More House Updates

By the time I get these pictures loaded onto this dang blog, I'm too tired for words. So these will be short and sweet.

Come up our new stairs...

John shows you the fabulous view out the second floor bonus room window.

This is from one corner of the bonus room to the other.

We are now taking donations to actually finish the bonus room. Or we'll be charging $100 a night, which is the First Monday Hotel going rate.

Today, we got outside walls! Here Ace models the front living room.

Peach enjoys the view out her bedroom window.

The Littles Model the fireplace.

Melee' is conspicuously absent. Yep, home playing StarWars.

Here are the outside views, starting with the back. The circus tent section of the roof is over the main backporch.

This is a view from the far right corner of the lot.

Front right corner of the lot, facing the three car garage.

The front view, complete with trash dumpster, bricks, radiant barrier decking, and whatever that stuff is that they're using for the outside skin (is that OSB?) and other various trash.

The First Signs

You might think that the first signs of spring might be budding trees, rainshowers, daffodils, warming temps and buying the industrial size bottle of Claritin. You'd be right, but at my house, the way I know Spring is upon us, is that Peach had to move her color for the first time in her illustrious Kindergarten career.



"What happened? Why did you have to move your color."

"I didn't get my work finished."

"Why didn't you get the paper finished?"

"Well, these other kids were talking and Momma...I just couldn't resist."





Spring has sprung!

KAY-RAH-TAY!

I don' t know what I'm gonna do with him. I just can't imagine what he's thinking.
Well, he's not. He's not thinking. He's certainly not thinking about his future. I never thought one of my kids would want to quit school. Much less before they got to Kindergarten.

Evidently things are not going smoothly at the new Mother's Day Out. The biggest part of the day, is naptime. It turns out that they lay down for an hour and a half. Ace is not used to taking a nap anymore, but at his old MDO, he tolerated without any trouble. He's been complaining about not wanting to go back to school for the last couple of weeks. On Tuesday when I went to pick him up, he bundled up his nap mat and tried to run incognito out of the room. On the way out I asked him how his day was, he said "She kept saying "Nosqueaking! No squeaking!, NoSQUEAKING!" and I said "What was the squeaking?" he said "My shoes." and so trying to change the subject I asked "How was the rest of your day?" and he said "In church Bo kept Swacking me and Swacking andSwacking andSwacking me!" He said that he basically didn't want to go back. And I said "Well, do you want to go to Kindergarten next year instead of Mothers Day Out." to which he replied, "No, I just wanna go to fight school."

My House Built of Sticks

This is what we found when we got back from Houston. I'll tell you right now, job sites are not for the weak at heart. I just want to pick everything up and stack it neatly somewhere. I'm loosing the game of picking up nails.

This is what it looked like when the entire first floor was done, before they started the roof.

The kids love to go out and look at their rooms now that they have walls. Well, everyone except Melee' who can't be torn away from his video games. I may have to put him in rehab when the house is done.

I broke a record this week by going out to the homesite three times in one day. This is so exciting! Charlie can hardly go to work everyday. He played hookie for half the day today. He went out to check on the cables this morning, the next thing I knew he was calling to tell me that they had not arched the doorways and did I want them to redo them. Today was not my day for decision making, I evidently woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning because the news sent me into a big cry. In the end they arched one of the doorways for me so that I could come look at it and decide what to do. I decided I wanted them arched and we stayed out there the rest of the morning chatting with the builder, the super, the framers and their boss. We went and picked up pizza for their lunch. (I felt so guilty that they had to change seven doorways, plus they were doing a fab job!) I had to decide whether I wanted the walls in the master shower to be full walls or half walls. Everytime I tried to get Charlie to tell me what he thought, he'd just "PHpppptt" and look at Calvin and Fred like "I don't know why she's asking me, I don't get a say...." That's ever so helpful. So I decided we would have one half wall and one full wall. How's that for decision making.

This was how we left it before lunch. By the end of today they were completely done..

This is the view of the back of the house. Those are the piles of brick laying all around. There are 13,790 and the guy who dropped them was not totally convinced that we had enough.

