Baby Lucas

Welp, he's finally here! Lucas Cole Mayers joined our family tuesday 1/11/11 (awesome birthday right!) at 1:53 pm. He weighed in at 8lbs 12 ozs and 21" long. He's a pretty mild mannered baby so far, and really only cries when he's hungry. He had a hard time breathing for the first little while so he was poked and prodded a lot while they monitored him, but it resolved itself in the first couple days and now he's good to go. Alex ADORES him and wants to hold/poke/lay on 24 hours a day. He calls him bebe yukas and we all think it is pretty much the cutest thing ever. Sorry about the lack of Luke's face in these pics, most of the good ones were taken with my mom's camera. I'll get those and post some better ones later, but here you go for now!

When does it stop?

The answer is never. Never ever. I have come to believe that life will never be slow or boring again. In theory our lives are not busy or stressful. In reality they are both. So I sat down and started looking at blogger I realized that I had not posted in 2 1/2 months. Then I started to ponder why it was I was such a slacker. Oh right, becuase of the afore mentioned busy & stress thing. Jeff still has a rediculous amount of credits he is taking and a teacher who assigns him pretty much a book a week to read. Durring the week when he's not in class or reading he is now out shoveling cow dung (litteraly) on the Romriell Ranch. Then on the weekends he works (or tries to) on whatever car we currently have getting ready to sell and then he tries to cram in some projects around the house somewhere in between. But don't feel too bad for him yet... Sunday? He sits on his butt and watches football uninterupted all day!! And as much as it pains me to say this, he deserves it. Don't tell him I said that.
As for me, only 2 months left on making this crazy baby boy. I realized the other day that I pretty much had not even begun to even THINK about what I needed to do before we have him. So of course since then I have been stressing out about it. Which is probably good because as we all know, there is a TON to do before a new baby arrives, and I was not joking in the slightest when I say I haven't even thought about it. So if anyone needs something to do....
Alex. Crazy kid. He split his head open last week which was pretty sad and made us feel like bad parents. We opted for no stitches since it was, again, on the back of his head and the scar will be covered with hair and the bleeding stopped pretty quickly. However, anywhere else and we would'a been cruising to the E.R. It was pretty nasty, but is now scabbing up nicely and doesn't seem to bug him much. He's getting skinny and smart too. If you ask him to count for you there is no way he'll do it, but if he thinks you aren't listening he'll count away. The other day he counted 8 toys in the tub with no problem. However if you try to get him to count it goes a little like this: one, two, three, four, three, three, three, one, three, etc. Stinking kid. If you ask him where his little brother is, he will point to his own stomach. If you ask him what his little brother's name is he usually says Bruce (the shark from Finding Nemo.) But I like to correct him and get him to say Luke because he says Yuke. It's cute how he says it.
That is pretty much our lives in a nutshell. Hope everything is well with everyone, and I'll try to not be such a slacker from now on!

Ta Da!!

So here we finally are, some before and after pics. Keep in mind we still have a lot of finishing work to do (painting, trim, hardware etc.) but for the most part we are up and functional. Up above you have the main kitchen wall, which also held the only cabinets that were in the kitchen. Those were obviously removed and replaced, and you can see the false ceiling up above that we ripped out. That gave us an extra 2 feet of head room. All of my cabinets are now a full 8 feet tall, with 2 feet to spare on the top! Its a little bit crazy how much bigger that made the place look.

Down below here we have the wall directly to the right of the upper pics. You can see there was nothing on it. Also the wall to the right in this pic is the wall we ripped out. That gave us an extra 3 1/2 feet of space in the kitchen. Not to mention how much it opened it up to the rest of the house, but we'll get to that.

And here we have the other side of that wall we hated so much. We didn't have to do too much in this room once the wall was down. We refinshed the floors, textured & painted the ceilings, replaced the light fixture, replaced a broken window. Um.. what else, a LOT of paint.

Ahhhh.... the living room. This one alsowasn't too bad. Except for the electricity. This room only had one outlet in it so we added a few more (which was no small feat, just ask all the blood splattered on the walls and the curse words echoing out of there...) In here we also textured & painted the ceilings (we actually did that in every room....) removed the wall paper, replaced light fixtures, repaired lots and lots of holes, and painted the heck out of it.

