January 22, 2013

Bedroom Photo Wall

Finally - the photos are all off the floor and up in a gallery arrangement in our bedroom!



Most of these are favorite photos, and there's plenty of room for more of them to be added above the closet. The exceptions are the two little white-framed pictures in the middle, which are prints of Lara and Jakey's newborn feet from the hospital; the large colorful collage, which is our ketubah; and the drawing at the top, which is a pen and ink sketch of my wedding dress done by the actual dress designer when he happened to be visiting the store where I was having a fitting.

Hopefully this is the first step of me actually getting the rest of the bedroom together, since right now it is the last undecorated bastion of the house, prominently featuring at least two very obviously broken pieces of furniture.

January 15, 2013

Ice skating

Jakey's class goes ice skating every other Tuesday. Today I got to go with!
These pictures are from the first five minutes.

It was all downhill from there- but he's a trooper and tried hard!

Highlight:
"daddy, when I walk in ice skates I'm like a robot. Like c3po."


January 6, 2013

New Faucet!


So, normally this is a pretty easy DIY home project - and, once we got the troublesome lug off, the whole thing took us 30 minutes.

Unfortunately, it took about 5 hours to get the lug off.
Rust, corrosion, impossible access, faulty design (they don't use this type anymore!) meant that wrenches, sockets, hammers, basin wrenches, and everything else failed.

So, dremmel to the rescue! We had to cut through the metal. With zero access and no lighting. Oy.

Old faucet:


What we grappled with:


The tools:


The destroyed "lug of doom" (note the corrosion):


The lovely awesome amazing new faucet! (Again - but come on, this thing is a beaut!)

January 5, 2013

Halftime

Faucet.... I shall return.

More Lego


"I'm making wings on this so it can be a flying car like a helicopter"
"this is what my constructions are. What my ingredients are."

So sayeth the Legomaster.

(also I love the "blogger" iPhone app!)

Home work

Hi
We are in the midst of changing our kitchen faucet.
Budgeted 2 hours
On hour 4.5
(the local hardware store dude, Jesse, who rocks, expressed deep sadness when I showed him how the prior faucet was attached. We are now using a basin wrench. You know what tool I dislike?

A basin wrench.

Up next, should this fail: hacksaw)

Anyway- jake is entertaining himself designing Lego cars all on his own upstairs.

See below.

I told him I was posting pictures of his car.
His answer? "I made a rocket ship, if you want to post pictures of that, just so you know. I'm making a sword-- when I'm done, you can type my fighting sword car."

Bowl-o-Rama


We had a great winter break- the kids really had fun visiting all of our scattered family in the region, and doing family things; this week was back to school time, but Friday I left early for a little extra bit of winter break fun. We took the kids bowling for the first time! After initial apprehension ("if I drop the ball will it break me" and "where'd the ball go will it come back???") they settled in and had a blast!



We bumper bowled, which definitely helped me the most (and yet you can see I barely topped our "two handed terror", Lara, and Jake, who needed to cradle the ball in a big hug and used a ramp to roll it down), but Ms. 42roads crushed us all. I am posting the scores for posterity, and hoping they vanish into some Interweb black hole.


It was great, they really got into cheering for the ball, using wiggly body english to try to twist the ball into place, and got super psyched for spares and strikes. Jakey's favorite parts were when the electronic scoring sheet would tell the next person it was their turn, and at how the "nice robots" would clear and restock the pins. Really though, his favorite part was the balls coming back, as if by magic.


Bowling- an awesome winter activity enjoyed by all!