The three-month's-worth post

Family pictures in November, 2014.

Knowing that I needed to update the blog these past few months has become one of those things that nags at you, and the longer you wait to do it, the worse it gets. We've been busy, but I really only have procrastination to blame. So, this post will cover Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year, and my 30th birthday. That's four birds, one stone!

Early in November, Jonathan's Dutch aunt and uncle came for a visit. It was so great to see them!

Mid-November we celebrated an early Thanksgiving with Jonathan's mom's family, including Ricky who came in from NYC. Here is Quinn kissing "Aunt Chi-chi" (he can't say Rachey yet).

Quinn playing with Great-Aunt Paula at Thanksgiving.

This is Quinn playing hide-and-seek. Love how a 2 year-old's mind works.

Jonathan playing and signing with his family at Thanksgiving.

Quinn and Aunt Lydee.

For Thanksgiving, Jonathan's Dad and Step-mom came to visit us. We had a great meal and visit. (And yes, the tree was already up!)

Christmas Eve we spent at home. The Christmas season was such a blast this year. Quinn was totally into Santa, Frosty the Snowman, and singing all of the music. He helped me bake cookies for Santa and loved playing with the trees.

Christmas morning we woke up early (nothing unusual there) and opened gifts with my mom. Quinn got a Thomas the train set, which he loves. He also got a Little People's airplane from my aunt, which is all he asked for for Christmas. We didn't really do adult gifts this year, but to keep it from being all about Quinn, we wrapped up some things around the house and gave them to each other. Quinn loved pretending to be Santa and 'delivering' all of our presents to us.

The day after Christmas we celebrated at Jonathan's dad's house. Quinn loved playing Santa there, too.

Quinn is great at not only delivering gifts, but helping you open them. :)

January brought us some nice, mild weather, so we spent more time outside than usual.

Playing outside. We played lots of tag this winter.

Gotcha!

Giving Quinn a 'raspberry,' which he calls a strawberry for some reason.

This is the LOTR cape that Uncle Ricky and Aunt Lydee got for Quinn for Christmas. We celebrated with Jonathan's mom's family in January. Unfortunately, all of the pictures from that trip are on Jonathan's phone because I forgot my camera. But Q loves his cape! We also got to see Lydia on her way out to NYC in January. Love you, Lydee!!!

Here is JJ - he is starting to go gray. He will be 6 years old on Tuesday (Feb 24). Hard to believe he has been with us for so long.

This is the second Frosty we got to build this year. We had a big snowstorm  the second week in February.

And this is Frosty's snowpet - Sparky the snowdog.

Playing in the snow with daddy.

This is Quinn's latest thing. He loves watching Youtube videos of YoYo Ma and The Piano Guys. He is obsessed with the cello (and piano, and guitar, and drums). This is him pretending to play the cello. This week he loves a Star Wars video by the piano guys in which Darth Vader dances and plays the accordion. According to Quinn, Vader is a robot with gloves. So Quinn and I take turns wearing my black winter gloves and dancing like "the robot" while the other plays the cello. Ah, the cute games he comes up with!

 The entire month of February so far has been a whirlwind. Last month I posted my survey to collect data for my dissertation. I spent three months prepping it, getting it edited and through the IRB. I expected a total of 100 respondents, if I was lucky, over the course of 6 weeks, including recruitment through the University clinics. I posted it on Facebook and in the course of a week or two, I have 600 completed surveys! I never had to recruit through the clinics. I am so excited but daunted at how much great data I now have to sort, clean, and analyze for my dissertation. I am loving it. I am hopeful that I can still graduate in July, but December is more likely.
On top of my dissertation stuff, this month Jonathan has been collecting data for is dissertation, too. He has had to prep and give intervention workshops every Friday this month, do over a dozen interviews, plus working full-time and teaching on campus. Holy. Cow. He has had great feedback so far from the graduate students participating in his project. What a great thing to do something for one's degree that will help others.
Given the craziness this month, it's pretty miraculous that Jonathan was able to take my birthday off. I turned 30 this month. I had a nice, quiet day, with Jonathan and mom watching Quinn so I could go out to eat, get a massage with my midwife (thank you family, including my cousin!). The day before I had to get my license renewed, so I had a makeover at Macy's for the first time (and got to get myself some nice makeup). I had lots of well wishes from family and friends. Overall, it was a very nice day.


Turning 30 wasn't as shocking as I thought it would be. Maybe it's because I'm a mom; maybe it's because my hubby turned 30 before me so I had time to get used to the idea; maybe it's because I feel very content with where I am at this time in my life. I have so much to be grateful for, and I wouldn't trade what I have now for something different if I had the chance to do it over. I'm excited about what the 4th decade will bring!

So, please accept my apologies for the delay - but Happy Thanksgiving, Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and Happy Valentine's Day!!

Halloween and more house pictures

Jonathan's office prior to moving in

Jonathan's office now

  As promised, here are some more pictures of our home improvements: the office and backyard. When we moved in, Jonathan's office was bright pink. We joke that he has a pink office curse because his office at our last home was pink when we moved in. We painted it sage green and furnished it with some neutral curtains and mahogeny antiques. Much better.

