Birthday #4

Trey had his forth birthday party last weekend and guess what kind of "theme" party he wanted. Anyone.....have a guess? Hmmm, a train party but this year it had to be a black engine party.

I found the perfect cake mold and it looked rather easy until 2am in the morning when my fingers were cramped from adding all that icing to the 3-D train. He LOVED it nonetheless.


He got a big boy bike from us for a gift and he looks so grown up sitting there. Breanne actually stole it and sat on it for a long time afterwards. I think she wants to be "grown up" too.

My parents got Trey his first "REAL" HO scale, black steam engine train and tracks for his birthday. He was so excited he was speechless! He just sat there in total awe saying, 'this is all mine? Just Trey's?' It seems like his lifelong hobby has started at a young age.

New Home

As many of you know we are currently in the middle of major renovation projects at our home. If you know me well, you know that I'm pulling my hair out about all the dirt and dust building up in my house as we speak. So, we moved the kids and I to my parents home and have been there over 3 weeks. (We originally thought this would take 4-7 days to complete. Oh were we wrong)

Parts of our farmhouse are over 100 years old so when we decide to renovate a room you never know what you are going to encounter or what suprises you will find. In our livingroom we took down the 1960's panel ceiling to discover a cracked an crumbling plaster ceiling which we had to take down only to discover beautiful wood beams throughout the room so we cleaned them up and it will eventually add character to the room. (this "project" added 5 days to our originally time crunch)

We also decided to replace the carpet in the livingroom and up the stairs since it was destroyed during the demo of our ceiling and our drywallers did a doosey on it as well. When we tore out the carpet on the steps we discovered finished steps that we decided to strip down, sand and stain. Little did we know that getting 40+ years of glue and varnish off those steps would take 100 years. (this "project" added, like I said, 100 years to the time crunch)

So as if all that wasn't enough for these "do it yourselfers" we decided to add hardwood flooring in the livingroom and refinish our kitchen floor since the clear coat topping was not hard enough when we originally did the floor. This was one of our dumbest decisions. (this "project" took two day but brought tears to both Arlan and I's eyes while we were sanding the floors at 3am in the morning.) The sanders weren't working for us and every time we ran it, it put more scratches in the floor that we couldn't get out. The only thing that semi-worked was sitting on the sander. Finally after about 12 hours of sitting on that darn sander we gave up, got out the little hand sander and spent the remaining 8 hours doing it on our hands and knees till it got smooth.

I must say I think we got in over our heads a bit this time but thanks to my dad and the Beiler clan we were able to get the project done and hopefully move back home by the end of the week.

Be sure to check in for the final results!!