Don't Close the Hatchet ~ A Story of Lots of Work and Progress

There has been a lot of work that has gone into the progress made at our house in the last couple of weeks and I am so excited about it!! Most of the work shown in the pictures below was done over a span of 3-4 days, and already more work has been completed since they were taken.

This is the view we have had going up our stairs since about November 16th. There is a trap door or hatch that we have covering the steps, not only to provide more working floor space up there, but also to keep as much dust and debris from the work up there out of the living room below. I am not sure what we would have done without this hatch! I am certain I could not have otherwise swept and vacuumed up enough to keep the downstairs clean, and we also needed to do what we could to keep heat in the lower level.

Emma calls the hatch, The Hatchet. She tends to leave a little trail of her belongings everywhere she goes, so it is quite common to hear her voice call out right before bed, as we are sealing up the hatch for the night, "Wait!! Don't close the hatchet! I left something down there." The something is usually Pinkie, her pink fleece blanket, or Eaou or Chi, two beloved stuffed animals. There is a heater in their room that keeps just that section of the upstairs warm.

This is what is making the girls bedroom livable at the moment. This zip door and plastic sheet that has partitioned off their room from the rest of the upstairs is surprisingly effect at keeping the heat in and the dust out! Being that it is simply heavy duty plastic and a zipper, not an actual wall or door, it has been quite a miracle that we have had use of the room every day of the project. I don't think we could fit anything else downstairs, so the girls not having to relocate their beds to the lower level has been wonderful.

This is the new flying gable on the front of the house.

The next couple of photos show the demo work involved tearing off the old roof and making an opening to expand the dormer:



Standing in our upstairs looking out at the sky above.

The moon one morning, also from upstairs in our house. It snowed the previous night. My dad had wrapped the house up as tight as he could the night before. Wrapping up a roof and the importance of doing it well, gives a whole new perspective on the idea of gift wrapping. I don't think I will ever complain when I can't get the wrapping paper on a present just right again!

A matching gable for the back of the house.

Beginning to frame out the new roof line and walls.

Exterior walls back in place.

New windows in the girls' room.

Gazing outside to the wintery night from her new window seat.

Loving {!!} the box that our new bathtub came in. My next post will show some more interior pictures of all the work being done. Our continued thanks to my Dad for everything, Mitch for all his plumbing expertise, and to Uncle Dan for the heating he installed. These are all very good and wonderful things to have and we are thankful for their work!

Christkindl Market Chicago

I recently chaperoned a field trip with Alyssa's German class to the Christkindl Market in Chicago. It's not as big as I remember it being when I went there as a kid, but such a fun place filled with all sorts of unique hand crafted gifts. It made me feel in the Christmas spirit to walk around there. Especially since we don't have many Christmas decorations of our own up this year, because of limited space with the construction, I really enjoyed seeing all the beautiful ornaments and other decorative things.

Chaperoning a middle school field trip is much like trying to keep a watchful eye on potentially naughty sheep from a distance that is far enough that those sheep can retain their cool factor, but not so far that they might actually make a run for it and join a new flock.

I realize that the fact that I just used the words "cool factor" to attempt to describe characteristics they would like attributed to them is probably why they don't want to hang out with me more. Alyssa doesn't mind me being around at all, in fact each time I walked away to take a few pictures I ran into her classmates who told me she was looking for me. They said it in a way that insinuated that even my absence was a burden to them. Ugh, so teenagery.

Verry pretty Lebkuchen hearts.

Amazing ornaments:



Delicious pretzels!!

These were larger than the faces of the kids who were eating them ~ HUGE!

Alyssa and one of her best besties.

These hand painted pewter art pieces were absolutely beautiful! I wanted the Noah's Ark one, then I saw how much it costs and I didn't want it as much anymore.

These nesting dolls were precious too, every single little delicate detail was attended to!

Alyssa bought one of these for her new room.

I opted for a souvenir mug full of what I think was hot apple cider.

Such a huge collection of steins!

The group of mostly good, sweet, potentially naughty sheep that Alyssa has gone to school with since kindergarten. It's been amazing to watch these kids grow up and it's at least a little sad that many of them will be going in various directions next year for high school...only about six more months together with their crazy and wonderful group!

Christmas Books

The day after Thanksgiving I usually take out all our Christmas stories and we try to read a couple of them each night between Thanksgiving and Christmas. It is one of my favorite traditions, and we have come to love so many great Christmas books!


A wonderful new book we discovered last year is The Paper Bag Christmas. I bought it simply because it was on the sale shelf at the book store, and it is definitely going back into the line up of Christmas books to read this season and every season after for as long as my girls will listen to it ~ it's so good!

