Busy Times...

Jim had business by an IKEA on Wednesday, so we thought it would be a great time to also get our kitchen, bathrooms, and laundry room cabinets. Throw a little flooring and a hutch in there too... Everything that day took hours longer than planned. I dropped Jim off for his meeting and then met our good friend Mindy for shopping/lunch. Jim was to call when he was done. Well, the lunch place we picked was noisy, so I happened to not hear the phone... until 45 minutes after Jim started to call... whoops. We raced over to get him (he had walked a mile to get himself some lunch). We then headed to IKEA. The road we picked took over an hour to get there due to an accident. I should mention that we had tried in the morning to fax over all the parts we needed, but they were not open and did not have the fax on... so, when we finally got to the place we had to go over the plans (took about and hour) and then the nice people ordered them (this took a half hour), then we came back to their department and paid, then we were told it would all be ready to pick up in an hour... great. Thankfully Mindy was with us and she would take the kids off to play throughout the store while we stressed about all the cabinets. We took the hour and tried to get a few other items and then went to check on our order... another hour! At this point we were running out of time... Mindy had to go and that is another story--her car across town... her husband came and rescued her. I won't go into much more detail other than to say that the kids were beyond tired, oh, and the parents too. It took a couple of hours, yes, hours to load everything on our trailer and to check everything off the list (they suggest you do this as you load). Jim sliced his finger on the second box and Carsten fell three times hitting his face each time. We got home at midnight. End of story. Wait... now we have to put it all together!
(note: the picture above is only about a quarter of the boxes in our garage to put together and make all our cabinets...)

We found out last week that one of our good friend's (and a previous roommate of mine) mother passed away. We headed over for the funeral... We found out on Thursday and the funeral was to be Saturday, so we hit the road on Friday. It was about a 9 hour drive. We stayed with other roomies of ours and had some fun times. The kids had a great time although Reese said that he, "did not have fun because it was only two days", he would, "have fun if next time if it was ten days".
Probably the most exciting portion of the trip was in the first two hours... we were going over a very curvy pass and low and behold Carsten became carsick. This was our first experience of this with either kid, so we were a little shocked. Reese immediately started to yell that he was also going to throw up so I started yelling for Jim to, "roll down Reese's window, pull over, Carsten is throwing up all over, pull over NOW!" Jim found a little patch of gravel on the side of the road and we attempted to clean up a 2 year old and a
carseat with just wipes. The rest of the trip we had to roll the windows down every few minutes to try to rid the car of the smell. The only thing we can figure is that usually Carsten is asleep when we are in the mountains, we had rented a small car to get better gas mileage so the kids really couldn't see the road, Carsten had just drunk a steamer... maybe the milk was bad?

We spent last evening over at the property doing a little clean-up. We collected a bag of recycling and a couple of bags of trash... lots of nails. The boys had fun putting nails in their buckets for us to throw away. The roofing is coming right along... today they are going to finish framing the front patio so it can be roofed. Speaking of roofing... they had a little visit from OSHA yesterday. In the picture of the back of the house below you will notice the boards they put on after the visit. Whoops. They got a little talk and a little fine.