New Arrivals

Look who we picked up yesterday... our 13 baby chicks! 

So begins our newest adventure. Right now they are happily chirping away in the brooder we built them in our basement. It will be their home for the next 8 weeks, until they are big enough to move to their permanent home in the barn. 

That gives us plenty of time to get the barn ready for them. One of the previous owners had chickens, and so we were left with a lot of chicken keeping equipment - 2 large waterers, 2 large feeders, and the heat lamp we are currently using in the brooder, all of which were properly cleaned and sterilized. Next on our list is a major cleaning of the "chicken room."

The room is huge, so we're going to partition off a section for the coop. We're also re-purposing an old, water damaged shelving unit for nesting boxes. Like the equipment, this room needs a good deep cleaning before the chicks can move in. Fortunately, we have 2 months to do it in. We'll keep you updated!

Ta Da! Office Update

Two posts in one day! After the last post I glanced through the archives and saw this post about our home office. Well, we finally finished it earlier this year. I love how it turned out!

Butterfly Garden

David and Emily bought me a bunch of perennials for Mother's Day this year, and they spent a couple of weeks waiting for the garden bed to be prepped for planting. We spent an afternoon digging out the grass and weeds, saving the few perennials and bulbs that were still in the bed, and laying down a good layer of landscaping fabric. We dumped in some new garden soil and were ready to plant!

Before...

... All dug out...

... Done!

Our plants include: Bee balm, Delphinium, Liatris, Butterfly weed, Oat grass, Brown-eyed susan, Purple coneflower, Baby's breath, Ice plant (Delosperma), Blanket flower, Parsley (for caterpillars), alyssum, and zinnias. There's also a large Sedum that was already there, some daffodils, hyacinth, and crocuses.

Unplanned Blog Sabbatical...

Apparently, in my world, having a toddler and blogging don't go hand in hand. Has it really been almost 2 years since my last post???

Aside from our continuing baby adventure, which is a never-ending, always surprising, and forever amazing, not too much has been going on. The gardens we spent so much time working on fell to the wayside, aided by the fact that all the grasses and weeds we so diligently removed came back with a vengeance. I managed to rescue some Hostas from the wilderness, and moved some wild roses to the garden bed next to the garage. Our address post near the road received some daylillies, as did the front of the barn. We also managed to enlarge our fire pit last summer, and have yet to have a single fire in it. Our bonfire pile has been accumulating for the past 2 summers, and we can't wait for a great excuse to light it!

In other news, our household grew with the addition of 2 new feline members. Finnegan came to us during a deep freeze in January. Figuring he lost his way, we gave him lots of food and water, a cardboard box home with plenty of towels to curl up in until the cold snap broke and he could head on home. After a couple of days of relatively "warm" weather, Finn was still hanging around, so we welcomed him in. The vet estimated that he was around 18 months old.

 

 The next addition was found next door to our daycare. A family's cat had had kittens, and they were up for adoption. David couldn't resist this one, and we called him an early birthday gift. He's has quite the personality - he'll follow us around the yard, loves playing fetch with sticks, and jumping out to surprise you if you happen past one of his many hiding spots. We named him Quicksilver, but call him Silver for short.

Although we are still lacking in land (and funds) for our alpaca dream, we have finally started work on our hobby farm. We have begun work on our new vegetable garden, plants have been purchased for converting a currently weed-filled garden into a butterfly garden, and our biggest project for this year: preparing for the arrival of 12 day-old chicks, which includes not only preparing a space for them to grow for the first 6 weeks, but also getting the barn's chicken room ready, and fencing in a chicken run for them as well. 

In other news, we saw one of our wild neighbours yesterday evening. This coyote passed through our yard, stopping briefly when he (or she?) heard us go out onto the deck to take some pictures. He stayed for a minute or two before crossing our border into the woods behind us. What an amazing encounter! Of course, our next step of action is to install a motion sensing security light on the back of our barn, and increase the amount of lighting we have on the property to discourage our canine friend from coming closer to our home, cats, and future chicken home.

Since we've taken an unplanned sabbatical from blogging, let's try this again, shall we?

New Garden

It's amazing how quickly the days fill up with a 6 month old! We did manage to get some work finally done on a garden. We finally started to outline and fill in our garden by our huge rock. I've wanted to do this garden for quite a while, since you can see it as soon as you start to drive up our driveway. 

