And............

We are still working on the garage doors. Granted we haven't had a lot of time to do any work around the house. I was in Minneapolis, we had birthday parties, we travelled to Nebraska, and we had company. Which pretty much took up every weekend in August. This weekend we just traveled back to Nebraska for Erin's bridal shower, and it seems like this next couple months will be packed with things to do.

We are having a 2nd birthday party for Bella in two weeks. Before then we would like to get the house in order and maybe tackle painting the family room. The family room has all the paneling, so it will be a long process to prime and paint that, but luckily next weekend is labor day weekend. So while everyone else is making plans to go to the lake, or get together with family and friends, we are trying to get more done on the house. Sounds like fun.

Bella in the dark family room

A year ago

We were planning Bella's birthday party and getting ready to head out on our first family vacation to Hawaii.

This year we are planning Bella's birthday party, but we have no family trips planned. I have told Bella that as soon as she can eat cold foods and drink cold milk, we will take her on a trip. We have accomplished the cold foods and were making good progress on the cold milk. Now Bella has decided to spit out cold milk again, or take very little. So maybe once she drinks only cold drinks for a month we will take a family vacation. Maybe it will be this winter and we can go somewhere warm and beachy....Florida might be nice.

By the way, doesn't it look like Bella is trying to hula in the picture. Pure coincidence, but it looks cute!

My beautiful balloon

Bella has a new favorite toy, it's a balloon. I'm not quite sure if it's the balloon itself, or the strings. But she loves to look at it, play with it, and try and put it in her mouth.

Beautiful Garage Doors

I think these are the best looking garage doors I have ever seen. I don't know why we decided we should replace them. Not to mention the one that you see down, is down becuase it quit working right before we moved in.

But three weekends into the process we have one garage door complete. Now let's hope we can learn from all the mistakes and it only takes us one additional weekend to get the other one up and running (or maybe only two weekends).

You may be asking why it took us 3 weekends to put up one door. Well that's because we have actually put up 3 different doors. The first door had a torsion spring, which couldn't be installed because of side clearances in the garage, this wasn't figured out until it was completely installed. The second door was too tall for the space, and we had to buy a ceiling clearance lowering kit. This again wasn't figured out till it was all installed.

So the second weekend we installed the third door, and it took longer than normal because of the tight side clearances and low headroom.

The third weekend we installed the garage door opener. Which actually didn't go bad, except we still had problem with the door opening because of the tight side clearance. But by the end of the third weekend we have a functioning garage door. Except we can't seem to get the keyless entry pad to work, but then it's always something, and that can wait for another weekend.

Bella was gracious enough to hang out with us, as we put up the door. She had a comfy little spot on a sleeping bag with the fan blowing directly on her.

I think we can almost say we accomplished...

eating cold foods. For three days in a row, we have eaten our afternoon snack cold. This is a huge feat for Bella. Normally she won't touch anything cold. We have had a little luck with yogurt in the past, but she will still only take about a fourth of a cup, and you can tell it isn't very easy for her to handle it. But this weekend, we managed to eat cold cereal and fruit, yogurt, and even drink cold milk. Now I'll admit the cold milk had a little yogurt mixed in for some added flavor, and only about half of it actually went down her throat. But at least she was attempting to drink it, instead of spitting it back out as she had done in the past. Hopefully this keeps up and we can finally stop having to heat EVERYTHING up in the microwave.

Hanging out with friends

The other day we had our old neighbors over to see the new digs. We took some pictures of the three girls Taylor - 3, Bella - almost 2, and Avery - 4 months

I think Bella might be kind of a camera hog!

First on the agenda

Colby and Elle on the new carpet.
I'll start this by saying, I'm sorry I don't have any pictures of this event. But thought I should mention it, since it really was the first thing we did.

The first thing up was new carpet for the house. The old owners had a cat, and I'm allergic to cats. And even more important than that, each room had a different kind/color of carpet. We like things to flow a little better in our house, so we set off to Nebraska Furniture Mart to purchase carpet. Even after finding a "super buy" carpet, we were hit with a $10k cost to re-carpet the whole house. We decided to take off the dining room, we will be changing that to hardwoods eventually. We also removed the rec room, since it will eventually be converted into a bedroom and bathroom for Bella. And lastly we removed the main entry stairs, as we have grand plans to do hardwood treads with a carpet runner. So after those deductions it was a little easier to swallow, but still a large chunk of change. I guess some of the additional projects will have to wait a little while until we pay off some of the carpet.

We also decided to pull up and haul away all of the existing carpet. This meant we had to leave our furniture out in the pod storage units until the new carpet could be installed, which was about 1.5 weeks after we moved in. Jesse and I spent every night for a week ripping out carpet, tack strips, padding, and screwing down the plywood subfloor. I even got more ambitious and painted some of the floor trim, since it was easier to do while the carpet was gone. All in all it went well, with a little help from our friends in watching Bella and ripping out carpet. There was only one night where we got a little stressed in trying to finish it up and had to "stop talking to each other" for awhile.

The carpet guys came in and installed in one day, and then finally that next weekend we could move all our things in. It looks good, now we just need to get the dining room, and main stairs done, so it doesn't look so disjointed. Because sadly, it doesn't look much better on the main floor than it did before we moved in. But the upstairs is now one continuous carpet instead of 5 different types.

The camera phenomenon

I'm sure you have noticed in most pictures that Bella does not often smile for the camera. It's not that she doesn't smile, she actually smiles quite often. It's just that our camera has this red light that comes on and stays on, regardless of the light in the room, which immediately grabs her attention and makes her intently stare at it. And most times she is sensitive to the flash, so often we catch the picture, after she has reacted to the flash. So we try really hard to get her to still look at the camera, but not directly at the light, and maybe once in a while....actually smile!

Staring at the red light........

Oh wait....we got the tail end of a smile....right after the flashAhh success, we caught a smile!!!