The books shown here are: Have You Seen Christmas?, A Gift From St. Nicholas, The Legend of the Candy Cane, The King's Christmas List, The Christmas List, A Special Place for Santa, The Three Gifts of Christmas, and The Christmas Bell. These are some of our favorites and I believe all are available on amazon.

Our girls are old enough now to read the story of Jesus' birth right from the Bible and understand, but when they were younger they loved reading the story from nativity books like these. The girls still enjoy the nativity adventure What God Wants for Christmas that is pictured in the middle.

I am sure the girls could remind me of several other good books that I have missed here, but if you are looking for any good Christmas read alouds that kids are sure to enjoy, we recommend any of these!!

Happy Thanksgiving

I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving! Ours was nice. Emma learned how to make origami turkeys at school on the day before Thanksgiving so she stayed busy crafting away so everyone could have one at their place setting. Rebekah made the cute turkey card.



Alyssa and Rebekah were happily playing dress up with items from my mom's closet. Recently Alyssa's favorite thing to wear is my mom's prom dress from when she was in high school. You can't see it all in this picture, but it looks pretty on her.

In every thing give thanks: for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you.

1 Thessalonians 5:18 (King James Bible)

Happy Thanksgiving!

The Before Pictures

On November 15th, my dad began a pretty huge construction project at our house. Here are some "before" pictures.

The collage above shows the front, back and a side view of the house as it was before any work began. It is an older home built in the 40s. We needed a new roof very badly, and while they were doing all the work my dad suggested that we expand the dormers to give the girls more room upstairs. It is not a big house at all and they were very cramped up there. It's a cute house that we love a lot, in a neighborhood that we love a lot and we are excited and ready for a change that will help us make more functional use of the space we have.

As I took these pictures I was thinking that I should have taken some "before the before" pictures so you could see all the stacks of books overflowing the shelves and the toys and the girls' instruments that they had piled up in this space. All these photos were taken after about a week worth of work just clearing out and cleaning up.

This photo above is right at the top of the stairs before any work was done. The house is laid out a little odd in that at one point it was a duplex and this area right here is a very small kitchenette at the top of the stairs. I loved it when I was a coffee drinker, I had a little coffee bar set up on the counter here and the girls had a toy kitchen next to it. Now that the girls are getting older {and I no longer drink coffee} we could make much better use of the area than having a little kitchen that no one really uses.

This is the bathroom, which is the door right next to the kitchenette area in the photo above. Believe it or not, there's not much more to it than what can be seen in the picture. It is very much like stepping into a bathroom on an airplane with a shower stall off to one side.

The most exciting part of the project for Alyssa is that she is going to be getting her own room. This is a walk in closet right at the top of the stairs that my dad is converting to a new room for her. It is not going to be a large room, but she doesn't mind one bit! He is doing a wonderful job with it, the ceiling is getting vaulted to give the space a more roomy feel. It looks very cool.

One half of the girls' current room. This is after I had shoved all their existing furniture into the middle of the room. All three girls have slept on this side of the room for the last few years.

The other half of the room where desks, dressers and toys have been kept. These two rooms are quite big, but the three girls fill them up very quickly and easily and Alyssa will be happy to have a room that is all her own.

This is looking out of the existing bedroom to the area where Alyssa's new room will be. I do not think the wall will be open here anymore once all the work is done, it will be a new closet.

Already a lot of progress has been made since these photos were taken. We are very thankful to my Dad who has been working hard everyday and is doing so much of this work! My Uncle Dan and Uncle Ted have also been working on it along with Dave and some friends. Thank you to everyone who has had a part, they have all been busy working so hard!! I hope to post some progress photos later this week.

First Tooth Fabulous

Rebekah has been asking since sometime in kindergarten, when her other friends began losing teeth, when she might get a loose tooth of her own. Based upon both of her older sisters losing their first teeth on the late side, I knew she had quite a while to go before she'd be experiencing any of this kind of excitement. Finally, a few weeks ago, she pointed out one of her bottom front teeth telling me it felt weird. I asked her if it was wiggly and we determined that she officially had her first loose tooth. This rather quickly convinced her that she could hardly eat anything at all for risk of the tooth hurting, or heaven forbid, becoming any looser. Over two years of waiting to basically figure out that she'd prefer to keep her deciduous teeth after all.

After about two weeks of apprehensive wiggling and going through a phase where the tooth was so loose she practically spit it out each time she spoke...On November 20th, the tooth came out and...she didn't even know it fell out when it happened. Rebekah was eating a snack as we were driving in the car after school when she called out to me from the back, "Mom, there's something in this puffed rice that is not puffed rice." It didn't immediately occur to me what she was talking about, so I didn't say much. About a minute or so later, I realized what happened and we had to fish through her snack filled cup holder in the car to find where she spit it out. She ran around cheering for about five straight minutes afterwards repeating over and over again, "It came out. My tooth came out. And it did not even hurt me at all. My tooth is really not there anymore. It came out..."


