July House Construction

After refinancing our house and doing a lot of number crunching, John and I decided to accept a load from my parents and to do our Phase 2 home addition that we’d dreamed of doing since we bought the house.  We didn’t want to carry any additional debt on the house but the stars kind of aligned and we figured it would be better to do it now, rather than later when we would have 2 kids in a construction zone. 

Our first call was to the great architect and contractor we worked with on our first addition.  We talked about what we had in mind and things started rolling.  We decided to add on a master bedroom, walk-in closet, and bathroom to the back of the house.  This added 400 square feet to our house.  It took up the existing patio area so our back lawn wasn’t affected much.  This was important to us so that Nala and our kids would have plenty of room to run around.

Before picture of the back of the house

We found a rather large lizard on the patio while we were cleaning everything to prep for demo

Demo began July 25^th

Trenches dug for forms – July 26^th

Forms – July 27^th

I just about died laughing when I walked out onto the back porch and spotted Nala stuck in the new formed off area.  She was able to jump in off of the back steps but didn’t know how to get out.  She was just waiting patiently for someone to come save her.

July 29th – August 2nd

Sunday, July 29^th

Landen knows that you use keys in the doorknob so now he loves to grab our keys and put them up to the doorknob.

I gave Landen a toothbrush to play with and he loves it.  He’ll even put it in his mouth.  It’s so great that he’s starting to use objects correctly.

Monday, July 30^th

Landen putting the keys up to the doorknob. He’s starting to show frustration when things don’t go the way he wants them to.

Dancing with Daddy during the Olympics

Tuesday, July 31^st

Look suspicious don’t they?

Wednesday, August 1^st

Happy Wednesday!

My shower time happy “helper”

Look at that crazy expression on Landen’s face!

Curly hair!

He always goes straight for the lip gloss bin

Thursday, August 2^nd

July 23rd – July 28th

Monday, July 23^rd

The day after we got home from Steph and Clay’s wedding weekend to San Luis Obispo we decided to stay home from work to “recover”. It was a nice lazy day and just what we needed. I pulled in Landen’s present from Santa Claus (finally) so he could check it out. He fell in love immediately!

Playtime! High five!

We spent some time in the backyard so Nala could run around and have some fun.

Wednesday, July 25^th

There’s an intruder  in my bed!

All dressed and ready to play!

Pretty girl

Now there’s an intruder in my shower!

Let’s eat Mommy!

Friday, July 27^th

Landen constantly pulls the hand towels off the oven and twirls them around.  The towels are never there when you need them.  It’s incredibly cute and totally annoying at the same time.

Trying some cut up banana

I hadn’t seen Nala for awhile so I poked my head out the back door to see if she was in the backyard.  I found her like this:

She had managed to jump into the area with the new forms for our addition but couldn’t get back out.  I laughed so hard!!  And then helped her out of course.

Saturday, July 28^th

Munching on a cookie

Playing with the newspaper

All dressed up for Jared and Kristie’s surprise baby shower

They were definitely surprised!

July 19th – July 22nd: Trip to San Luis Obispo

We took a trip up to San Luis Obispo to attend our friend Stephanie’s wedding.  We decided to make a long weekend of it and left on Thursday.  The trip was a learning experience: (1) Landen is NOT fond of road trips and (2) traveling with a baby is a lot of work!  It was generally a nice weekend though and we are glad we went to see Steph marry Clay.

Thursday, July 19^th

All packed up and ready to go! Let’s hit the road!

Asleep before we even make it to the gas station … we were praying he’d sleep for a LONG time …

… unfortunately we weren’t that lucky.  He woke up and started fussing and then crying.  We decided to pull off the road and take a break at a park so Landen could move around and get something to eat.  We stopped at Conejo Community Park.

I decided to sit in the backseat with Landen to hopefully keep him entertained for the next leg of our trip. He spent a little time “working” when we got back in the car.

Then after being a bit grumpy he fell asleep (thank goodness).

