony after a while. I know what you're thinking - why do I breastfeed my babies? I don't know. I guess the main reason is because I fear that because their stomachs are so sensitive, they will not tolerate formula and we would have to buy the super expensive stuff for babies with allergies (Caleb drank a bottle of formula when he was 5 months old and vomited the whole thing). So I always feel like I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place.

So...when Grace was 9 months old, I came to a state of acceptance that she is not going to drink a bottle. I cannot eat whatever I want to. And she is not going to take a full feeding in one sitting. I accepted it. And I felt much better after accepting it. I told myself I would give it 3 more months. Well, her birthday rolled around and I have no idea why I have been dragging my feet. I did introduce everything back into my diet, and yesterday morning I made the decision. She is going to wean whether she likes it or not.

So the whole reason for this long post is to make myself accountable to you, my few readers (I'm with you Kristin, if you post a goal so everyone knows, it makes it easier to follow through...). Yesterday morning I nursed Grace after she woke up, and I did not nurse her again until she went to bed. She was pretty ticked off by the end of the day. And today was the same, no nursing during the day. I'm going continue this for one week, and then I'm going to drop the morning nursing, and so on and so forth. If she gets thirsty enough, she will drink milk, right? That's what I'm counting on anyway. So in 3 to 4 weeks I am planning on being done. Finished. FREE.

I really have no other choice because in about a month and a half I'm going down to AZ for a reunion with my awesome college girlfriends, and I am not taking the kids. So it's about time!

I'm Done

So Glen goes to Mutual with the Young Men/Women every other Wednesday, and last night he took Caleb with him. On the way home he had to stop by a member's home to drop something off. This member lives at the Mortuary with his family. His job is to go and retrieve dead bodies and bring them back the to mortuary for "primping" (or whatever you call it...) When they arrived, this is how Glen's and Caleb's conversation went:

Caleb: Where are we, Daddy?
Glen: We're at the cemetery. This is where dead people go. Well, their bodies stay here and their spirits go to Heaven.
Caleb: Oh, I want to go!
Glen: You want your body to stay here and your spirit to go to Heaven?
Caleb: Yep, I'm done, Daddy. I'm done.

What, the...!? Where in the world did the child come up with that? While we're on the subject of death, here's another funny thing Caleb said. This was quite a few months ago, actually. I had just come home from the store with the kids. As soon as Caleb got out of the car he ran right down the driveway toward the street. We live on the pretty busy street, so this is a HUGE no, no. I ran after him and grabbed his arm and said very fiercely, "Caleb, you do NOT run into the street!! You could get hit by a car! Do you know what would happen if you got hit by a car?" To which Caleb responded, "Lights out!" Yes, Caleb, precisely. Lights out! I had to laugh at that.