Between the rock and our Juniper

Another moss and a pink stonecrop, with our existing

wild roses and day lilies - this part is closest to the

driveway

We added some brown eyed susans, foxglove, lupine, purple hollyhock, pink hollyhock, a moss, a dwarf monkshood, and some orange flowers whose name I forget. I also planted 25 daffodil and 40 pink tulip bulbs for next spring! There looks like there is a huge empty space in the middle, and that's because there is. I was looking for regular monkshood, which grows to around 1.2m tall but they only had the dwarf variety. I'm absolutely set on having monkshood, so I've left the space and my mission for next spring is to track it down. Our last step is to get a couple bags of mulch to protect everything over the winter.

Newfoundland Vacation (Photo Heavy!)

Emily and I have been away for the past 3 weeks - David sent us off to Newfoundland to visit my family. My dad calls his parents every evening, and since Emily was born my Grandmother instructs my dad to "give that little girl a kiss and a hug for me!"

It took us 3 days of driving to get there (with lots of breaks for Miss Emily), but she was such a good little traveller!

She got to meet most of the family, as everyone was there for my grandparents' 71st wedding anniversary.

We also helped celebrate my Aunt & Uncle's 50th wedding anniversary. I got screeched in at the party (but got to drink Purity Syrup rather than screech, as I'm nursing), and am now an "honourary" Newfie.

We had a great time at a Mussel boil on the beach...

Emily's First time on the Beach!

And Emily had a bath in her Great-Great-Grandmother's bowl (she was a midwife, and most of the children born in Bonne Bay were washed in that bowl, including Emily's Great-Grandmother and Grandmother). She had a great time, splashing water all over Grammy's floor!

We had a great time, and finally after 3 weeks it was time to say goodbye...

Rocky Harbour, Newfoundland

... and head home.

Unexpected Project

A few nights ago, David and I were talking about our office, and what we could do to freshen it up. Our first thought, naturally, was paint. We contemplated many different colours, but couldn't settle on any one colour. Until David asked if we had paint in the basement. When I painted the craft/guest room when we first moved it, I bought a gallon of green paint as well as a gallon of blue paint (even though it turned out I only needed a quart of the blue). So, at 11pm we emptied out the office, I patched all the nail holes in the walls left by the previous owner, and then started cutting in. By the time I was finished it was 2am! Emily woke up at 5:30 for her feeding, and when she went back to sleep, I found myself wide awake. I tossed and turned for a little while before giving up. I figured, if I'm awake, I may as well get busy. By 11am, the main painting was done. We had to run out for some paint for the trim, and by supper time all the painting was finished.

We looked through office furniture at Ikea and finally settled on some pieces that will (eventually) work well in the room. Although, we can't afford to pick them up now, over the next few months our tiny office will have a new, organized look!

Before - the yellow was really intense...

After - A nice, cool, relaxing blue

The office furniture on our "to buy" list

Summer Projects...

As usual, I have a long list of projects for this summer. First and foremost is to repair and repaint my old bedroom furniture from my childhood for Emily. When I was 16 I bought myself a new bedroom set, and gave my old set to my youngest cousin. She used it for many years, until she got a new set. It then went to live in my aunt and uncle's barn for the next 7 years. Just before Emily was born, my uncle called and asked if I wanted the furniture back, warning me that it was in pretty rough shape. I said we'd take a look at it and see if it was worth restoring.

On first inspection, it looked pretty bad. The once white paint had a greyish speckling to it, there were some chips in the pain and in the wood, mice had made one drawer their home, and some of the drawers themselves will need a little work. Although David thought they were a lost cause, I was (and still am) pretty optimistic.

I went out to our shed a couple days ago to have another look and to start cleaning with a bleach solution. I wanted to know how bad the damage was to the paint. As it turns out, the grey speckling that I thought might have been mildew damage was only dirt! So, with a little love and care the furniture will look as good, if not better, than it ever has!

Bureau

Bureau with hutch (will be delivered later)

The mouse-home drawer

Vanity/Desk

You can see the clean spot in the middle of this drawer...

We're still waiting for the hutch to go on one of the bureaus, as well as a corner unit. I can't wait to get started on these!

Finished Basement!

Our basement is finally done! We chose a red oak laminate floor, and it's amazing how much bigger the living room looks!

Now it's just a matter of unpacking all of those boxes and getting everything back into order!

Basement Update

Once the crew ripped up the sub-floor that they had exposed, they found that the water had stayed to one half of the basement. They set up a couple of fans and a de-humidifier (which means we now watch TV with the volume really high!) and let them run for a few days to get rid of the moisture. On Saturday, the supervisor came by to see how everything was drying out, check if the water had run any further into the basement, and to get us to choose our flooring.

The damage so far...

A sample of our new flooring!

