Happy Pre-Easter!

We had an early Easter Party @ Mike and Shelly's house - our wonderful Uncle and Aunt. Mikey and Joshy hid chocolate easter eggs for Jaren though he did need a little help finding them all. :) He didn't quite get the concept as you can see from below where Josh put one right in front of him. But that also maybe has to do with the fact that we don't let Jaren eat chocolate yet and I don't think he really knew what it was.

 

We love seeing them and were excited to have a chance to bond. Happy pre-Easter 2011!

 

Tidbits of April 2011

   

Now that I don't print off every photo I take to add to my giant collection of photo albums, I think of this blog as a place to put all these memories and small moments. So here are a few miscellaneous pictures from last April. One day Jaren was playing by himself in his room and just laughing away so I peaked in to see what was making him so happy and the first picture below is what I saw- him sitting and reading a book to himself. Oh it melted my little teacher heart. Jaren has always really liked books and will sit for ages with me or alone and read story after story. 

 

So this is a tribute to all husbands out there who for some reason can't seem to manage to pick up their own clothes. I hesitate in posting this in that Varian and I have recently discussed this again and he's doing so much better and putting his clothes in the laundry basket (which usually are in the laundry room). In our Brisbane house our laundry was out in the garage and so we kept our baskets in the bathroom. The first week we were there he joked about how he was almost tempted to leave his clothes on the floor again but how that would probably drive me crazy since the baskets were right there. We had a laugh about it but then after a week or so this is what started to happen. Sigh, old habits are hard to break

And just another photo tribute to laundry I took this picture when Varian went out of town on a little trip with his sister. The caption in my head was, "you can't be lonely when you have all this laundry to keep you company." I had gone through all our bags of stored and donated baby clothes to wash them all in preparation for baby Reid coming, and in general laundry can pile up for me as it is. But while he was away I went through and washed and sorted everything. Getting ready for a baby is hard work! :) 

A Work in Progress

Occasionally Varian and/or I would have to drive back up to Ipswich to meet the builders at our house and go through with them, make various decisions..etc. Shortly after the floods one of the inspectors told me that as a father he was telling me not to come in the house again, that it was too contaminated. But after a few months of ripping everything out, sterilizing and rebuilding I too could go back in. Here are some shots of some of the rebuilding process back in April.

 

One challenge we had was picking out things separately. The builders had 6 tile combinations we could choose from. We really wanted a darker non-peachy floor tile so we went with this one. So we took a picture of it and then weeks later picked out carpet and paint colors we hoped would match.

 

The white tiles are for the shower, side of the bath, and splash tiles of the bathroom sink and kitchen. The smaller white square is the color of our cupboards, the smaller grey square is the color of our counter tops, the shiny silver bar is the edging of our kitchen splash tiles (nice and modern) and the feature little square tiles are a strip down our shower and down the wall next to the bath tub.

 

Carpets were sadly not covered by our insurance but luckily we found a nice man giving flood discounts and went with his company. We kept trying to take pictures of everything and hoped to match them from the photos and our memories. We hoped to replace our black furniture and hence the black flip-flop so we could see how the contrast looked. I really do like our carpets and I like the tiles, but my initial impression when they both were finally installed next to each other was that they didn't match. I had picture the tiles as being just a dark charcoal grey and that the carpets would be fine, but the former ended up having a brown tinge to it and the carpets more of a blue cool color tone. Both look great with the wall paint we choose, Frosted Ice (light grey) and our white trim, but when you stand in between the two you notice the discrepancies.

This giant skiff was placed in front of our house for months, ruining our glass and cement edging and filling up again and again with plaster and cupboards and everything else that made up the inside of our home. Meanwhile all our plants were growing wild and unkempt.

We paid extra to have the builders turn our garage into a 4th bedroom and as part of the deal had to go out and find our own bricks to match.

Jaren discovered his love of playing in the front seat (supervised) and it has been an obsession with him ever since. We'll have to drag him out sometimes while he stretches his hands towards the driver's seat and cries, "Car! Car!" Maybe one day he'll be a chauffeur.