The Reveal

Hopefully you'll all be just as excited as Eamon to see.....

Our new sink!

Look, it swivels! (Or is he giving me that look for the overhyped drama going on here? Probably more the latter, eh?)

Fine, I'll let E show off the utility of this baby:

You can turn it on...

.but when Mom and Dad notice, you'll have to turn down the flow.

You can get a drink...

...or wash your face.

I suppose you could even wash your hands. 

Water conservation? BOOOOOOO.


Like the sink we loved at the old place, super deep on one side and huge, with a little side sink that perfectly holds a pan or muffin tin for soaking:


It blends so well with the other appliances.

Now, about that countertop....it's looking awfully beige. Hey, didn't some store open up in Denver last week?

Father's Day

We spent part of Father's Day weekend camping in the Buffalo Creek Wilderness Area. For Father's Day E kept Ray up all night. But before that, we had a lot of fun hiking about....





...photobombing each other....


...learning to climb...
...and being tough in general.

The Silent Characters

Thanks to the new camera, I can actually show you the rest of our family.
Anyone who comes to our house meets Donut.

Heck, he even lets E pet him. Sometimes.

If you provide food or are male, then Marco Polo will generally snuggle up to you (and yes, age is catching up to his eyesight).

But almost no one sees Smoke. On mornings when Smoke is slow to hide, E asks "what is that?" as the shadow runs by.

Somebody...

****




...GOT A NEW CAMERA!!!

And now you know what a Friday night looks like pre-bedtime around here.
I'd say more but I need to go play with my toy. Have a good weekend.

****Okay, I do have to note that Ray always laughs at E posing for the camera as "the Senator". But look where he gets it from. I will be playing with my camera, these two will be kissing babies or something.

Fire TRUCKS (bounce house)

While Ray finished the sink, E and I headed to an open house.

At the fire station.

E is in love with fire trucks. He liked the robotic dog. He wasn't so fond of the crowds and certainly did not want to actually get IN a truck, what are you, crazy?

But he did get in something else that he has previously been wary of.


No, not toddler jail.

Note the flailing limbs in the background of the next two shots.



A bajillion points if you guessed.....

...a bounce house!

Not only did he go in, he loved it. There was a line and each kid only got to go in for a couple of minutes. E asked for a second turn not long after coming out the first time.


Extra points for E because, unlike many of the kids there, he came out without argument. When we were leaving on older kid was crying because he'd had to come out of the bounce house, saying "I didn't have any fun"... E looked at me, puzzled, and said "I had fun!"  Every once in a while, it's all win.

Of course, this just gets us through Saturday of two weekends ago. The weekend wasn't over yet. But that is a whole OTHER post....

I already mentioned that we had a full weekend two weekends ago. Here is the first of three posts to explain that comment a bit further.

Ray and I both got the bug to start making some improvements on the house. Thanks to Heather's visit several months ago, I have had a sink in the garage awaiting a new faucet to vastly improve our kitchen (we both hated the enamel-covered aluminum super-deep double sink we had). Although E considered the sink in the garage great fun, a cast-iron sink is a bit of a tripping hazard. And it works better in the horizontal, plumbed state. Ray had finally had enough and decided that we were going to stop waiting for the perfect faucet and just get a good, workable one.

Thus, Saturday morning looked like this:


(Amazingly, Ray was managing to detach the plumbing while his wife sniggered and kept shooting in the background.)



One last time.


Yay, sock mitten dusting!

Amazingly, I don't have an "after" shot for you all. Partially because I'll never get this posted if I wait for one (I keep forgetting until late at night when the light in the kitchen is poor) and partially because E and I left to go do something else and left Ray alone to get the sink done. But that is a whole OTHER post....

So.. keep checking back, I'll get some before and after shots on this.....soon.

TUNNEL

This is technically warning for Cheryl, who has kindly offered to help with planning our landscaping. We just made it more difficult.

When our daycare changed their buildings around they no longer had room for the huge wood and plastic play structure they used to have. After months of seeing the plastic bits sitting in a side yard I finally had to ask - did they have plans for those?
They didn't. They just wanted them gone.
(Not shown: the Civic and Mazda with tunnels on top (and the climbing one sticking out the back of the Mazda) driving back to the house. Wish I'd gotten that picture!)
Fortunately E doesn't know this is work, so he got all the accumulated mud off for us (sorry about the white balance, he didn't actually go albino with happiness).
E was so happy that helping was hazardous.
Sorry, hon, should I remove that child from your head or just sit back here laughing and snapping pictures? 
TUNNEL!

I'm not sure where these will end up. My original plan to line them up in the side yard is temporarily foiled because E scoots out too fast to have a river rock landing pad. One is hiding under a tree next to the slide in the corner of our yard (where it does blend in better) and the others are in the side yard for now (the back yard, that is - Dad was concerned for the neighbors' sake, but we'll find other ways to torment them). Some parts may one day become part of a really fun bed - the ends are made to take 2x4's, so there are a lot of possibilities (hamster trail to the balcony?). Who knows. But for now E is having fun and we were able to haul one into the front yard last weekend and get a lot done while E played. However, that is a whole OTHER post....