Bat Strike Two!

It flew around the main floor for about an hour, now we can't find it because it crawled under the door into the basement around 9:30 pm and is hiding...

Sleep tight us!

The House Rental: part 2

Next on our tour is the main floor bathroom. Here it is!

Scott and I despise this shower. We are both tall and the shower head, which showers the back wall as it showers us, is a little low. In addition, if we have to bend over to pick up soap when it falls, we inevitably bump the curtain which pushes the bottom of the curtain out so that the water spray gets on the floor of the bathroom.

The bathroom itself is arranged a little awkwardly and we have had to improvise because of lack of counter/cupboard/closet space. When we first moved in Grace was afraid of the bathroom. I'm not sure if she's gotten over her fear, yet. She still begs us to go with her to keep her company when she uses the toilet.

Next on our tour is the crucible. I mean the attic. With record-breaking heat all summer and no central air-conditioning, this space has been pretty much unbearable to live in. It's a fun space, though, and I hope we will use it more as the weather cools off.

It also is useful storage space and is where I'm hanging my clothes for now until we get the afore mentioned dresser for the bedroom and redistribute the clothes.

In the attic is fire hazard #4 in the form of another archaic AC unit cut into the wall that has been stuffed with foam and plastic bags and is being held together by packaging tape. We have no intention of ever turning it on. We actually ignore its existence. I didn't even get a picture of it, I'm already that good at ignoring it.

In addition to the attic, we have a full basement! It's not really much of a living space for several reasons, some of which are minimal flooding at almost every heavy rainfall, a suffocating heavy air drenched in old cigar smell (or other smoked leaves) and mildew, and scary stairs for the kids. It offers much useful storage space, though, and a second bathroom which has a bathtub.

When we're feeling brave we make the trek down there for bath time. Otherwise we just bathe the kids in the kitchen sink. They both love it and I think they prefer the kitchen sink to the basement bathtub.

Speaking of the kitchen, here it is! I love that the sink looks out the window, and I love the graceful arching wood curtain frame above the window.

In the kitchen are fire hazards #5 and #6 in the forms of the oven and dishwasher. I could literally write entire blog posts about each of these appliances and their quirks, but I won't. I'll just cram bullets in here for your enjoyment touching on some highlights...

• The oven runs at least 100 degrees hotter than the dial indicates.
• There is no insulation so every square inch of the oven is burning hot to the touch every time it's on.
• On a whim I looked up the oven brand cause I'd never heard of it before, and learned that the company hasn't made ovens for around 20 years because they had so many problems, the most dramatic being spontaneously exploding glass doors. We're kind of scared of our oven.
• We ran the dishwasher once and it filled the kitchen with a burning plastic smell. And it didn't clean.
• The refrigerator has wheels that work really well. Yeah.

The kitchen cabinetry looks like it was put in around the early 90's, which is nice. When we lived in Kirksville our kitchen cabinets were probably from the 20's. I'm glad we don't have to deal with their problems here. The back door to the kitchen leads out to the laundry room.

The laundry room needs a big shelf, preferably above the washer and dryer. I think that's one of my next projects.

My main project since we've been here, besides cleaning and cleaning and raising kids, has been the yard. I'm determined to not be afraid of the back yard by the time Fall gets here. Since I took this picture the neighbors have replaced the broken wood fence with a pretty white vinyl one. Yay!

But I'm still battling rampant poison ivy, a huge mole infestation, a total lack of real grass, and overgrown everything else. In the spring I want to be able to plant flowers and a vegetable garden, so there's a lot of prep work still to do.

In the front yard I've already torn down the English ivy that was threatening to swallow the house whole. You can kind of see it in the first picture we posted, but it's hiding behind the other overgrowth that I mostly have cut down, too.

We love the big stone porch and have spent many hours on these steps watching the cars go by. We have lots of cars to watch because we live on a very busy state highway.

So there you have it!

The House Rental: part 1

Welcome to our new home! Here is the unmeasured, estimated floor layout, for your reference.

 We enter through the front door to see the family room on your left and the TV room on your right. I didn't get a photo of the front hallway, just use your imagination. It has dark, matte, rosy red walls with old worn orange carpet.

Now, on to the family/dining room. We love the bits of character the house has from the arts and crafts era. Most prominent of those is these lovely dark wood built-in pillars and half-walls.

We inherited the organ from the homeowner who basically said, "I don't want it but couldn't get rid of it, now it's your problem." It only kind of works... but that's a different story. If we're counting fire hazards in the house, the organ is tentatively number 1.

The second fire hazard is the fireplace itself which is crumbling on the inside, outside, and through the floor. Suffice it to say, we will not be building any fires in it, but it adds a lovely decor element and will be fun to decorate for Christmas. You can see more of the arts and crafts details in the below picture. Look at the wood relief above the window, and those windows are bay windows. Lovely!

If you saw our Catching Rainbows post, you know we catch rainbows at our house almost every morning. We get a myriad of light refractions from these beautiful cut glass windows. This is another detail we love.

Here is an angle looking in to the dining room. You can't see very well, but the half-walls have shelves with glass doors on them. Our folding table is temporarily in the dining room until we can get a smaller desk that fits our needs.

Here is the TV room. It's a little cozy, but we like it that way.

The futon in this room can function as a guest bed, too. Or, as our bed when guests come and sleep in the master bedroom, which is how we've done it so far.

Speaking of master bedroom, here it is! Henry naps in here, so we always have had the pack-n-play in our room with us.

Scott complains about our room saying there's so much poo on the wall. Oh, I mean pooh. There are 53 poohs on the wall, actually. I'm pretty sure I exaggerated the size of the closet on the floor layout because the closet in this room is not very large at all. Coming from a lovely walk-in master closet with built in shelves to this is an adjustment. Until we can get a dresser, my clothes are in neat piles on the floor below the biggest Winnie the Pooh home mural ever.

