This Week

 We've been raking a lot of leaves.  Our new house is on a 1/4 acre (big for around here), with lots of mature leaves and great fall foliage.  Gorgeous October = 17 full lawn bags of leaves and counting.

 Jack has learned the fine art of jumping in all the leaf piles.  :)  And then helping to fill the bags...sometimes one leaf at a time.

 Last Friday we had a 2 hour playground playdate.  Afterwards, he went upstairs, took his shoes off, crawled in to our bed, and went to sleep.  For almost 3 hours!  First nap he's had in months.

 I put away our summer-y colored dishes, and replaced them with the darker, more autumnal/wintery ones.  I'm going to miss these bright colors, but it's fun to have the seasonal change.

 Jack and I have been assembling a lot of IKEA furniture.  We've finally got the basement back to normal, just 4 months after it flooded.  We had exterior grading down around the window wells, cleaned out the gutters, got new windows installed, and finally this week had the carpet pad replaced and the carpet re-laid, and got the carpet cleaned.  So excited to finally put Jack's playroom/my craft space together!

 I had a stack of boxes of IKEA furniture sitting in the family room for the past month while we waiting on the windows and carpeting.  (I had coupons that were about to expire.)

 Jack is getting pretty good at furniture assembly.  And playing in the partially assembled furniture - he kept calling this a "bridge".

 He's really good with an allen wrench.  :)  Should come in handy in about 15-18 years in his dorm room and first apartment.

He has decided that if it's below 60, he needs his jacket (with hood up), hat, and mittens.  On the flip side, he's hot and uncomfortable if it's much about 85 (or 80 with humidity).  I think he may have to move to San Diego when he's older (or some other place where the temps stay right around 70).  :)  Although he does enjoy the snow...as long as it's not actually snowing on him.  We'll see how this winter goes!  :)

Grading, drains, and garbage removal

We had some landscaping people come out to do some grading on our house.  Our basement flooded twice (bigtime) since we moved in, so we needed to get something done.  They brought in about 3 tons of dirt, moved the rocks back, ripped up weed barrier, put in new dirt, put down new weed barrier, and replaced the rocks.  They worked fast, did a good job, and charged a very fair price.  Before and after pics are below.  Oh, and they also replaced 2 drains and made sure that our gutters drained correctly.

Before

After

1st Day of Preschool

 Jack had his preschool Open House on Monday.  He was excited to be back, and really excited that this year they opened up the dividing middle door and will be using both sides of the portable.  :)

 His classroom.

 Back-to-school shopping.  Of course it's still a bit warm for most of this, but probably not in another month or so.

 Our upstairs gallery wall, courtesy of Jon's dad when they were up here a couple of weeks ago.  Thanks!  I purchased and added the last frame, but still need to order some new pics though.

 First day of preschool on Wednesday!

 This is the longest he's carried his backpack so far!  :)

 Waiting for his classroom to open (notice that I'm holding the backpack now).  Everyone was trying to get a good picture of their kid before class started.

 The teachers (well, speech therapist, special ed assistant, and social worker - he doesn't actually *have* a teacher yet - hiring snag) told him to sit on the rug for circle time.  He ran to the next room and drew circles on the pristinely clean whiteboard.  I had to laugh, but we need to work on following directions!

 We hit up the farmers' market after preschool, and snagged this ginormous bag of kettle corn.  Jack's showing Daddy his skinned knee (war wound from day 1 of preschool).

 The actual produce that we got at the market.  The watermelon is delicious!  And those aren't green beans - they're black-eyed-peas that we have to shell.  I've never bought them before, and have no idea what to do with them, but they seemed fun!

 We made a strawberry cake to use up some strawberries.

 Jack learned why you don't crack eggs over your lap.

Yeah, that's yolk all over his shorts.  The cake still tasted pretty good with just 3 1/2 eggs though!  :)

New House - Week 3.5 - we have ceiling fans!

Okay, issues with blogger, so here's the rest of the pictures.

Jack has his construction hat on and cell phone in hand...

...ready to tackle our flooded basement!

 Yeah...apparently a window leaks, plus poor grading by that window well.  Luckily I hadn't move much furniture around down there yet, so nothing was really damaged. 
We do need to open up the walls to check for mold though.  I tore out the carpet padding (totally soaked), and there is evidence of previous flooding on the carpeting and wallpaper. 

 On the plus side, we had 2 electricians here today for over 5 hours.  We now have ceiling fans/lights in all 3 upstairs (non-master) bedrooms!  Yay!!!  I think this is my favorite completed project/update so far.  The ceiling fans really help, especially until we get new windows.  We also had them install a 2nd outdoor outlet, and do some electrical work in the garage.  Lots of things checked off the list today.  :)

New house - Week 3.5

We unloaded our 10x10 storage unit 2 weeks ago.

More boxes to sort and unpack!

Jack loves eating breakfast on the deck - me too!

3 car garage...hoping to put our cars inside before first snowfall.

Gorgeous clematis on our arbor

Boxes also make a nice playground  :)