 It turns out that the water went further than they originally thought, and the whole floor, including the craft/guest room, has to come up (squee!). They're going to start building everything back on the side they tore up this week (including laying the new laminate flooring), move everything to the finished side, then rip up the other half of the basement. So, we should have a "new" basement in a couple of weeks!

Happy Mother's Day!

Another year, another basement...

Wow, this whole trying to keep up a blog and raise a baby at the same time is proving very difficult!

Emily is doing great! She's sleeping her nights (from about 9pm to 5am!), although she hasn't been doing so well with daytime naps any more. Usually she'll only sleep for about 20 - 30 minutes at a time (45 if I'm really lucky!). That means that once she goes down for the night, I'm pretty much sleepwalking and vegging out in front of the TV. We've also been driving David into work each day and hanging out at my parent's place. That wasn't in our initial plans, but it turned out to be the wiser financial decision. We're counting down the weeks until David is off for the summer (only a week and a half left!).

Emily rocking her jeans at 2 months old

We had a super moon on Saturday, May 5th. We completely forgot about it until 11:30 that night, so we didn't get photos of it rising. I did manage to get a few interesting photos on the manual setting of my camera though, by playing around with the settings.

Now I'm sure you're curious as to the meaning of the title. On Monday night, David went down into our closet under the stairs to clean the litter box we have in there, and discovered water on the floor. Praying that it wasn't a sump pump failure again, he went into the utility room to investigate. Fortunately the sump pump was working, however the hot water tank had sprung a leak. There was a considerable amount of water on the floor, but it was no where near as bad as 2 years ago.

Yesterday morning the insurance company was called, the claims manager came by to check out the damage, and then the post-disaster contractor came by with his crew (the same guys from last time). After a day of hard work, we now have a new (and bigger) hot water tank, and half of our carpet has been taken up. Although many people may find this devastating, you have to understand that we regretted our decision to put down carpet. The cats thought the basement was their personal scratching post, and set about destroying the new carpet immediately after the crew finished the job in 2010. So, while it sucks that we are once again living through yet another unplanned renovation, looking on the bright side: we can now (possibly) get the engineered hardwood floor we should have agreed to when the contractor suggested it last time!

The Before...

The Reno: From the stairs to the utility room...

The rest of the basement

So, on the agenda today is to take up the sub-floor to see how far the water went and what the extent of the damage is. We're keeping our fingers crossed that the entire floor has to come up, just to make it worth the cost of our deductible!

I'm taking this fleeting moment for a quick update! Emily is now 1 month old, and these past few weeks have been quite the adventure!

Our first night home was a sleepless night, as Emily's digestive system was still working itself out. Our little girl cried most of the night and no amount of feeding/changing/rocking/bouncing would help. We called our "emergency support team" (my mom & dad, and grandmother), who came out the next day and stayed with us for 2 nights. Emily was experiencing a bad case of gas, and once we figured that out (and how to deal with it), things went a lot smoother.

Now she's been eating like a champ, taking lots of naps during the day, and has been sleeping for 4-5 hour blocks at night! Life has been settling into a new routine and we've been loving every moment of it!

Announcing Emily Rose!

 This morning we welcomed our newest addition, Emily Rose. Born at 10:21 this morning, weighing 7lbs 5oz and measuring 19" long!

Waiting for baby...

So I've been on maternity leave for the past 2 weeks, and yet haven't found the time energy to post even once. Things have been pretty quiet around here; most of my days are spent taking it easy, doing some simple household chores (washing the dishes mostly), and wondering how much longer it will be before Emily decides to make her appearance. We have now passed the due date and still no sings of impending birth.

38 Weeks                                                        40 Weeks

My aunt and uncle came by a couple of weeks ago to drop off my old bedroom set from when I was a kid. It spent a few years stored in their barn, so it needs a bit of work before it will move into the baby's room (paint, minor repairs). That will be one of our projects once mother nature tires of this whole winter thing and starts to move into spring/summer. In the meantime, we re-arranged the room (again) and moved the large bookcase back down to the basement (trying to make room for the furniture I was hoping would be able to go into her room). On the plus side, we've made a nice play/reading area at the back of the downstairs living room!

In an attempt to be productive, I have managed to churn the cutest little baby sweater (although I may be biased). It's worked in Malabrigo lace with the cutest eyelet pattern. It only took 4 days from beginning to end, and we can't wait to see her in it! 

The christening gown has been put on hold for the moment - the pattern, though beautiful, takes a little more thought than I'm able to deal with at this point, but I should have until April or May to get it done... plenty of time! =)