The Woes of a Wanna-Be Do-It-Yourselfer

Our kitchen faucet has been leaking for a while.  I finally got around to calling a plumber.  He said the leak was inside the faucet, but he could install a new one for $$$.  We said, "No thank you.  We'll do it ourselves."  And he didn't even charge us for the service call - go, Mr. Rooter!  So, I bought a new faucet (this time without the pull-out sprayer because I've heard those tend to leak more than the other kind) and decided I could install it all by myself.  

Tobie was a big help.  She sat on the instructions and rubbed against my hands and even crawled under the sink with me.

The kids were actually a bit more helpful than that.  Helene handed me tools and gave me lots of advice.  Campbell took a picture of me at work:
After I'd been under the sink for about 2 hours (still trying to remove the old faucet), I had the kids start making dinner.  They had to haul water from the powder room sink and fill up a pot on the stove, since I didn't have the kitchen water working yet.  You'd have thought from the complaints that I was having them  fetch water from a well in the back yard!  But they were very helpful.

I finally realized why I was having such a hard time.  Where the faucet had leaked, it had rusted, so there was one nut that was extremely difficult to remove.  I had to give up and ask John to finish removing it when he got home (thank you!).

Here's the inside of the corroded, rusty, old faucet:
And all of its parts, once it was eventually removed:
Doesn't the new faucet look nice?
Next problem . . .
The water supply tubes do not reach the water supply lines.  There's an inch gap between the hot ones and about four inches between the cold ones!  Uh oh.
So now I'm having a cookie and doing internet research.  If any of you know how to fix my problem, please respond!  I'm assuming I may have to go back to the hardware store and get some sort of extension.  I'm on my fourth cookie of the afternoon, by the way.  Frustrating plumbing repairs require lots of cookie breaks.

Blankie, well-loved

When Helene was first born, she received a small "blankie" as a gift.  It has been the love of her life ever since.  It was about 1 foot square, flannel on one side, silk on the other, . . . just a small thing to snuggle.  It was light pink.  I can't find a picture of the exact one online, but this is basically what it looked like (except pink instead of blue and with silk ruffles around the edges).

It has been lost and found many times since then, once missing for almost 6 months.  Here is a picture of her with it when she was 3.  (I haven't figured out this Mac yet.  I rotated this picture on iPhoto, but it is not staying rotated when I upload it to Blogger.  Argh.)  It had lost some color by this point, looking more off-white than pink.

And here she is with Blankie now.  The poor thing is totally in shreds and mostly dingy brown, but she loves it more than ever.  Helene will turn 6 in two days.  I wonder if she'll be ready to give up Blankie before Blankie gives up the ghost.  I told her tonight that I was taking a picture so we'd always remember Blankie, even after she (yes, Blankie is a she) was completely in shreds and all worn out.  Helene cried at the thought.

Unseasonably Warm

We have had incredibly warm weather this week - in the 60s and 70s during the day.  Beautiful!  On Sunday, Campbell set up a Frisbee golf course for us (which fulfilled a requirement for Cub Scouts and provided a fun activity for the family).

Helene and I enjoyed wearing our bikinis and soaking up a little Vitamin D.
The boys went shirtless, just because they can.  Guys have it so easy!  ;)

I pulled some dead stuff out of the vegetable garden and added it to the compost.  So nice that the ground's not frozen or covered in snow!
Just for comparison's sake, here's what John's run in the foothills looked like last week:
And snow is in the forecast for tomorrow . . . so I had to write this before then.  I might want to look back at it to remind myself that I wasn't just dreaming.

Happy New Year

This is how I've felt during Christmas Break:











Campbell got a camera for Christmas (from his really cool Uncle Chad and Aunt Courtney). He has been super excited to use it at every opportunity. Today, John went skiing, and the kids and I went for a hike (we all skied together yesterday; two days in a row would overwhelm our children). Campbell took his camera along:

We did the 1.3 mile Lichen Loop at Heil Valley Ranch. It was a beautiful day, about 60 degrees. All the snow has melted, so the hike was pleasant. The kids had good attitudes (it was their idea to hike in the first place, so that helps), and they did lots of bouldering along the way.