The fun continues....

Pray for clear, dry skies!

The End of an Era

Wednesday Morning...

Loaded up and ready for Travel.
We closed on the house and prepared for the movers.

Thursday Morning...

Last stop at Best Donuts.
Sugar is the breakfast of champions.

I packed all these boxes with just these two fingers!









Not a thing left unpacked.
(No thanks to us. All professionally done. Well except for the six truckloads of boxes that we brought over from storage. I totally packed those!)

Nowhere to sit, all the furniture is wrapped.

Friday morning...

The big guns arrive. Loaded from 9:30 in the morning until about 7:30 in the evening, while we sat out in the front yard, trying to stay out of the way.

*Sniff*

Good-bye trees.

Good-bye Rippling Hollow!

We Love You!

SHHH, They didn't notice....

Happy Easter! I have never planned less for any holiday that requires I buy treats for my kids. We went last night to Walmart at 9:00 and believe it or not, we were not alone. The older boys didn't even have baskets or buckets because everything is packed in Houston. I had bought the Little's baskets last weekend because they both had Easter Egg hunts at school. We did a little Egg Hunt and then we did one treasure hunt for the Big's and one for the Little's that ended in a double feature of The Bee Movie and Enchanted. That distracted everyone from the fact that we did not dye one egg. Nope, not one... it was nice. I'll admit, I love to decorate an egg, in fact last year I bought enough eggs so that each of us could decorate a dozen. Trust me, nobody needs to have that many boiled eggs around, unless your having a huge picnic afterward.

Here's to More Chocolate!!!

Momma's Got a Brand New Slab...

Charlie and John got up and were out at the "dirt" by 6:00 a.m. and they had started without them.



It took about 20 truckloads of concrete and five hours.

Charlie called me and I rolled out of bed at 6:30 so I could get it all on video tape. Yes folks, there is taped footage. Consider yourself lucky that it's not a digital video camera and that I am not tech-savy!

The ground is so saturated that the trucks completely demolished the road, despite their best efforts at keeping it protected.

Monday they are dropping off the framing lumber!!!! Wednesday Charlie and I go to Houston to close on the sale of our house there, and then the movers are meeting us there on Thursday to pack all our stuff and put it in storage. It's going to be a busy week!

Write the Caption...

Send me a caption, then I'll tell you the story behind the picture.

* Oh you guys are great!

Jeff you are exactly right, but you got the driver wrong! Charlie is King of the Loop de Loops, I am Queen of cleaning up the results.

Annie, I hope you get the chance to come to Texas sometime after I get this house built! I need to take you to First Monday where you can buy ANYTHING to eat - "On a Stick" and I will make sure Ace does not Judo chop your ass!

Since we've done all this traveling back and forth to Houston, we can't get in the car without somebody getting carsick. My guts are made of steel, and even I've been getting quesy when we start down the road. This was just a short little hop over to Tyler to look at some kitchen appliances, Ace has on his Sea-Bands accupressure wrist-bands, and we finally had to give him some dramamine. He fell asleep with his "air-sick" bag on his lap.

We Pause for Spring Break...

To catch you up...

this is what the plumbers were up too. That's the garden tub there on the left.





Woops! Turns out the plumbers ran over one of the shower stub- ins.

That might have to be addressed...





Looking good! Beams are dug and poly wrapped...








You're looking into the garage all the way through to the end of the house.







I took some really bad pictures today, because this is the sexiest shot, but you can hardly see the red cables.
It rained really hard last night, so although they tried to pump the water out of the beams it's still pretty soggy.





Will we have concrete tomorrow or won't we?

It Has That NEW HOUSE SMELL !!

Mom and I went out for my daily drive to the dirt, we crested the hill and this is what I saw...


THE PLUMBERS WERE THERE!

THE PLUMBERS WERE THERE!

THE PLUMBERS WERE THERE!

I almost wet my pants.

They almost had excitement all over them.*

I'm still pretty stoked, in case you can't tell.