So, there you have most of the main floor. We are getting our bedroom carpeted soon so I will post some pics of that once it is done. But for the most part, now you have visted our almost brand new 90 year old house!!

Holy Crap!!

Ok, so my house has been completely all encompassing this sumer, and there hasn't been a post about anything other than that for a while. However, we are just about done (with the major stuff) and I can finally point out that SOMEHOW we managed to squeeze in a little fun this summer also. So here is some of our summer in a few pics. There are more but I am having issues getting them uploaded, so I will try for more later. Here we go!

Ross Park! We went to this swimming park on Jeff's birthday and had a blast! There was a lazy river, a regular pool and a kids activity play pool where the water is only about a foot deep and there's a big play toy in the center. There was also a slide that we were hard pressed to get Rhianna off of. She definitly was much braver this summer than last.

4th of July. We had sparklers. We watched fireworks, we had a BBQ. The usual.

Alex's first head wound. He fell backwards off a chair and landed on the thread post on my sewing machine (top pic.) It took a big chunk of scalp off and we were afraid he was going to have to have stitches. However, since it stopped bleeding and the scar would be covered by hair, we opted for no stitches.

That's what I have so far. I'll post more later!

Let there be a kitchen!

Oh man my life is exciting!! I have a sink, I have appliances, I have a coutertop!! I know, I know, all of you have all these things too. However, I can guarantee you that none of you have the tremendous appreciation for them that I do! So here is a 'durring' pic of my new kitchen. Off to the right here are my full lengths. Or massive wall o' cabinet. Please notice how tall the fridge is (it's not a small fridge) then how much farther up the wall the cabinets go. A full 8 feet of storage! Down below here are just some more durring shots. None of the uppers have been installed yet, that is happening tonight. So they are sitting all over the floor and you can see Jeff's butt in the pics because he is screwing the doors onto the frames as we speak. The last pic down on the bottom is out at my dad's shop while they were still building them. Jeff is sitting on the floor doing something... probably taking a nap. Anyway, hopefully soon we can post some DONE pics!

Moved In!

So, we got moved into our house last week. It's a little bit like camping seeing as how I still don't have a kitchen, but it's nice to have sooooo much more space than we are used to. Alex and Rhianna get up in the morning and just run laps around the house. You can hear them upstairs just running back and forth into and out of eachothers rooms having a good old time.
My dad brought over a few of my new kitchen cabinets today (just the boxes, they don't have doors or shelves yet) and I am a little amazed at all the new skills my Jeff has picked up in the last few months. In the last two days he has mowed the lawn, rewired and installed the plug in my range jack, drained and snaked the main line in my house that clogged (we have a weeping willow eating our main line) hooked up my washer and dryer and installed a light over them, then he helped build and paint (with a compressor sprayer, not a brush & roller) my 8 foot cabinets. Who the crap is this guy???
Anyway, right now you get no pictures because mostly the house is still in a massive state of disarray. There is stuff EVERYWHERE!!! So as soon as we get a little more cleaned up and you can actually see what it looks like I'll post some pics.

House Updates

Ok, so here we go! Here is (finally) a pic of the front on the house. The only thing that has changed out here so far is that boarded up window has been replaced. The other pic is of our living room ceiling (sweet light fixture huh?) we forgot to take pics of it before we textured it, but here it is textured, and you can see the line of where we had painted. It's amazing, we never really thought that some texture and a nice clean white celing would make SUCH a difference, but it really does. The wall in the kitchen is fully removed and the support beam that replaced it is pretty much done. The majority of the wiring has been completed throughout the whole house, and the are building my new closet in my bedroom as we speak. We have also fully removed the chimney and patched all the walls that had to be ripped down to do it. Most of all the walls have been patched and are ready to paint, and almost all the ugly 40 year old wallpaper has been removed. It still looks pretty much like a disaster in there, but we have made some really good progress over the last few weeks (thanks Dad!) It is starting to look like it might actually be completed one day! I'll get some more pics to post soon.