I want a hamburger, no a cheeseburger. . .

In the basement we created a little play area under the stairs. I'm thinking we should paint McDonald's drive up windows on the wall.

Here is what the house looks like as of mid-August. We are hoping to move in by mid-September.

Mia in the girl's room

Nothing subtle about this choice of color. The painters came back and put an extra coat on to try and tone it down, but its still pretty sassy. This is the girls room, a bonus room above the garage that they are going to use as their bedroom for the foreseeable future. There are two dormers on the right of this photo that will each contain a bed. The girls one request was that they wanted a stage in their room to perform on (fashion shows, karaoke, etc.), so the framers built the stage that mia is standing behind.

Alright, so now that we have recovered our camera, fast forward five months on the house. Here are Jill and Ainsley in the great room circa the second week of August.

Pre-school graduation

Here is Ainsley on pre-school graduation day. We thought our camera was stolen/lost this day because we could not find it for the next four months. Alas, last week a friend of a friend produced our camera that they had found on the side of the road and wondered whose it was. We must have left it on the top of the car following this preschool graduation and drove off. The camera has some nicks and scrapes, but we are just happy to have recovered the 680 pictures that were on the memory stick!!

Ainsley's fantastic finish. . .ta da!

Here is Ainsley finishing off her gymnastics routine in her year end performance. She loved her pretty pink and purple velvet outfit so much she wore it around the house for weeks. She would ensconce herself in velvet if it were socially acceptable.

Easter Egg Smash Off

Each year at Easter we have a smash off. When you take two hard boiled eggs and smash them end on end, one or the other will break. We create a bracket, the trash talking kicks in, and we start smashing until only one egg (or one end of one egg) is left standing. This year Grandpa's John Deere green/yellow egg was the grand champion.

Here is the hole with the coils inside. Pretty cool technology if you're smart enough to understand it (I am not). For Christmas I gave Jill a series of certificates related to the house (one half hour of discussing flooring without rolling my eyes, etc.). One of the certificates was for one free environmentally-friendly upgrade without me even asking the cost. I never imagined she would choose something as big (and OUCH expensive) as this!

This is the hole they dug in our backyard to put in the geothermal heating/cooling. It was roughly 9 feet deep, 30 feet wide and 100 feet long.

timbers over the front door

Master bedroom to be

This is the master bed and master bath. Over on the left is the cutout for the two-way fireplace.

concrete for the patio

Here they are pouring the concrete for the patio and the footings for the posts for the deck in back.