Ben's Birthday Dinner

 The end of July was always a busy birthday time for our family. Kathryn and I turned 26 on the 25th and then Ben has a birthday three days later. My birthday this year was very relaxing but not very exciting, mostly because Andy was recovering from a stomach bug that hit him hard the day before. But it actually was very nice. I ended up running a few errands with the kids and got some free coffee that was absolutely wonderful. Do yourself a favor, if you live in Spokane, get a free Dutch Bros coffee on your birthday. They are the most wonderful drinks. Seriously.
But this post is actually about Ben's birthday. We had a little family get together and it was a fun time celebrating Ben. He enjoys attention so it works out pretty great.

 Typical Ben

 At this point Becca was trying to take a nice picture but Ben thought she wanted to help blow out the candles. It was pretty great.

 Feeding Pip her bottle

Our New House!!!

We bought a house! We first started looking at houses at the end of June and this was actually the very first house we looked at! The selling point of this house was the three large windows to the backyard and the open-ness of the living room to the dining room and kitchen. We knew that we would be doing work to any house that we bought to make it ours, so it wasn't much of a deterrent when we looked at this house. After a long process of declines, acceptances, inspections, papers, loans, and a mess of other things we finally got the house! We got the keys on Friday, July 31st and got straight to work. Here is a daily list of what we did:

Day 1: Removed drapes and prepped for painting

Day 2: Painted walls in all first floor rooms

Day 3: Painted ceilings and trim 

Day 4: Continued painting trim and started pulling up carpet

Day 5: Finished trim and pulled up all carpets and linoleum

Day 6: Used adhesive removers, paint strippers, scrapers, and a whole ton of elbow grease to remove             all the glue from the floors

Day 7: Finished removing the glue and sanded edges of rooms

Day 8: Sanded all the floors

Day 9: Prepped floors  

Day 10: Put finish on the floors

Day 11: Painted bathroom, put up curtains, and re-seeded the yard

Andy and Liz are a powerhouse of a team and they knocked out these floors so fast. I am amazed at the speed of what they did. Seriously. Those floors were no joke and stripping all that gunk off of it was ridiculous. I don't think they'd ever want to do it again, but maybe they're proud that they did it once? Maybe?!? All I know is that I am SOOO thankful they did it! The floors look awesome and I can't wait to move in! So here are some before and during photos. After photos will be up when we've moved in!

Huge thanks to everyone for helping paint, watch our kids, or let us borrow kitchen utensils!!! We couldn't have done it without any of you!

 This is the front entry

 Living room/dining room

Hallway

Bathroom

 Nursery

 Charlie's room

 Our room

 Backyard patio

 Pulling up of the carpets!

First pizza party! And you can barely see Charlie under the table

Pip decided to start army crawling the day we got keys

 All the laminate and glue is removed

In the nursery there was cork under the carpet and it was a beast of a project, but it looks so good now!

Left is halfway through the scraping and right is after it's been removed but pre-sanding

Just putting on the last coat and Pip slept right on through it

A Drive By Visit

A few weeks ago, Andy's grandma, aunt, and cousin dropped by for a quick visit before they left for home. They literally stopped by the house for 15 minutes for Auntie Ann to meet Pip. It was a nice visit and I'm so glad that we were able to find a time to work. We had just arrived home from Seattle the night before.
Update on the house, we have officially finished the floors! I'll try and get some photos up soon, but the house is looking pretty great! Hopefully we'll get to move in by the end of the week.

Great Grandpa's 80th Birthday!!!

At the end of July we went over to Seattle to celebrate Andy's grandpa's 80th birthday! Most of the family was able to come over for the party, and it was so much fun to see everyone. We played some games, sat around and chatted, and watched the kids so they wouldn't run off to the cliff. It was a good weekend.

Grandpa's present

Maggie and Charlie playing under the pillows

Story time with Uncle Andy