StevenLaura

I finally posted the promised cute K pictures. She's a little bundle of joy and peace, full of smiles and aptly named. It appears she thinks she's a pirate. Her favorite game is to say "arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr." She laughs when you repeat the "arrrrrr" back to her.

K got constipated from the solids we put her on. We fixed it. 'Nough said. That was the easiest fix of the last week and a half. She continues to love solid foods. As you can see above, K's second favorite game seems to be wearing a beard of food. (Maybe she thinks it helps her look like a pirate?) She has also started rolling ALL over the floor. It's the newest, funnest, thing to do. She's gotten really strong over the past two weeks! It's remarkable!

E has caught another cold. She is coughing up a lung in her bed as I speak. K aslo has it (minus the cough). That said - BLESSINGS! - E does NOT have an ear infection or a high fever!!! It appears having the tubes in is helping!

S continues to, very slowly, much slower than we'd like, recover. He is still sick.

I saw a specialist today to see what to do about my throat. Apparently I never got rid of the strep last month. And I had strep in December as well, so I guess that's not good. "Not good" enough that my doc sent me to this specialist, who gave me a different dose of antibiotic, and told me to see him again if it didn't get better to talk 'tonsils.' (This "reoccurant strep" thing has happened to me before.) That said, I think this should kick it. I'm not worried.

The rodent guy has caught 5 red squirrels. At $50 per squirrel, that's an expensive little family of rodents! I guess it's nice to know that our new house didn't go COMPLETELY unused over the last 9 months to 3 years (or however long it's been since it had regular occupants). The rodent guy ("Josh" -- he goes to our church, so now we know one more church person) is now working at fixing up all the entry points, as it appears we have caught the entire family.

We figured out where the smell in our new house came from -- it was all the stove, after all. It appears, after doing some more digging, that a rodent had NOT fallen into our wall and died, but instead a family of mice had, at one point, lived in the insulation in our stove. I looked in to their little home and I can't blame them! It was easy to crawl into, following the gas pipe up from the basement, and very cozy. But they're not tidy animals, and they left little reminders of themselves all throughout the oven's insulated and hard-to-reach if not impossible-to-clean nooks and crannies (as well as on the floor under the oven). So, the smell came because we'd turned our oven on.

That's the bad news. The good news is -- the mice appear to have vacated the house long ago (none of the traps throughout the house have sprung over the last few weeks and their entry point to the kitchen had been patched up by the previous owner) and WE GET A NEW STOVE! Thanks to a "no down payment no interest for 12 months" deal at Sears, tonight we bought our first appliance for this new house. We decided on a stove with FIVE stovetop burners, oh what luxury! S's really excited about the fifth burner, as it's extra long and a perfect size to heat up our oval dutch oven. We're both really excited about having a gas oven.

Josh the rodent guy is going to drywall our garage next week so that the rodents stop using it as their playground/ accessing our attic through it, and before that we'll have an electrician come in to find out why the outlets in the garage don't work. (IF YOU KNOW A GOOD ELECTRICIAN -- we're still looking for someone, so let us know!!!)

All in all, this house is EXPENSIVE so far! Here's hoping that all these improvements help, long term! And here's hoping that last lingering W2 gets to us soon so we can get our tax return!