Unfortunately, we hit some traffic a bit down the road and Landen woke up when he realized we weren’t moving. At this point he was REALLY unhappy about being in the car and let us know it! Sobbing crying, refusing all toys and snacks. He finally got himself so choked up that he threw up all over!! I looked out the window and saw we were literally in the middle of nowhere – 2 lane road, rolling hills, not a building in sight. I told John to just keep driving.  We were about 30 minutes away from the hotel and I figured it wouldn’t do us much good to stop at that point.  I could change Landen’s clothes but couldn’t really clean out the carseat or anything. We just sucked it up and kept going.  Landen wasn’t happy but it was the right decision.

Once we got to the hotel I got us checked in while John got Landen out of the car. As soon as he picked him up he was happy as could be.  Stinker.  I found a luggage cart and took a load of luggage up to the room.  Once I dug out the bath stuff, John gave Landen a bath and I headed back out to the car to finish unpacking and clean up.  Unfortunately our room was a long hallway, elevator, and down a hill from the car … I was huffing and puffing after all my trips to get our luggage up there.  Then I had the pleasure of trying to clean the puke out of the carseat … it was not fun.  Really, really not fun.  I cleaned it out the best I could but I knew I’d need better supplies than Clorox wipes and washcloths from our room.  John decided to go out and buy us some dinner and stop by Walmart to get vinegar, a bucket, and a scrub brush.  That night I went back out to the car and scrubbed the heck out of everything, and then did a load of laundry in the hotel.  I didn’t want to stay up late to wait for the dryer to finish so I hung up the wet load in the bathroom to air dry. Landen was his regular jolly self, but John and I were both stressed, irritable, and exhausted.  It was not a good end to our first day of vacation.  I just hoped the car wouldn’t smell like puke (or vinegar) the whole weekend.

Bath time!

Friday, July 20^th

Luckily we all woke up happy pappy the next day and the car smelled completely normal!  After getting dressed we went downstairs for some breakfast.

By the time we got back up to the room, John and Landen were ready for a snooze.

I took some pictures of the room.

After naps we drove to downtown SLO for lunch with some of our friends.  We walked to the Splash Café to try their famous clam chowder.  I had something else of course but John really liked it.

We walked over to the San Luis Obispo Mission to check it out.

Mission Bells

Someone is hot, bored, and ready for a nap.

After some quiet time back in the hotel room we met the Moogers on the boardwalk to get dinner.

Dinner at the Cracked Crab

Gnawin’ on a bag of oyster crackers

My own weapon!

John’s loving it!

Saturday, July 21^st

Wedding day!!  We spent the morning in our room playing and taking naps.  We taught Landen how to do a high 5, which he thought was hilarious.

Eventually it was time to get dressed for the wedding. Don’t we spiff up well? I love my handsome boys!

The wedding venue

The festivities – isn’t Stephanie gorgeous?

The food and the party was really fun.  As the sun went down it got pretty dang cold.  Landen was pretty much confined to the stroller since he couldn’t crawl on the gravel.  He eventually fell asleep until we decided to head back to the hotel.

Sunday, July 22^nd

We woke up Sunday with a little bit of foreboding … we were really worried that Landen would give us a repeat performance of the drive up.  We got our act together though and started preparing to leave.  It took awhile to get everything packed up again.  Then we got to haul it back out to the car.  We were hoping that Landen would sleep more this time.  Fortunately, he did sleep a little more.  Unfortunately, we hit a ton of traffic.  We stopped at a park in Goletta and had a little picnic on the grass.

After getting back on the road and hitting more traffic I knew Landen wasn’t going to make it all the way home without another stop.  We decided to pull off the freeway in Northridge and stop at my Grandma’s for a visit.  She was over the moon to have us.  We stayed for a couple of hours and had pizza for dinner.  We finally piled back in the car and headed home.  Landen dozed off but woke up when we were twenty minutes out and was not happy.  He started the crazy crying thing again.  We decided to just push on and try to get home as quickly as possible. (Looking back on it now, I think he was probably hungry so we should have stopped to give him a bottle.)  We finally pulled in the driveway and got him out of the car immediately.  Once again, he was happy as could be as soon as we picked him up.  Luckily this time we made it to our destination without any vomiting!

See how red my eyes are from crying? I’m so happy to be out of that evil car!

It was a good trip but John and I decided that for the foreseeable future, we aren’t taking any road trips longer than a 2 hour drive away.  It’s just too stressful.