Saturday, July 30, 2011

Dining room

One more picture of yesterday's progress. This is the almost finished dining room. 


Boogs' playroom storage/cabinets came in yesterday afternoon. I know what I am going to be doing this weekend. I can't wait to put these together and then organize his toys. It is long overdue!

Friday, July 29, 2011

House Decorating Progress


Finally our house is starting to look livable. Our decorator came over today and helped hang drapes, hang pictures, and put accessories up. She brought the bedding for the master bedroom and guest room. Our living room couches are on backorder so we put the patio furniture in the living room to have a place to sit. We are still waiting for the bed posts and rails to come in for our bed and a few other things, but at least after today we feel like progress has been made. Here are a few pics of todays efforts, but first a reminder of a couple of weeks ago.
Living room in early July
Guest room

Living room with patio furniture
Living room with patio furniture

Master bedroom
 




The back porch was stained this week. It looks good with the stone. Here's the star in front of the grill.




Thursday, July 28, 2011

Random pics


My tired boys about a month ago.





Relaxing in his baseball chair.
At a friend's birthday party.



Making a "broom" (brew).

Pirate Pete

Thursday, July 21, 2011

Enjoying Our Outdoor Living Space

Last weekend, in between seeing the movies Cars 2 and Winnie the Pooh, we spent a lot of time enjoying our new outdoor space. My husband and I finally got around to assembling the patio furniture. We had breakfast, lunch, and dinner outside. We also sat in the shade and watched Dual Survivor on the outdoor t.v. while Boogs played with the furniture box. He made the box into a restaurant, Mt. Everest, a cave, and a "slanted party house." We can't wait for it to get a little cooler (we know we will be waiting a looooong time) so we can use the space more often.





Thursday, July 14, 2011

Round Rock Donuts & Memorial Park

We went with Boogs' swim buddies to Round Rock Donuts and Round Rock Memorial Park. The kids had a great time. The moms were joking about our "stay-cation" and taking our kids to play under a bridge. It was a fun day.


I want this one!
Hmmm...
...very tasty!

Not happy to pose for this picture.
Walking to see the Round Rock.


Mostly staying dry.

They loved playing under the bridge.


Tree climbing.

They kept calling this a "submarine bullet".

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Boogs' Creative Stories

Boogs and I were talking while I was giving him a bath tonight. He was saying all sorts of things about all sorts of things. Then he said:
     One sleeping brown bear
     'Nother bear sneaks up on him
     He tackles the bear

I said, "Hey, you just made up a Haiku. That is a short poem that has 5 syllables in the first line, 7 in the second, and 5 in the last. That was really cool." He then decided he wanted to make up some more poems and instructed me to go get paper so I could write down what he was saying. When he was younger (2 1/2 to 3), we used to do this all the time and called it our "bathtub poetry hour".  I had almost forgotten about it.

The following is the story he told me tonight. He let me know it is not a story, it is a POEM. I wrote down exactly what he said. When I needed him to wait so I could catch up with his words, he would stop and wait for me to tell him to continue. He was able to pick right up where he left off and keep going without losing his train of thought. He amazes me all of the time. Boogs used great inflection in his voice while he was telling this "poem".

One frog jumped in the water. There was a little fish swimming by. The frog just ignored the fish. Then a piranha came up to him. The frog swimmed into a hole. The piranha swimmed after him near the hole. Then the hole got deeper and deeper for the frog. The piranha found the entrance where the frog was going to come out. The piranha snuck toward the hole. While the frog was swimming a fish swam by and it entered the hole. Now that was a daddy fish that came by. The frog sat down for a rest. The daddy fish was swimming and met the frog and they became a team. The daddy fish told the frog, "The piranha is waiting outside the next entrance."  And then the daddy fish found the next entrance and they knew not to go to the next entrance. Then the daddy fish knew one thing sharp enough to dig through the rock. It was his own sharp teeth. He scratched them against rock every day. While the daddy fish was digging the piranha fish found out he was tiny enough to fit through the hole. The daddy fish finally broke through to the mine. They found a little boulder big enough to block the mine entrance. While they were moving the boulder, the piranha came by. It got closer and closer and closer and was just one inch away from the mine. Then he was just in the mine when they released the boulder. The boulder went right on top of the piranha who got flattened. Then he was called the flattened fish. That is why there are sting rays that look like flattened fish.  (After I read the story, I mean poem, back to Boogs, he added "One day the flattened fish met a electric eel. That is how he got his stinger to work and why he is a sting ray."

Boogs then told me he needed to add more to his first haiku poem. So I wrote that down too. Here it is:

The brown bear won the fight . Black bear knew a small eruption was going to start. Then the eruption would get bigger and bigger, like 3 feet mountain tall, like Mt. Everest tall. The black bear went away from the town. The brown bear stayed because he didn't know the eruption from the volcano was going to start. The whole place got destroyed. The brown bear didn't know a way out. He had a ladder but forgot he put it at the window because he was upstairs while the eruption was starting. He found the ladder, but the downstairs was filled with lava. The ladder was on the last window. He found the ladder got knocked down and melted by the eruption. So he jumped out the window and ran across his fence and then he got away from town. All the other animals did the same thing before he did. Everyone was safe.

When I tucked Boogs into bed tonight, I told him that he was a great storyteller. He replied, "That is because I don't make up dead stories." When I asked him what that means, he said, "You know. I don't put killing and violence in my stories like dead stories because you don't like that, Momma. I only put in a little bit of fighting."

