We're Local

So now we live on the other side of the same valley, right? So we're already pretty familiar with the happenings over here, but we thought we'd do some fun things that we hadn't before. 

We headed up to the Zermatt resort, because they have a 'mini golf' course for their guests (and us, ha!) and our kids had never golfed before and it was free so OK! Usually it costs a dollar or something, but everyone gets one free game this summer. 

It's basically an 18 hole golf course minus the.... fairways? No, that's where the hole is, right? The.... drive way? I know nothing about golf! What ever you want to call it, it was adorable. And beautiful! We live in a crazy gorgeous place. It's just a fact.

Caleb and I carefully explained the rules, the scoring system, the order of whose turn it is, etc.... and let them loose. The rules lasted for the first hole.

Then it sort of turned into a violence-free version of field hockey. 

We just let them go. They were having a blast, they weren't being destructive, and Caleb and I had an hour long lovely stroll through a desert mountain garden! What's not to love about that?

Claire was dialing in her Granny swing, which I'm pleased to say she perfected.

She also chose to dip her club in the stream when ever she passed by, to "wash it."

It was nice to leave the project and spend some time in the ridiculously fresh mountain air, with the people I like best. 

Then the carousel conductor invited us on a free ride, which wrapped up our evening perfectly.

Best night ever.

Completely Batty

We had a few prior tenants who were perfectly happy living in our home and willing to keep on living here free of charge to infinity and beyond, but we served them an eviction notice and gave them the old huck-tooey out the front door.  

Don't worry. They weren't human. 

Just kidding, go ahead and worry.

 Papa and Lala came over at about midnight last week, and the boys got to work. No, it wasn't cold. It was quite warm. Caleb donned winter gear in order to protect himself from the certain onslaught which awaited him as he carried out the eviction orders.

 We weren't dealing with anything ordinary here, my friends. This was serious. Nightmarish. Creepy to the max. We're talking bats.

Actually, they're kinda creepy-cute, if you know what I mean.

 There is a year-round stream right in front of our house, so you'd think mosquito heaven, right? Nope! Haven't seen a single one, thanks to our Bat friends!

They lived behind the shutters on every side of our house. We sat out one evening and watched them fly out, and counted over 40.

Now, a few bats would be awesome. Terrific, even! I appreciate the services they render. But 40?
They started getting stinky, too, which was quite unfortunate. They were in the shutter right next to Emmy's room, and I couldn't open her window at night to let the cool mountain breezes in because the bats were stinky!

That was the last straw for me.

 Dads are the coolest. Thanks, Caleb. Also, thank you for not falling off.

They took every single shutter off the house (which we would have done any way, they need to be painted. Or left off. I can't decide what to do about the exterior of the house and I need your help! But that's for another post) and he also filled a crack between the chimney and the roof where they were living. He got one of those cans of spray foam, you know the ones? It did the trick. He'll have to get up there again and scrape off the excess, because with those things there is always excess, but that'll be for another day.

We were up until 1:30am, but they got the job done! 

 The next day, we found this little guy wishing he could get into his little crack and go to sleep. Sorry, little buddy. I appreciate that you eat my bugs, but I can't handle your poopies on my back porch any more. Love you, bye.

I'm hoping they find a nice spot nearby. There's a barn across the way, seems like a good place, right?

 Thank you, super cool hero Dad dudes.

To my Bat friends, may you find a new home which will treat you better than your last one did. xoxo

Sometimes we're cool and we play

In between the unpacking and the painting and the general craziness around here, we are managing to take a little time to play. Because we love to play! And for us, nothing makes us feel like kids again more than riding bikes. 

Tim and I regressed to our early teenage years a little bit when we hit the dirt last weekend. Caleb was awesome enough to volunteer (he really did) to watch all six tiny people so she and I could go play for a little while. He didn't need to ask twice.

Top of the mountain victory pose! These photos are cute when you're 17. When you're 29 and you have a few stretch marks and your shirt comes up a little when you raise your bike over head, you have to call in your AMAZING photoshop skills to help the photo a little. 

Tess was cool and had her iPhone in hand and fortunately (unfortunately) still had it in hand when I started riding and almost immediately tipped over off the trail into a nice comfy (not) sage brush.
Don't mind me! Just getting all hard core over here in this comfy (not) bush!

See now, I could have just showed this photo along with a photo of my bruises and made up a wicked story about how I was hitting 35mph when suddenly a red tailed hawk swooped down out of the sky aimed straight for my head but I skillfully dodged it but it accidentally dropped it's freshly caught trout in my back pocket and a black bear charged me out of the woods trying to get at the trout and I had to do a three-sixty gainer with a half twist backflip off the bear's head in order to save myself minus the bruises and later fried up the fish for dinner.

But I didn't, cause I don't make up stories. I like to keep things honest around here.

Obviously.

Meanwhile, the husband has been playing with a totally different breed of biking.

My Dad (remember him? Crazy genius inventor guy?) built a wind tunnel. It's been a few years in the making, but that happens when you build something like this all by yourself. It recently opened for business and cool things have been happening! 

Hi, Dad! You're so cool. 

They test all sorts of things in the tunnel (cars, skiers, any thing/one who wants to go faster), but on this particular day they were having a clinic for coaches (or anyone interested) on how to use the tunnel for bike aerodynamics.  So my Dad, being the nice guy that he is, invited Caleb to come hang out.