The largest closet in the house is actually in the kids bedroom, but it overwhelmingly smells like old cat urine mixed with a little bit of dead animal smell, so we use it sparingly. So I guess that segues us to the kids bedroom!

Grace made her own bed this day, can you tell? It's actually not too bad. In the window of this room was fire hazard number 3. After deep frying our electrical cord and filling the house with a burning plastic smell, my sister rescued us from the archaic AC window unit that was hours away (or less) from bursting into flames. It is now dead in our back yard, and fans have replaced it... fans that let in bats.

If you didn't catch the wall by Grace's bed, here is another shot of it. We're not quite sure what's going on here.

The photo doesn't capture the texture, either. Previous owners have tried (weakly), and failed to tear down the wallpaper, so they painted over the torn continent-shaped remnants with alternating brushes dipped in white, off-white, and blue. The rest of the wallpaper that is still "on" the wall isn't faring so well, either, as evidenced by the scotch tape barely holding it up.

Part 2 of the House Rental will be up when I get the time to blog again. I bet you can't wait!

Before I forget...

 How do you measure a first step? By the loosest of terms, Henry had his first steps in mid June. He loved the game of walking between Scott and I. He could take up to three sprinted unsupported steps before he'd fall into our arms laughing. However, it wasn't until last week that he could officially be considered a "walker" by the most stringent of terms. He's so careful about standing up completely unsupported. He'll do a few controlled squats (he's really strong). He'll take about five slow, steady steps. Then he'll deliberately sit down and crawl away like a speed demon.

His first words have been Mommmm and Dad (sounds like dat) closely followed by Dace (Grace), Ba (ball) and mmmm-mmmm (vroom-referring to toy cars).

And the final first on this post: his first tooth broke through on July 4th.

Next on schedule, definitely not his first, but his 5th haircut will be due shortly. His hair is almost in his eyes again. His 4th haircut was via Flowbee with the help of my brother and Henry loved it. Maybe I should get one.

kiddos

Oh, kiddos, kiddos kiddos... I was pumped up to post all about my house and took dozens of pictures. Earlier this week I put the SD card in my computer to extract them, then got distracted by kiddos. The next thing I know, the SD card is gone... the kiddo in question says she took it, she knew she wasn't supposed to, but now she doesn't know what she did with it.

We're still looking for it. Until then, enjoy this old photo from earlier in the summer of Grace and her cousin wearing matching suits.

Get excited!

I've posted several back posts so I thought I'd let you know about them if you haven't found them yet:

All About Henry: 9 months

All About Grace: 3 years

Baby Story, take 2

Plus two new blogs just below this one! Hurray! I also have most of the pictures of our new house, and I am eager to get my thoughts about this house down in writing.

It's a giant moth the size of a bird! No, it's a flying mouse! No, it's... a bat!

Scott rescued us all from the flying mouse with rabies yesterday. What a brave, brave man.

Here's the little bugger that had us all up just after 4 a.m.:

The kids were so wired after the adventure there's no way they were going back to sleep. We had a Cars movie party starting at 5:30. It was Henry's first time watching that movie. I think he's a fan.

Speaking of fan, we think this was the culprit. The design is flawed, if you can tell from the picture, on the side of the fan that has the accordion (supposedly to 'seal off' the rest of the window opening). There is a gap of space right above the accordion.

This picture was taken after Scott tried squeezing that corner of the window down further. The gap had been larger before the picture was taken, but it didn't seem large enough for a bat! The only other possible crack we found was a hole in the ceiling of the closet made for some cables. I sure hope that was our last bat.

Scott's story is below. It's very entertaining. I love it when he gets the creative writing bug. His stories are always fun.

Scott's Story

(This was posted on Scott's facebook page yesterday morning at 6:17 am. I wanted to keep it here for posterity's sake.)

Woke up to Henry crying a little after 4 this morning, which Britta and I thought was just the normal feeding for him, but when she went to put him back in bed around 4:45 she came back complaining of "a moth the size of a bird" which flew into her face and was in the kids' room. (Honestly, it was before 5 am, I thought she was exaggerating)

I went in to get it and discovered a bat flying in circles. After sitting in the room with the door closed and ducking and dodging the bat's sorties for about 5 minutes, I realized that I needed a plan bigger than my fly swatter.

So, I googled it. Not while I was in the room. Apparently catching a bat is very similar to catching a spider. Well, a flying spider with (potential) rabies, which may or may not turn to dust or glisten in direct sunlight, but either way, has the personality of a sullen teenager.

I decided that my best strategy was to wait for it to land. Bats have quite the energy reserve and a ton of endurance. After what seemed like an additional 45 minutes (but was more like 46 minutes), the bat finally landed - and hid! When I went in the room, I couldn't immediately find him.

Checking under the furniture revealed two little arms sticking out from under a dresser. Its escape blocked behind by some padding, I tried to coax it out into tupperware, to no avail, so I moved the entire dresser, hoping that the vampire wouldn't start flying again. He didn't.

This is where the spider-catching skills came to full-force. I had conquered my foe and overcome my enemy with the sheer courage of a warrior in battle who tiptoes behind a lower species with a tupperware in one hand and the other hand on the doorknob of cowardly escape. Thankfully, my vanquished foe accepted its fate and conceded victory to a truly superior being. That would be me, if there was any doubt.

Now here I am to tell the tale. The bat is crawling around in a tupperware on the dining table as I decide whether to contact the health department for rabies prophylaxis.

Yes, I am the batman!