Cheetah Girl

FlickrDroid Upload, originally uploaded by elizabethwickland.

Here's a bit of cuteness to brighten your day! Ellie's pretty much been wearing her Cheetah ears and tail everywhere for a couple weeks now. At least she's a cute Cheetah!!

Reframing...

Of course, when you design a house on paper, it looks differently from it's physical counterpart. So as our house has been going up, Leif has found a few things he wants reframed. Now the reframing has been taking place and it's fun to see the house we loved turn into something we love even more! Here are a few of the changes...

We made the front closet smaller and added a nook into my office, perfect for an inventory cabinet or a cozy chair.

We opened up the hallway to extend into the bonus area and make that area feel more like a part the house. This leads to the laundry room and the craft room. I think it opens up that end of the hallway so much more!

We added windows to the side of the sliding glass door in the dining room. We had windows upstairs, so these just mirror those.

I don't have pictures of it, but we also added a second door to the upstairs bathroom from the guest room, making it a sort of Jack-and-Jill bathroom. It will make the guest room access nicer and when Ellie is older she can have the guest room and have access to her own bathroom that way without having to cross the hall to get to it.

The last (I think) bit of reframing that needs to be done is the wall at the top of the stairs. Currently it is a full wall, and we are going to have Keith reframe it to be a half wall with a square window in it, like the windows around the stairwell on the first floor. I think it will open up the hallway and add a bit of continuity between the first and second floor, as well as continuing the contemporary design.

We've also got sidewalks and driveway in, rough plumbing in, electrical going in, and other stuff going on, so it's coming along nicely!!

Alabama people

I was reading this article on my phone:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Homo_sapiens_neanderthalensis.jpg
When Eliana asked to see the silly skeleton again. She told me that skeleton was a kind of people, and that those people were called Alabama people who live in a country called Alia and that Alia is a giant city with buildings that reach up to the sun.

Talk about an imagination! Her off-the-cuff stories always make me laugh.

Deck-oration...

This week Leif and his dad are working on framing the deck in. The actual decking won't go on until later so it doesn't get beat up in the construction process, but the framing is coming along nicely! Here are the boys at work...

Our new house has quite a bit of deck, which will be so nice in the summer months! We love eating outside and spending time outside!

Rapunzel

This morning Eliana was sitting on the potty when she looked at me very thoughtfully and said, "Wow, if Rapunzel let down her hair while she was going potty, that would be... um, weird."

Another...

I just gave Eliana a little bag of Skittles. She looked at it and said, "Oh, these start with "S." They must be SEM-n-Ms!"

Ellie-isms

Recent words of wisdom from sweet Ellie...

"Mommy, is a zebra a kind of horse, or a kind of cow?"

"Chula colasta gooleta - See, Mommy! I can speak in Spanish!" (Ellie talks in "Spanish" a lot these days. Mind you, she makes it all up, so it's really funny.)

This morning I peeked in on Ellie, surprised she was still sleeping quietly in her room. She was just laying on her bed, arms behind her head, staring at the ceiling. I asked her what she was doing. "I'm just thinking about hatching caterpillars and turning them into butterflies." I love it!

Ellie put on her pink fuzzy coat from Uncle Robert a few days ago and pranced around the house in it. Every time I talked to her she insisted that her name was not Eliana. It was (hands spread out with fingers splayed) "Rockstar!"

Guess where we are today?

Yep! It's family day at the dentist! Hooray!

Progress!

The house is changing daily right now, which is so exciting! Here are pictures from the other day, and it has changed even more since!

The Working Mother...

This past week has been pretty busy for our whole family. Elizabeth has been working hard to expand her Mark Kay business. We've been busy trying to make decisions about the new house. I've been trying to make progress on my master's project. Not everything that we intended to get done around the house has.
This morning Elizabeth, while surveying our not entirely clean house, began to proclaim "The working mother must be über-organized." She paused for dramatic effect. "Someone I know is not--"

From the breakfast table, our impertinent daughter interrupted, with arm outstretched and index finger pointed, "It's you, mommy! It's you!"