To the guy

.....who definitely earns the 'D' in DH

Many thanks for when returning home after your week away and a walk thoughout the house looked a lot like this
and like this

and the project that I started (thinking that I could finish it while you were away) still looked like this

and the lawn looked like this

and our daughter's face looked like this

that you just came in and rolled up your sleeves instead of rolling your eyes. I love you big-time, you know.

Mother's Day

I know that there are a variety of reasons that plenty of people don't exactly enjoy Mother's Day, but, honestly, I haven't ever been able to empathize with any of them. I'm starting to think that maybe it's my favorite holiday.

This year, besides Adam building me some raised garden beds, and then getting to spend all afternoon in my sweats and in my bed without any responsibilities or any guilt, Max made me this PowerPoint presentation at school (it does have sounds and movement, but I can't get that function to work here):

Read this doc on Scribd: I love you, Mommy-max

Now, Adam is warning me that I shouldn't admit that although I was an ace at WordPerfect 5.1 in my advanced word processing class in high school, that I think that was about the point where I peaked in my technology skillz. I've now become one of those moms that can hardly program the clock on the VCR. Anyway, I'm super proud of Max because, just as I've never owned a PDA, used a flash drive, and I still struggle with that stupid mouse button on a lap top, I've also never, ever done anything on PowerPoint. In fact, I could barely post it to this site.

But while I was having my second nap on Sunday afternoon, Max thought that he would help Olivia learn to make one too:

Read this doc on Scribd: Presentation1

Olivia's may be a little rough around the edges, but still, it's a pretty sweet Mother's Day present to see your kids become more than you are. Now I'm only hoping that I can keep up.

I'm a stoner now

The soapstone is in! Here's the step-by-step of how it happened, so there will be a lot of pics, but some people have been asking for the details. And besides, I'm pretty darn proud of Adam pulling this off and doing such a great job. And, did I mention that I love it!!

Here's the 1600lb crate that was delivered to our house:

It took 4 people to carry this piece into our house. After getting it moved, one of the guys commented that it felt like they had just moved a Volkswagen. Actually, moving it in was a bit scary--that sucker was heavy!

Here are Adam and Jesse positioning the slab exactly to get it ready for cutting out the section where the range will be:


Marking and taping for the cut-out:

Here's what they rigged up to support the piece that would eventually be cut out. The support would be slid all the way underneath, of course.
Taping off an area in order to keep all the dust somewhat confined:

And the cutting begins:
As Adam is cutting, Jesse is holding the shop-vac at the blade to try and get most of the dust:
Success! They pull off the cut out piece:
No mistakes whatsoever, and it's only about 1/16th of an inch away from the cabinet. Tight!
Here's the stove installed and the stone all oiled up fir the first time:
One of the sides of the built in area all oiled up:
The next big cut out is for the sink. This one is tricky because the sink is rounded and asymmetrical.

Here's the sink installed:

He did a great job on the cut out and the installation. I purchased the largest possible sink for this cabinet size, which meant that the cabinet had to be notched out for the installation, and it also made attaching the clips to the bottom pretty tricky as there wasn't a lot of space left over. But last Friday night he worked until 2am and now I have water. Happy Mother's Day weekend to me. Hoorah. The only thing left on this is that I still need to do some sanding to on the eased edges to smooth and polish them somewhat more. (The darker spots to the right are just water spots that haven't dried off since I was in a hurry to snap this picture. And the slab has not yet been oiled either.)

This is the only piece that needed to be seamed:

Unfortunately, the company supplying the stone didn't follow our instructions about leaving 2' of the larger piece with an unfinished edge for the butt joint with the smaller piece. It meant that Adam had to slice off that edge and notch it for the seam. It makes for a slightly more visable seam (and that's driving Adam crazy), but I think that in the long run it's not going to matter at all.


Ok, so it's all in. Already I feel like it's changing my life. On the first day of use after the stove was installed the kids got to sit up at the island and work on homework and coloring while I fixed dinner. Now this is the kind of stuff that makes it all worth it.

Happy Birthday to Jayne

I have to give a birthday shout out to my sister Jayne on her big 25th! Not only are you one of the all-over best Muggles around, but we now have seven more reasons to love you even more thanks to your sending us all of the Harry Potter series as audio books last year.

It was a fabulous way to introduce the series and characters to the kids and to Adam, who had never read any of them before. We started listening in the summer for our long road trips to DC, NYC and Cape Cod, but we hardly paused for breath in between each book and disc--listening even around town on errands or on the way to church. By the time we got to The Deathly Hallows (which I didn't read in print when it came out in July since I decided to wait until Adam and the kids had caught up with all the others), Adam and I had to keep listening at night while we worked on painting our bedroom and bathroom. Shhhh...don't tell the kids that we got ahead of them this way. Just sing it like you're Tevye: "Addiction....Addiction!"

Actually, I knew that we were really immersed when one day Olivia was calling for me (and I wasn't responding right away) and she finally yelled out in exasperaion, "Accio Mommy!"

So, dear Aunt Jayne, many, many thanks. To say that it made for a very fun year is a pretty weak characterization of we actually feel. And it was a very bittersweet experience to hit the end of Book #7 and have to say goodbye to not only Harry and Ron and Hermione and all the others, but also to Jim Dale and his fabulous narration performance. He was tremendous. (So it's a good thing that I've found that watching Pushing Daises fixes that hurt just a little.)

But of course, we could never love Harry Potter more than we love you. We're looking forward to seeing you next month, and in the meantime, we hope that your birthday was just as good as a day with some Felix Felicis! You deserve it!

For the record: I tried

During this morning's Battle of the Clothes, Olivia declared: "You always want me to wear matching clothes and I don't want to wear matching clothes anymore!"

So I am officially waiving the white flag and letting the girl have at it. There has to be better battles out there to fight.