Sunday, July 10, 2011

Moving In - One week later

Whew, it has been a busy week. My husband took the week off of work to help get us settled. There has been a lot things going on. The theater room equipment is running. We are still putting up the sconces. My husband had to get a new cell phone, but at least people are able to reach him now. AT&T gave a tentative date of July 18th to begin work on putting a cable under the driveway in order to hook up service. So, we went with another company and I now have internet service. Yay!
Only one sconce is installed.
Still needs curtains and decorating.
We finally unboxed all of the new furniture from our first U-haul load that we picked up at the warehouse. Just when I could see my floor, we had another U-haul load to unbox. I did not realize how much cardboard and stryofoam would be involved with un-crating the new furniture. We have had to do some minor assembly of the furniture.
Part of my office set-up.
The mess that is my living room.

Dining room table. I need to Scotch guard the seat
cushions before I put the rest of the chairs together.
We are settling nicely into the new house. Boogs is adjusting well. He is so happy to be able to have room to play, to go outside in the backyard on his own, and to be reunited with toys that have been in storage since November.
We have room to cook together.
Boogs' playroom
It may be two months before all of our furniture is in. We are just taking everything one step at a time and not worrying about how it all looks for now. The mess is slowly getting organized.
First family breakfast in new house.

Hanging Boogs' home-
made birdfeeder.
First steaks on the new grill.

Last Typhoon Swim Practice

Breaststroke
He looks so little climbing out of the pool.

Swim buddies
Waiting to throw a "pie".

Gotcha!
The coaches covered in "pie".

Boogs had his last swim team practice this past Friday. I can't get over how much he enjoyed being on the team. We only made it to two meets this season. Boogs said he wants to be on the team next year. We will try to make it to more meets next year. Boogs also told me that he wants to continue swimming EVERY day. We will have to make that happen. After the last practice, the kids lined up to throw "pies" at their coaches. They had great fun choosing which coach to hit.

Monday, July 4, 2011

Bad service!

We are without phone, internet, and tv service in our new house. I don't know how long it will take to get connected. AT&T was supposed to hook us up last Friday, but they can't. We still do not have a date for service. I am unable to upload photos until we get service. So, I will take a break from the blog for awhile. Hopefully, I will be back soon.

Saturday, July 2, 2011

Moving In - Day One

It was an interesting and busy first day of moving in to the new house. Luckily, I had two friends who took Boogs on an adventure for the entire day. After swim team practice, Boogs went with six kiddos and two moms to Brenham, Texas to visit the Bluebell Ice Cream Factory and then swim at the Bluebell Aquatic Center. On the way to Brenham (about a 1 hour 40 minute drive), they stopped off in Elgin for barbeque. Boogs did not get back into town until almost 8 pm. He was exhausted!

Meanwhile back at the house, we had some good things happening and some frustrating things happening. All of the painting was completed on Thursday and it looks amazing! We had a lot of service calls come out to the house: a new garage door installed, a company came by to discuss installing doors on the theater room, a company came by to discuss staining the back porch, pool table installation, fridge delivery, phone/internet hook-up denied, and window blinds installed. The garage door looks amazing, I will have to get a good picture of it to post. The guys who were installing the pool table told us that there was a problem with the slate, one section was not exactly the same size as the other two sections and the pre-drilled holes in it were not lining up correctly. He told us he was not comfortable putting it together and would order another table. It will take 3 - 4 weeks for the new table to come in. The blinds went in perfectly, we will have to wait a couple of weeks for the plantation shutters to arrive. AT&T said they cannot hook up our phone/internet service because their service box is on the opposite side of the house from the wiring they need to connect to. The AT&T rep told us they will have to contract a crew to come out and bore a hole under the yard and driveway to get the cables connected to their box. He could not give us ANY kind of timeline for this. My husband spent well over an hour trying to get an answer about how long this will take. No one knows. In addition to that, my husband's phone is on the fritz and dropping calls like crazy. So, the home phone and the cell phone used for all of the service call contacts are not working. It is very frustrating!
Old garage door

New garage door


Getting the fridge into the house was a challenge. The fridge was too big to fit through the front door. Normally, they just take the front door off the hinges and can easily get a fridge into a house. Our front door had some sort of hinge locks on it and could not be taken off. So, the delivery crew took the fridge apart on the front porch to get it through the door. They had to remove all of the doors which led them to removing most of the inside shelving so the shelves would not fall out. It was quite the process. Right now the only thing sitting in that fridge is a bottle of champagne and a 12 pack of beer for after the move today.


We rented a U-haul to pick up furniture from our decorator's warehouse. That was an adventure. When we were leaving U-haul, a woman driving another truck pulled in and blocked the entire exit because she could not drive her truck around the corner of the entrance. My husband got out and moved her truck and lightly bumped into our truck. No damage was done. We picked up a friend and went to load the truck at the warehouse. We did not realize how much and how heavy the pick-up items would be. They filled the entire truck. Our decorated stated that we were the happiest movers she had ever seen. It was either joke or cry about it, so we had a few good laughs and hopefully nothing is broken.



Today is a brand new day! Movers are coming in about an hour to clear out the apartment and storage unit and haul it over to the new house. That means we will be sleeping in the new house tonight!