Now you see it....

When we were first looking at the house, I noticed the walls had a lot of finger prints on them.  It was pretty clear that the people living here before us weren't neat freaks so the finger prints seemed like they belonged. We got the keys and I got to work with my magic erasers.  They took off all the fingerprints, but left behind some residue.  I washed the residue off, but it still left marks.  It turned into way too much work.  After really checking the walls out, we realized they used a flat paint. Why would anyone use a flat paint?  I've been staring at walls that were accumulating Purdum fingerprints for the past few weeks and I convinced Jon to repaint the house.  He wasn't thrilled, but he loves me!  

We finished the downstairs last night.  It looks so much better and smudges wipe right off with nothing left behind. Its amazing how much something little like paint changes everything.  We'll probably start the upstairs this weekend and then maybe take a whole night off to rest before we start the deck!

Clean walls with no little finger prints staring at me.  I love it!

Bear

Ben has successfully completed another year of cub scouts.  He has moved on from Wolf to Bear.  We finished out the year in Lakewood and he'll start back in the fall with the Olmsted Twp group. 

Friends

Now that the boys have met every single kid in the neighborhood, Ellie has claimed most of them as her friends too.  Luckily, they seem to be ok with that. Ellie hitched a ride with her friend Emmy.  She even got to drive, but that didn't go so well!

Ellie inherited skates from another friend that outgrew them.  She's basically just walking right now, but she's having fun.

Busy morning

Apparently the kids had a really good time playing....

He was pooped!

New pj's

I love taking the kids shopping for pajamas.  They always look so cute and have fun picking them out.  I think I just like that we put on new pj's after bath time...the only time they're clean for more than 30seconds all summer long!

Party animal

The kids went to a birthday party where the main attraction was Jungle Terry.  He's a toned down version of Steve Irwin who travels around showing off his animal friends.  The kids were very excited to see a white skunk, dove, chinchilla, hedge hog, crocodile and snakes to name a few.  They got to pet them, play on a brand new swing set and had major amounts of sweets.  It was a good time!

My Mothers Day

Jon did some landscaping for me yesterday.  It turned out amazing.  It will be nice when the bushes in the back come back to life and get some green on them.

Wordless Wednesday: Random pics from the week

Update

I'm not sure what I was thinking in the last post.  I said Ellie would have the bike thing down by the end of the week.  After her nap she went back out, hopped on and started riding.  She's mastered her Minnie bike!

Bikes!

Jon took Ben out to get a new helmet yesterday.  That got us thinking about the whole bike situation.  Ben got a new one last year.  Sam has Bens first bike which he has outgrown, but is still riding.  We bit the bullet and got Sam and Ellie a new bike and were able to pass down Sams bike to Zach.  Ellie is thrilled.  She has a Minnie bike and helmet to match her Minnie shoes.  Jon was thrilled because her bike was marked down huge!  

Ellie is pretty close to getting the hang of riding a bike. She keeps breaking instead of moving and forgets to look where she's going.  I have no doubt she'll have the hang of it by the end of the week.

Zach is going to require a bit more patience and practice. He loves feeling like a big boy like his brothers so I'm not too worried about him either.

Wipeout

Ben was out riding bikes with his friends last night.  I'm not completely sure what happened, but I think some not paying attention was involved.  Ben hit the curb and had his first major fall off his bike.  Thank goodness he was wearing his helmet.  Based on the bump he has on his head, I'm confident we would have been in the ER last night if he didn't have a helmet on.  

Last night just before bed:

Its not just red, thats all swollen and gross!

This morning:

The bump isn't as red today, but its still huge.

The helmet:  

The visor wont stay in place anymore and you can see a chunk of his helmet is missing in the middle.  Fortunately, hes already talking about getting a new helmet so he can ride bikes again today.

All grown up

Notice anything missing?  Ben came up to Jon when he got home from work and said he was ready to lose the training wheels.  Jon happily got rid of them and Ben was off.  He's a little unsteady, but he hasn't fallen. I was expecting a couple bloody body parts tonight, but he's doing great so far.  We're two proud parents!

Decorations

Corrie found this decoration for Ellies room and helped us put it up over the weekend.  Cute is an understatement! Ellie loves it.

Letting go

I went out yesterday for a few hours.  The kids were in the back yard and everything was normal.  When I came home, I pulled around the corner just in time to see a line of kids running through the garage and into the house.  Jon said the boys made friends and they had been out riding bikes with them and then going from house to house to play all afternoon.  I'm thrilled that they've made friends....even though so far they are all girls!  I wanted a street full of kids for them to play with.  I want a basement full of laughing, dumb kid jokes and secrets.  They didn't have any of this in Lakewood.  We had a couple kids on our street that they played with once and a while, but I wanted so much more for them.  Now we have it and a little part of me is freaking out inside.  In the 24hrs they've had these friends, they've started riding bikes in the street.  That's something we've never let them do before.  Not only are they in the street, but we can't see them the entire time. They've never been allowed to ride more than 4 or 5 house away on either side of us.  Now they have two connecting cul de sacs that we can't see.  We've also had a few times when we didn't know where the kids were.  We knew who they were with, but we didn't know whose house they were at, if they were riding bikes or something else.  This is a whole new thing for us.  I know this is how kids are.  This is normal and this is good, but its a big change in 24hrs!

Almost done

We've been living with boxes for so long, we've been on a mission to unpack as quickly as possible.  Aside from the basement and a few boxes with all of our pictures in them, we are unpacked!  We don't have anything on the walls yet, but it feels so good to have a functional house.  Here are a couple downstairs pictures:

The living room

Half the kitchen and dining room

Part of the kitchen and family room

Today

We finally got the ok to move last Thursday.  I was thinking we were going to be delayed another week so we unpacked a few things and got a little lazy about packing up the kitchen and some other random things. Once we got the ok, it was a whirlwind.  Gram was coming up Friday afternoon so I knew the kids would be covered on moving day, but we planned on painting the kids rooms before we moved in, we needed to clean and hang some hardware for curtains and blinds.  We didn't get the keys until Friday morning.  Luckily we have some amazing family and friends who stepped up and helped us get it done.  Poor Corrie painted 2 rooms by herself.  3 colors and 9hrs later, they look amazing!
We signed papers at 9am Friday, got the keys at 11:30, worked until 10pm and didn't get to bed until after midnight. A long day is an understatement!  We barely slept, but were wired Saturday morning.  We were organized and ready, we had a great group of guys, but we needed a bigger truck.  We ended up making 2 trips. We were all exhausted, but we were home.
Jon was off Friday through today.  We busted through a lot of the boxes so we could just relax today.  We went out for breakfast, did some exploring and are enjoying the house. It feels so good to have more space, fewer boxes and multiple bathrooms!  Life is good.

Outside

After the longest, coldest and snowiest winter ever, it was finally warming up (Its in the low 40's today) so we hit Bens favorite park.

Look at those cool dudes.

Sam only fell off the slide once!

Ben is super rad!

Improvement???

Mall time

The kids and I met Jon at the mall on a rainy Monday last week.  Since we didn't have any food in the house, we hit Panera for some bagels for lunch.  Since boxes were all over the house, a stop at the play area as a must!

We're back!

After a last minute delay and a crazy amount of drama, we're moved and the internet is up and running!  I'll post more about the house later, but I made it a point to take pictures to update the blog so I want to get some of those up.  

We headed to the Easter egg hunt on what should have been moving day.  Ellie wasn't interested in pictures, but she was very excited for candy!

The boys spent that weekend with Gram so we were short two kids while we did dome shopping, hung out at Corries and had a cookout that night.