Backyard before

Backyard after

Before - messy with aging deck

Before - 2 foot high playground area

After

After

After

After - playground leveled, grass seeded, sandbox re-edged

The backyard used to have a large (about 350 square feet), raised playground bed off the patio in the center of the yard. The playground had been removed long ago, so all kinds of weeds had grown up through the landscaping fabric. Since we are within a short walking distance of two playgrounds, we never intended to install a playground. After toying with several ideas, we decided to remove all of the cinder edging blocks and fill dirt and gravel, and create some edged beds in the corners of the yard. It took us a full weekend to pull up all of the weeds and landscaping fabric, and then Jonathan hauled a couple of tons of dirt and gravel (literally). Then we moved over 150 cinder blocks, shaped them to create beds, and filled them in with the playground dirt and rock. Over a couple of months, we filled in the beds with mulch and river rock, planted some evergreen trees, ferns, and hostas, and had the barren area where the playground was seeded for grass.  The entire backyard transformation cost about $200. We are pretty proud of the landscaping transformation because we designed it ourselves, it cost so little, and really changed the yard into something intentional.
 The deck and stairs were in rough shape, as they hadn't been stained for years. Jonathan did a ton of research and bought high-quality stain. We spent most of the summer staining, as we had to do it on days that weren't too hot or too cold and had no precipitation. It was a pain in the butt!! It looks stunning and brand-new now, though, and we did it all ourselves (my mom included).

After, with deck stained

After

Halloween turkey!

For Halloween, Quinn dressed up as a turkey. I found the costume at a thrift store and thought it was too cute. He loves it. I figured that he wouldn't be too keen about taking candy from strangers, so we practiced trick or treating all around the house for two weeks before the holiday. It was super cold on Halloween, but we went out and made it to about 8 or 9 houses before Quinn was done. He didn't get much loot, but he had never had candy before, so he didn't realize that his stash was small (I remember filling up whole pillowcases as a kid!). He tried candy bars for the first time and loved it, of course. I think he enjoyed handing out candy to the trick or treaters who came to our door more than he liked trick or treating himself. That is so Quinn. We also got a nice compliment from the previous owners, who brought their girls trick or treating at our house. They said that they were impressed with all the improvements we had made to the outside, and that it looked very nice. Gold star for us! :)

First bite of candy

Handing out candy to the trick or treaters

We've had tons of stuff going on this month - two out-of-town visits to see family, Jonathan's comps defense (which he rocked!), etc., but I will save all of that for the next post.

Home Improvements

We've been in our new home now for 6 months, and we love it. We've been working on projects all over the house, inside and out. We've stained the deck and porch, painted the door and shutters, done landscaping in the front and back yards, painted three rooms, cleaned the carpets, scrubbed all sorts of things off walls and floors, bronzed fixtures, and more. In this and the next post I will show you some before and after photos of our work in the last months. We still have a lot of painting to do, but we are making good progress, learning a lot, and having fun.

This is how the house looked when we moved in. The plants in the front bed were overgrown and wild, bare spots and dandelions ruled the yard, the shutters were a hideous shade of mauve, and the door was eggplant. Not to mention some general grime in windows, as well as clutter. The picture above was taken from Google Earth, as the house was before we moved in. I have no idea why there is a plastic easel and cooler in the front yard.

Step one was to pull out multiple wheelbarrows full of weeds, and transplant the existing plants to provide balance. We bought and laid down some river rock in the front beds. Next we had the dandelions taken care of and the lawn seeded to fill in the bald spots. This took all summer.

 

 

Step two involved some exterior paint and stain. We painstakingly primed and painted the shutters and front door. They are now "tree branch" rather than "Barney", and they match. We cleaned and stained the porch rails, as they were weathered and worn. This is how the house looks now.

While we were working on the outside, we were also working inside. Both of the spare bedrooms were painted sloppily (paint on trim, carpets, ceiling, and doors) with bright pink and purple paint. The children had colored and written their names everywhere - walls, windows, doors - and put stickers on every surface. All sorts of stains were set in the carpets. Our first task was to paint Jonathan's office, as it was shiny pink. Pictures will come in the next post. Then we primed and painted Quinn's room a pale green, as well as spent many hours scraping and scrubbing the walls and doors. 

Here is Quinn's room before - a cluttered mess with bright purple walls. (This is the furniture and decor of the previous owners.)

Quinn's room now - calm and clean.

The spare bathroom was dirty, off-white, and decorated in a rubber ducky theme when we moved in. Jonathan bronzed the fixtures and we painted the room a light tan.

Bathroom before

Bathroom after

 I will post some pictures of the office, other rooms in the house, and the back landscaping next time.

In non-home improvement news, lots of things have been going on in our lives lately. The weather has been cooler and hot off and on, but we love Fall. Quinn has had several language explosions this month. This week he is using past tense verbs consistently and clearly. He also can hear when he makes mistakes in pronunciation, because he slows down and tries to mimic our speech more accurately. Some of the cutest phrases he says are: "I love you too!", "Are you okay?", "I like to play room!", "I made a big mess!", and "JJ eats Zoie poop." (That last one is true.)

 Big news in terms of Jonathan's life outside of home - he will defend his comprehensive exams in two weeks (a month early than originally planned, but he has been very productive this semester). He will also be starting his dissertation next month and may possibly push through to finish in July - nearly a year early. There would be several benefits of this change, but it will also be intense.

My dissertation is really starting to take off, and I've had renewed motivation to finish sooner than later. Hopefully  my graduation date will also be moved up.

We are preparing for Halloween this week. We carved pumpkins over the weekend (Jonathan carved a Star Trek pumpkin and Quinn and I colored ours with markers). I asked Quinn if he wanted to make a big mess with me, and he was thrilled. I stripped him down, cut open the pumpkin, stuck my arm in, and pulled out the messy stuff inside. I said, "here, you do it too." He leaned over, looked in, looked at my messy hands, and said, "no" while walking away. That is so Quinn. Evaluating the situation first, then likely declining. Later he changed his mind and had a blast making a "big pumpkin mess!". On Friday he is dressing up as a turkey (I know, odd costume, but super cute!) and going trick or treating for the first time.
Here are some Fall pictures I took of Quinn last week.

This is Quinn telling me that JJ eats cat poop. He thinks it is hilarious. We don't.

Making a big pumpkin mess

A lovely Fall morning

Happy Halloween!