New Flat Roof & other house stuff

When my brother was visiting, we got a new front light installed. I didn't take before or after photos, but the old light was small and broken. The actual bulb was hanging down and was unsightly. I also wanted something we could leave turned on but would turn off at dawn and on at dusk. This is an LED light I got at Costco that does just that! Only complaint is it turns on at dark not necessarily dusk. I wish it'd turn on a little earlier than it does. But other than that I'm really happy with the light. 

In doing the light, we took the house numbers down. We wanted to move them but didn't have the right drill bit to go into the stucco. So I whipped up some numbers on my silhouette to put on the mailbox. These are just temporary because I'm not happy with them. We are eventually getting the house re-dashed so we'll figure out something when that time comes early next spring. 

Back during the first week of July, ya know that week of craziness as we prepare to birth a baby. The Wednesday of that week we woke up to our kitchen light filled with water: photo below.

We didn't know the cause. But got it dried out and taken down. Left it for a week and then when nothing happened, Kyle got the light put back up with the help of our postpartum doula after Thomas was here. It was also our PPdoula that suggested it might have been the tile bathroom floor above that was leaking. We figured this HAD to be it because the kids had bathed the night before mainly unsupervised because of the craziness that was happening and must have splashed all over the floor. Okay so we were thinking we'd need to get the tile grout looked at. Well a week or so later it happened AGAIN! But this time the kids had not bathed the night before and we knew this because the night before was swim night and we have them shower at the gym after swim. Both times it happened it was after rain. After more looking the gutters were full and the gutter above the flat roof was bent a little and would just gush down in the middle just to the left of the balcony door. So we figured that had to be it, the roof leaking. So we called our stucco people and they took a look. It was still quite a mystery because he was thinking he had to be the bathroom but we knew it wasn't because we had ran water for a long time, and there was still no water. And we actually had no more leaks after we cleaned the gutters and bent up the spot in the droopy gutter. So paying thousands of dollars to fix a mystery problem wasn't not the funnest thing, but we needed to do something because having water pour down from your kitchen light fixture is not a good thing. 

Fast forward to this week, (after signing papers a couple months ago) the guys show up to get it fixed. He even said the roof looked good, which was not what we wanted to hear. Luckily (for our sake of paying for this work) they did find water intrusion under the tar-mat. Here you can see the spots in the wood. They guessed it had been seeping through near the balcony door and running down along the edge. 

They replaced some boards

Got a new roof on

And got it all sealed up so we 'hopefully' will have no more mysterious water leaks or pools of water in our light fixtures!

Fast forward to last week, it snowed a little then melted and we had some trickles in the light!!!! They came to patch up the stucco a few days later and the downspout was off. He put that back into place and hopefully that was the water issue. But we'll keep an eye on it and be in touch with them if it still happens. They can maybe tear into the wall from the outside next spring when they re-dash the house. Because tearing into the ceiling from the inside would just be a mess. 

Preschool Field Trip

Last week I was so thankful to get to go with the girls on a field trip. They don't typically go to school on Wednesdays but if a parent could attend, they were invited to go with the Wednesday class. I had a friend watch Thomas and we got to go! They were SOOO excited to get to ride in a bus, for the first time! And there were quite a few of their friends from class attend as well. 

Mary is beaming.

I sat with Mary and Emma was pretty proud to be getting to sit with Teacher Karen.

We went to a little spot called Imagination Theater. It was just a room, where we all sat on the floor to watch a cute little production.

It was a puppet production under black lights and was pretty cool. The lady came out ahead of time to clarify "Puppets aren't real. Puppets are controlled by puppeteers" (I used to be a puppeteer, :-P )

It was a story about emotions, each butterfly fairy was a different emotion. It was pretty cute with songs. As soon as it was over Emma said she wanted to come back tomorrow.

We rode the bus back. The girls had a great trip!