The guy in the black is John Cobb, the genius behind Cobb Cycling. He came for a few days to coach the coaches. That means he's cool, too. On the bike is my Aunt, who is the COOLEST of the cool. She was invited to come be the... what would you call her? Model? That works. See the smoke? Gives a good visual as to where the air is flowing, eh? 

Sorry about all the terribly technical terms I'm throwing out here. 

 I just thought this was a cool photo. Again, Tess is behind the camera lens. She's really good there.

 Mr. Cobb put one of his saddles on Caleb's bike (it's a test saddle, that's why it's green. Promise.) so he's been riding it for the past week or so.

Isn't the tunnel gorgeous? My Daddy built it all by himself.
Isn't Caleb gorgeous? He's mine.

Good job, babe. Way to be super aerodynamic and technologically advanced with your bike riding! 

Opposites attract.

Mostly done projects

Millie told you I was coming, so here I am. 

We have been working! It doesn't seem like anything is really done yet, but that's ok. Looking through these photos has given me encouragement that we are accomplishing things. 

You may remember this photo from before, I just wanted to show you the hallway before I finished painting it. You can't really see the walls, but they needed loving. It took me a few weeks to get the prep done, and I finally realized that it may never be finished if I didn't bring in reinforcements. So I called Tess and she came. Bless her! 

She was here for a few days playing with my kids, and I got the hallway done! I can do the prep in little blocks of time between wrastlin' kids, but painting takes time! As in, one long stretch of time. Those are hard to come by around here. 

Thank you, Tim!

I really like the buttery yellow color. It's not like YELLOW. It's just... you know, cute yellow. 

Here is Emmy and Amelia's room with some furniture in it. We haven't decorated yet, as you can see, because there are so many other BIG things we're working on. I might not get curtains up until winter. Let's just be honest. And yes, that is Amelia halfway under the bed. Don't be alarmed. 

But we did paint a headboard for her! We went to the thrift store to look for one, waited in line for it to open (because that's how you get stuff at our thrift store. Silliness) and got a great one! $10. Okay. 

Commence headboard refreshening.

These two needed a watermelon refreshening. And do you like that they set up their camp chairs to watch me? 

Sanding completed!

While all of this headboard stuff was going on, some worker guys were repaving our cul-de-sac! They had ripped up the pavement 4 weeks before (right after we moved in) and today was the day for lovely smooth new road.

We had fun watching.

 Finished! I had to call my painting-furniture-expert-cousin halfway through to make sure I was doing it right. Thanks, Kenzie!

 There has also been a lot of chocolate ice cream going on around here. Daily chocolate ice cream.

 Here we have worker man deciding what to do with the mooshed parts of the drywall. These are the worst spots.

 Cut it out.

Clean it up.

..........

And apparently I didn't take any photos of the patch. Hmmm. We'll get back to that.

Next project:

Painting doors. This was another big one that we've been putting off for a while. It's always easier to jump into projects when you know what you're doing. This one, we definitely didn't. But saturday afternoon came, we had finished our other jobs, the weather was perfect... so we dove in. 

Jonah was the photographer. He was standing up when he took this photo.

We had to wipe them down first, but that's not why I'm scowling. Caleb and I had just finished a water fight to end all water fights, and I was on the lookout for guerilla warfare.  

Also, let the record show that I won the water fight. For the first time in our ten years of impromptu water fights, he conceded that this time I won. I wish you had been there! I was ruthless! Plus my squirt gun worked way better than his. But still.

                                                                     

Claire had my back. And the back of the door! She got it sparkly clean!

Time to paint! This was the part that we were hesitant about, neither one of us had ever used a big spray gun before. Caleb did awesome, though! 

When ever we're about to start a project I always go through a moment of "Do we really need to do this? Are they really that bad? Can we just skip this part and get by ok?" and then we go ahead and get it done and then I always think "WOW! What a difference! I'm so glad we did it!" 

The psychology of the home renovator.

As I said earlier, the weather was perfect. Naturally, as we were spraying, a slight breeze picked up. Nothing to be worried about. But then, as the doors were drying, a gust blustered up. We were inside, but we heard it whistle through the trees. "Ahhhg!" we both said, then we heard the crash! One of the rows of doors blew over. And that was it! No more gusts! Weird. 

I didn't get a photo of it, because we were both somewhat frantically unscrewing doors and hauling them inside, worried that another gust would come. 

Very fortunately, only one door was damaged.

It's kind of a mess, but hopefully fixable. Very fortunately, this is one of two sliding doors that cover Emmy's closet, and this crack is on the inside. It will only be visible from inside the closet, where hopefully no one will be visiting:) 

Also fortunately, the doors were dry enough that the paint stayed where it was supposed to. They were a little tacky, so we couldn't stack them on each other, so my living room is full of doors. Beautiful clean white lovely doors! The kids ran up and down the hallway lots of times, just because things like this are fun, for some reason. 

Amelia has been working hard, too!

 She finally learned how to crawl with her tummy up off the floor. Suddenly she went from sweet little quiet and content to sit and play with toys Amelia, and turned into sweet little fearless conquerer Amelia. It's a side of her we didn't know she had!

You're almost there, Millie! Keep going!

That seems to be the theme around here, lately:)