The Difference a Door Makes

We had a new garage door put on, so now we have an opener and don’t have to fling up a giant piece of wood!

Isaac and my dad put in a new front door and a few new windows upstairs and down.  Mom is doing finish work around the edges, and it’s amazing how different everything looks now.

Isaac’s latest project has been building a small walk-in closet in our master suite. He has done a great job.

Our house still looks like a huge construction zone, but it is coming along! Hopefully the next update will be our first completed room.

To be Three

It is so fun seeing Aiden understand more and more as he gets older. He talks so much more clearly and tries to understand what is going on all the time. He asks lots of questions.

The other day, Aiden and I spotted a worm outside that seemed to be trapped in the water spilled from the dog’s dish. He wiggled all around but couldn’t seem to get anywhere. Aiden and I talked about how earthworms live in the dirt most of the time. My mom mentioned that it was sad that by the time the worm escaped from the puddle, it would probably be warm and dry outside, and the worm might die before he made it back to the dirt. Aiden looked alarmed and said, “I want to save the worm!” He didn’t actually want to touch it, but he convinced Isaac to pick it up and carry it over to the dirt. Then he squatted next to it like this for TWENTY minutes as it wiggled into the dirt.

I was impressed that he would think of “saving” the worm and that he showed compassion for such a tiny creature. The following weekend, he told me that he wanted to watch a worm again, but we didn’t find any. Funny kid.

News

This is somewhat overdue, but we bought a house last month! We are renting out our condo and looking forward to having more space now. It’s a fixer-upper, with much of the house being original or just old. It’s a work in progress, and we haven’t moved in yet. Having Aiden there is a handful, so I often stay away with him.

So far, Isaac has torn off the vines that were covering the balcony. I took this picture after he tore them down. Otherwise, this is original. We are having a new garage door put in this week, and we just got a new front door since I’m pretty sure I could knock this one in without trying too hard.

Here you can see (through the door) the entry tile that we will be be replacing with a slate laminate. We tore out the doors, and Mom refinished the doorway. This is the original kitchen. Isaac tore up FOUR layers of old flooring… it literally added two vertical inches to the room. He tore out the cabinets because some were broken and in bad shape. He tore out the old appliances and bought new ones. He and our friend Jon tore down the unimportant wall to the left of the fridge and the dark beams running all around and across the ceiling. We took down the old light fixtures.

The paint in the kitchen was so dark, and the two different kinds of vinyl were dated, so I wasn’t sad to see any of it go. The house has a country kitchen where the kitchen area runs right into the family room, which is great, but I did not love the wood paneling covering the family room walls, the old AC unit, or the 5’ x 6’ window that was a sheet of glass and didn’t open. We said goodbye to it all.

Isaac and Dad replaced the giant window with two single-hung windows this weekend.

Chris, from our ward, helped us out a lot by fixing our electrical, then Mom and Isaac patched the walls. We went with a lighter, warmer wall color. Mom and Patrick textured the ceiling and walls, and Dad and Isaac joined in for painting.

We have been doing a lot on our own to cut costs, but we decided it was worth a little extra money to have someone else do the cabinets and countertops. They did most of the work in three days. It was amazing.

Now we just have to finish patching the back wall, do finish work around the new windows, texture, paint, and lay the wood laminate flooring we got for this room and the living room.

We have lots more on our list of things to do, but once this is done, we’ll get the master ready, and then we can move in and work on other things as we have time and money. All of the bedrooms have beautiful hardwood flooring that we are planning to uncover and refinish. We already bought paint for the whole house. We are replacing a few upstairs windows, and we need to do a lot of work on the bathrooms… One nice thing about moving into a fixer-upper is that we can fix it up in ways we like.

We have been SO lucky to have friends help us load all of our stuff into the living room and pile up lots of debris in the backyard. My parents are amazing to let us stay with them for so long and to help us do so much work on the house. Everyone has done so much for us, and we look forward to cooking them meals in our new kitchen soon!

Thanks, Uncle Sean!

This is probably a sad time to post these photos since both teams just lost yesterday, but we’re still Bay Area sports fans.
Uncle Sean picked up some sweet gear for Aiden from Spring Training and said Aiden would have to make a choice.

I don’t think he’s really chosen… but he does like to throw on the hat before he goes outside to play with the whiffle ball sometimes. I think he looks cute in both!

Happy Easter!

Aiden was pretty good about his egg hunt in the patio. He needed a little prompting on some of the eggs, but he was diligent and kind of counted them as he went.

 Aiden didn't get a flying elephant in his back yard for his birthday, but he got a little elephant in his front yard for Easter, so that's pretty good, right? He was excited. :)

Happy birthday, Aiden!

THREE. That sounds so old.

• Aiden is still hard to understand (I was hoping this would be easier by three), but he definitely talks more.
• He loves fruit snacks, milkshakes/smoothies (both of which he calls "ice ream"), and any chips he can get his hands on.
• He loves living at Papa's house now, and he has started calling my mom "Gama," which is weird after calling her "Ah" for so long.
• He likes to tell us "I wake up!" when he gets out of bed in the morning, and he is a total milk fiend.
• He does not like to be in pictures, but he will sometimes humor me with a very cheesy smile.

• He LOVES cars, which hasn't changed in the past year.
• His newest phrase that he says a lot is "I don't want it" (not my favorite thing).
• He loves sea animals, especially sharks.
• He has started to get excited about seeing his friends at Nursery, but he has a hard time cleaning up the toys when it is time... he always wants to play more.

• He likes Curious George cartoons and reading President Monson's Christmas Train book that his Grandma Snow got us for Christmas.  
• He likes to sit on my lap after work, but not right away because he is usually involved in playing something and seems to have a long attention span, so transitioning activities is hard for him.
• He loves to play outside and go for walks, but he runs more than he walks.  Sometimes he just runs around in circles.
• He hates diaper changes but hates sitting on the potty even more... this is a lose-lose right now.
• Lately he has decided that he wants a pet elephant in his backyard. Good luck, Aiden.

Thanks to everyone who made Aiden’s birthday so special! I know that he felt very loved.

Ano Nuevo

Every year, Fremont gives us a four-day weekend for Presidents’ Day (if we do an extra professional development day in August). Last year, I thought we should hike to see the elephant seals at Ano Nuevo, but sadly, because February is pretty much the best time to see elephant seals of all ages at one time the tours fill up FAST. So there were no spots available. This year I signed up at Christmas so we could go. It was awesome.

The weather was perfect, although Isaac should not have forgotten sunscreen.

We even saw a bobcat and a… whatever that thing is…

The adult males get giant proboscises, and they bark-bray loudly as they wave their huge noses in the air to show how mature and dominant they are. The “babies” grow from somewhere around 75 pounds to 300 in a month. Unless they wean from two moms like this guy. He’s huge.

The moms don’t eat or drink for a whole month after giving birth, so by the time they go back to the ocean after weaning their pups, they are literally starving.

The sanctuary here has helped the elephant seals, which were once edging toward extinction and are now up around 180,000. The fertility rate is about 100% but the mortality rate of new pups is only about 50% for the first year. They have to teach themselves to swim.

We had to get a souvenir elephant seal. Aiden swam it all the way home. We highly recommend a visit. It was a nice little hike, and this is the kind of unusual animal I remember being fascinated by from books in elementary school but never seeing in real life. It was a fun day trip.