I love little window smiles!

I used a fancy, swirly font to write a letter to Rebekah from the tooth fairy, in part because Emma lost two teeth during this same week and completely lost {as in the tooth never made it from school to home after falling out of her mouth} one of them and I thought it would be fun for the tooth fairy to give her a hard time about the really lost tooth. So anyway, my computer printed letters seemed to go by rather unnoticed by both of the girls and the bottom sentence of her schoolwork here tells exactly what Rebekah thought of it:

"The Letter the Tooth Fairy gave me last week came from the computer."

So while she was thrilled to loose her first tooth, I guess as far as the tooth fairy goes, she is not easily impressed.

Flying By Fall

Fall flew by so fast this year. I know we aren't quite to Winter yet, but Thanksgiving is getting so close and it has already snowed here so it feels like Autumn is gone. Here's a bunch of photos from October and November...



Picking out pumpkins at Stein's.

Yummy pumpkin pizza.

The two older girls and I ran in a 5K donut dash at my parent's house. Any race that serves donuts at the finish line is Emma's kind of fun for sure!!

Our gym hosted a meet near the end of October and we had different "team spirit dress up days" throughout the week. All the gymnasts loved it!! This photo was taken on beach day. I wish I would have done a better job taking pics throughout the week, the kids had some pretty crazy attire going on.

And the meet itself...it was Rebekah's first meet ever, she was competing just for the fun of it. She decided Thursday night that she would compete Saturday. She talked to me throughout her entire beam routine, {something a competitor is not supposed to do and something I have never really witnessed in a meet before.} She is so sweet. Our optionals treated this home meet as a practice competition. It went well.

Way too much Halloween candy, most of which is still in our living room.

We love to help rake :-)

And of course, playing in the leaves is just as much fun!!

We had a pretty decent snowfall on November 11th to let us know that Winter is on it's way. The girls can't wait.

This was the first day of tech rehearsal, when among other things Alyssa found out how they would style her hair for each performance of A Christmas Carol. She LOVES it!!

14

Alyssa turned 14 last Friday!!

I remember being in the hospital, holding her tiny 5 pound 8 ounce body swaddled tight like a little burrito and thinking she was just the most perfect thing I had ever seen. I marveled at the tiny wrinkles on her fingers and toes and studied her delicate little finger nails. She was born with these amazing and wise steely eyes that just seemed to stare back right through me, as if she was examining every detail of me, just like I was of her. Now I know that with her imperfect newborn vision, she was trying to focus on something ~ anything, but at the time, being a young first-time mom, I was sure she had my number from the day she was born.

If you would have told me back then about the kind of fourteen year old young lady she would be someday, I could not have even imagined the girl we have today. It would have been just too much to dream up.

In the last few weeks alone, she has asked to drive Dave's car, gotten her first cell phone and filled out high school applications... pretty significant milestones that I can't even believe are upon us.

Alyssa has a gentle, careful, independent and creative nature. She's kind and attentive to anyone younger than she is, and respectful to anyone older. There's about a million different things I could say about her, mostly all to say that we are so thankful for Alyssa and the delightful young person she is. She has admittedly made our first year of parenting a teenager rather easy.

{at Disney World's Magic Kingdom in August, right after getting a kiss on the cheek from Marie.}

{at her MPact Girls "Friends" graduation in June. Alyssa still has a terrible dislike of fire of any kind, a little bit of the symbolism of this part of the ceremony is lost on her as she tries not to panic about the small flame she is holding.}

{At the Rainforest Café}

{Walking in Epcot's France with Rebekah. I always appreciate how watchful Alyssa is of her younger sisters!}

Happy 14th Birthday, Alyssa! 

 We love you very much!!

My Three Cleopatras

Earlier in the month we went to the public museum for their trick or treat night...


Learning sign language during an animal presentation.


In the Streets of Old Milwaukee exhibit there are a lot of old buildings and homes decorated for the time period and culture that they represent. The girls love running through there and playing make believe games as they speak in many foreign accents. Many of the windows have at least somewhat realistic looking figures inside {the woman peeking back out the window at them}...Rebekah only gets so close, I think they scare her a little.

In Japan.

Fancy posing Cleopatras.


This room with all the pretty shells is one of the girls favorite places in the museum. The lighting is kind of strange in there and I haven't figured out what setting to put my camera on to get good photos. I had to add a lot of fill light here, and Rebekah's still wouldn't come out quite right.

Emma in Cleopatra's Dance of the Butterfly.


Happy Halloween