See Campbell's blog for more pictures. Most of his pictures are not on the main page, but if you find the "friends" section on the bottom left of his page and click on "pictures" there, it will take you to his photos of the hike.

BIG NEWS: Helene decided to start blogging! I uploaded the pictures for her, but she did all the typing and spelling unassisted. Check it out.

There's a link to both kids' blogs on my page, under "Friends' Blogs."

Christmas Day

We had a nice, relaxing, lazy Christmas with just our little family of four this year. Campbell woke up at 5:30, which means I got up then, as well, to keep him away from what Santa had left until the rest of the family was up. He helped me make pigs-in-a-blanket while we awaited the others. Helene came downstairs at about 5:45, so I sent her up to wake up Daddy. John is usually the first one up, but he was on call and worked late on Christmas Eve. So, we finally got everyone downstairs before 6:00am, but John decided to torture the children a little more by telling them they had to do a happy Christmas dance first:

We tried to do everything kind of simple and small-scale this year. The kids seemed to enjoy their gifts. And, as always, the boxes and bows are almost as much fun to play with as the gifts inside:

I snapped this picture mid-morning because we were looking at the hundreds of birds that landed in the cottonwood. I posted it here because it shows what kind of weather we had for Christmas Day. It hasn't snowed in several days, but there's still some snow left on the ground. This was the warmest day we had had for a few weeks; it got up to about 45 in the afternoon. The sky was blue and the sun was warm enough that we enjoyed sitting out on our deck mid-morning, drinking coffee and reading new books, while the kids ran around in the green space and got some fresh air.

This is me peeling apples and Helene eating the peelings:

I had so much fun making this pie. It's from a Southern Living recipe that I saw before Thanksgiving and had been wanting to try. It calls for 4 1/2 pounds of apples! It's a balancing act trying to pile all of those apples on.

Here's our Christmas spread, which the children found to be suspiciously like a Thanksgiving spread. Helene is in the background with a plastic rose in her teeth. She thought I was taking a picture of her. We had turkey, mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, stuffing/dressing, rolls, and gravy. It was all wonderful, and we should be eating the leftovers for days. We used the Christmas china. I think it was the fanciest meal we've ever had with just the four of us.

John prepared a delicious herbed roasted turkey.

The pie baked down some, but was still huge. And yummy. The crust was wonderful and not too hard to make. I highly recommend this recipe. (I did not do the sauce that the recipe mentions, just the cornmeal crust and double apple pie.)

Take-Apart Station

In Campbell's first grade classroom, as well as at a summer camp he attended last summer, there was a take-apart station. People would donate old equipment (typewriters, phones, etc.), and the kids could take them apart with tools and just explore. Ever since, the kids have been asking to take stuff apart at home. We don't usually have stuff sitting around that I would like to have destroyed, though.

For his birthday, Campbell got a used laptop computer. I finally got around to taking the old desktop computer out of his bedroom this last weekend. So, the kids are having a great time taking it apart. They woke up early on Tuesday and spent an hour working on it before school, then another two hours on it when they got home in the afternoon. I don't know how much they're actually learning, but I think it's a good experience, good practice using tools, and a good way to take out their destructive tendencies. And it's better than watching TV!

Harry Potter Scars Are Cool

When Campbell was about 18 months old, he tripped at the museum and fell into the corner of a display cabinet. I rushed him to the ER, and they glued him up. He now has a nice vertical scar on the right side of his forehead.

Now Helene will have one, too. We took the kids to the Rec Center today to swim. Helene was in John's lap on the twisty tube slide. They had been sliding over and over again and having a blast, but this last time, Helene sat up instead of leaning back and bonked her head on the tube. She has a pretty deep horizontal cut. The lifeguards did a quick patch-up job, then we took her home, so John could do a better job.

He used the kitchen table as a surgical table and glued her up. Helene was very brave.

John told Helene that stitches create less of a scar, but Helene insisted that she wants a scar! I'm writing this down, so we can remind her of it when she's a teenager. She asked why anyone would not want a cool scar on their forehead. I told her 16-year-old girls are silly and get upset about any little blemish on their face. She laughed and said she'll never be that way. That's my girl!