So, as we're driving down to the corner, I rolled down my window to get into picture taking position and that's when the smell hit us. "What's that smell?", she asked me. "I'm sure it's cows in the pasture back there, the wind must be blowing in this direction." "No, I don't think so.", she answered. And guess what, she was right. They put poop dirt on my pad. You heard me.

That didn't dampen my spirits. Besides, if there was any possibility of moisture coming down, I have over 3000 sq feet of poly to keep me from getting wet.

Yes honey, this is the part where I tell everybody that you were right. How could I ever doubt you? When have you ever been wrong?

You're the man, honey.

You da man!

What's your strategy about poop dirt?

*Editors note: This is in reference to an Arthur story I read to my kids.

SERENITY NOW!

Like a lot of people on the planet, according to Oprah, I'm reading Ekhart Tolle's "A New Earth". When I started reading the book I thought "Me and Enlightenment, we're like this...."

I mean, people who cut me off in traffic never inspire me to road rage, I'm really quiet in the morning, and I often find beauty and majesty when I ponder trees, although I guess if I'm being truthful, I do tend to think of them as "trees". So I signed up for the online class, filled out my first workbook pages and watched the class. Then two things happened that tripped me on my spiritual journey.

First, Charlie decided that we should go out to the dirt and cover the "pad" with poly so that when the rain started again this week, the pad would be protected and they could get on with the work at hand. That doesn't surprise me about Charlie, because he's impatient. He obviously has so much farther to go on his spiritual journey than I do. But because in my own personal Handbook to Happiness, one of my many mantras is "Charlie's always right.", I loaded the boys in the suburban with him, a hammer and my rainboots and off we went to roll out three gigantic rolls of plastic wrap over the dirt so it wouldn't get wet. The problem for me came after we started taping the first two rolls of plastic wrap together and a thought occured to me that the builder is gonna drive out here tomorrow, see this gigantic 3000 sq. ft. pad covered in poly and say "What the %$#@!" Who in the hell is building this house anyway, you or me?" And I started to panic. Despite my own personal mantra, I started to question the plan outloud.

"You don't think this is gonna make Calvin really mad?"

"No. Why would it?"

"Well, he's gotta have somebody come and take all this off and then what's he gonna do with it?"

"He can call me, I'll take it off. Hell, I'll throw it away for him."

"Do you think it would have been better to call first?"

"Do you want me to call?"

"Well, I wish you had called first."

"Do you want me to call now?"

"No. Don't you think he's gonna be kind of mad at us?"

"No, why would he?"

He just can't go there. He's not a put yourself in somebody else's shoes kinda guy. I'm a bend over backwards so your not mad at me kind of girl. My ego cares what you think of me. So much so that I didn't sleep a wink last night. Even though it rained during the night, which technically makes Charlie right, I only felt marginal relief.

Then the second thing, was that I got into the car with my "always right" husband and am currently riding 85 miles an hour in the pouring rain on the way to Houston to have a follow-up foot exray and to interview moving companies for the big day. I'm having a big problem being "present" and letting my current situation be what it is. All I can think about is the moment, about a half hour from now, when I get to hike my hiney out of this red Altima bobsled. So much for living in the present. Which explains why I'm sitting in the passenger seat telling you about my past and wishing for the future. I suppose I could dig my book out of the floorboard and reread the first chapter. The first step to enlightment is awareness afterall.

Since there is no news about the house, whatsoever. I'll tell you a story about a dress.

We are going to a wedding for my neice in June. It's a beach wedding in Florida. Sounds like fun right? Acutally we can't wait, except for the fact that I've gained about 15 pounds since we've moved in with Mom. So that has taken some of the shine off shopping for the wedding. But even though I've gained the weight, I was still holding out hope that it wouldn't show.

I lost all hope in the Coldwater Creek store in Tyler last week.

I had my eye on this little number..

But evidently they don't have all the dresses in the stores that they offer in the catalog, so when I went to try it on they didn't have it. So I looked for something that had a simialr fit, so I would no what size I wear. So what I found and tried on..

was this...

And after I tried it on, I realized that I look like Nathan Lane in the Birdcage. It's not good. Can a person wear black to a beach wedding?

No?

Are you sure?