New Car

At the first of November, Kyle drove the Subaru down to Missouri for his grandfather's funeral. As he pulled into his mom's house the Subaru was making a terrible sound. He took it in the next morning before the funeral to get it looked at. Turns out it was the ball bearing in the drive shaft and was going to take 3 days or so for the part to come in... this was bad news since he had planned to drive home that evening. He did end up coming home that night but he drove his dad's car. Then Friday after the Subaru was fixed he drove down to meet his dad and mom in Des Moines to switch cars.

He had already done some test driving Wednesday that week and I did some Friday so he decided to purchase on Saturday. We had already talked about trading in the Subaru prior to that road trip because it was getting older and we didn't want to be pouring money into it to fix it.

Pretty excited about the new ride. It's Kyle's work commuter as well as my commuter and we so far only have the booster in it, but have a car seat we can put in it, cuz the girls love riding with daddy or going on solo trips in the other car.

Dad and Brad's VIsit

As I mentioned in my Halloween post, my brother and dad came up for a quick visit during the week. They got to meet Thomas for the first time and it was my brother's first time seeing our new house. 

 

Thursday we went to Mall of America and rode a few rides. It was good to have my brother there because a couple of rides the girls needed 'chaperones'. So I rode with Mary and Brad rode with Emma. They had lots of fun! We were using an old ticket band from 2015, lol! Still has a few left too.

Isaac is big enough to do more rides on his own but as a family he's gonna have to wait a little while. Hard to let him go and not the girls. They got to ride the train by themselves. After the above ride Emma wasn't happy to go without me but once I convinced her that it wouldn't be as fast as the first ride she was all for it.

Emma sat out on this one, by this time I was wearing Thomas so it was good that she wasn't wanting to ride it.

The girls did brave this one by themselves, and liked it. I was a little nervous Emma wasn't going to tolerate it but she did.

Emma was too short to do the bumper cars :-( but it was actually okay cuz Isaac and Mary couldn't really figure out driving them as well and weren't too thrilled with it. Took them the whole time to get the hang of it then by the time they did the time was up. 

They were visiting in the middle of Isaac's read-a-thon, so there was LOTS of reading being done. Glad Brad and Dad were able to help out with the minutes of reading we needed to fit into the day.

Before they headed out Friday morning, dad gave each of the kids a fidget spinner. Isaac was so excited! He had seen one before at a friend's house, once. He has really enjoyed playing with it. The girls too, but we've had to take theirs away a few times because Emma keeps chewing on it and Mary keeps throwing it.... 

Halloween 2017

The kids had a fun night of trick-or-treating. We got all dressed up and waited for it to get dark enough to hit the neighborhood. 

We went to our next door neighbor's first and ran into some other kids from down the street. Isaac was pretty excited to bump into them and we ended up hitting the rest of the houses with them. Isaac says his favorite part was 'the halloween playdate'.

It's been fun getting to know our neighbors and before Isaac was in school we didn't realize there were so many kids on our street! The girls have a buddy just down our alley that they played soccer with and is also in their preschool class. We bumped into them too and hit a couple house. I just did one line of houses before the cold got to me and Thomas and I headed back home. 

A house two doors down goes all out for Halloween. They have a movie playing out side (at this time it was Charlie Brown something), a bomb fire and lots of decoration. We heard many kids hit our house and say "Let's go to the TV house!" 

My dad and brother were visiting, so it was nice having someone man the front door while we all went out with the kids. Kyle and my brother, Brad, stayed with the kids while I came back to see my dad. He had dressed up as Santa to pass out candy. I over heard a neighbor kid say "Why did they hire santa?" it was cute. 

Mary came back shortly after I did. It was pretty cold and she isn't as into candy as Emma is. Emma probably would have gone all night, she loved it. Once Isaac and Emma made it home I couldn't believe how full their candy buckets were!!! Candy lasted about a week, well allowing a few pieces here and there til Mary's bucket was empty. Then it 'went away', oh the whining and begging for candy drove me NUTS!