Great Strides

All sorts of great strides are happening around here! The highlights:

• Demolition of the fixer-upper is nearly complete (another video tour coming soon)
• Louisa learned to ride a bike (video below)
• Peter has found a new vantage point from which to enjoy life (video below)
• Cora's vocab is in full bloom (I'll work on a video for this one)

About a month ago, Cora was still lovingly referring to Peter as "Der," refusing to add the "Pea" to the front, likely because we laughed every time she refused. Now we miss that nickname for our sweet pea, and the Amos Lee song I picked to go with Peter's sitting up video offered a nice little way to remember it.

In Lou's biking video, she is practicing at her new school - Lowell Elementary, where she'll soon join her fellow Lowell Lizards entering grades 4K through 5th grade. She met her 4K teacher, Mrs. Douglas yesterday and is excited to start school on September 2. She'll go Tuesday through Friday, from 11:30-2:30. The timing isn't amazing for our napping schedule, but we've already met a classmate named CiCi who lives across the street that we hope to walk-pool/carpool with!





Another highlight of late is the first few weeks with Helen, our new nanny. She is wonderful! Louisa and Cora love her because she lets them do crafts every day, Peter loves her because she feeds him sweet potatoes and other mushed-up concoctions, and I love her because she does an amazing job entertaining the kids while keeping up with laundry and dishes. I always come home to a calm, clean house, which is awesome. On that note, my new job is going well. I'm glad to be back at UW Health and the new hospital/clinic I'm working at is beautiful, with tons of natural light!

That's all for now...Cora's waking and Peter seems to be ready for nap #3!

Progress is Progress

I think the best way to amaze with progress is to just stay quiet for a while!

Lots has happened in the past 3 weeks. On Saturday, August 1, we hosted our first demo day. It's incredible what you can accomplish with the help of friends and family. So far we've been blessed by 14 unique sets of hands in addition to our own. This absolutely includes the hands that have prepared food for the crew and watched Lou, Cora & Peter.

This past Saturday, I learned how to remove plaster and lath. Once I got over the fact that I was going to get super-dirty, it was actually really fun. But I will take credit for far less than 0.001% of the total work that's been done. Nate is incredibly dedicated to this project, and for that I'm grateful!

Our hope is to be done with demo by the end of August, which seems attainable. In the next two weeks or so we have lots of contractors coming to give us bids on tasks like masonry work in the basement, the pouring of a garage slab and driveway, and siding repair or replacement. We're eager to hear whether repairing and painting the existing wood siding is the feasible, because the cost of replacing it with a wood-like composite comes with a bit of sticker shock.

Here are some photos from the first day of plaster removal. It was a family affair with my brother-in-law, Dan and my hard-working dad! And finally, a video. When we go back and watch home videos of our kids, we only regret not taking more, so to avoid similar regret once the house is complete, I asked Nate to take a house-video-tour before he locked up last night. He even narrated it!