New House and a Missing Month

I don't really know what happened to the month of September. We closed on our new house on August 31 and worked on getting it cleaned up to move in that weekend. Friends from our new Sunday School class helped unload our PODS (note to readers - do not use PODS - they stole over $100 from us and justified it by saying that their sales people were vague enough in their language that although it is easy to see things from our point of view, they can't do anything about it) that Saturday and we were ready to get settled.

However, we ended up needing to stay with Kat's parents for another two weeks!
Bedtime ritual - story time with Pop Pop

The sellers did a great job of hiding the fact that they were complete and total slobs who let their cats use the floors as litter and never seemed to clean more than necessary. They hid the smells with discrete air fresheners stuck in every inconspicuous location. We were disappointed during the walk through but didn't think it was that big of a deal to change our minds at the last minute. After having the carpets cleaned it was discovered that the second bedroom on the first floor (the room designated as the nursery) was so saturated with cat pee that the carpet and baseboards had to be ripped up. The bathroom adjacent to that room had been noted as having no sealer around the bath tub, what the inspector failed to notice is that under the linoleum was years of mold and mildew build-up because of this. That room had to be ripped up completely too in order to get rid of that smell and filth.

Eventually we decided that the smells were to a minimum and it was time to get moved in. This was a bit difficult with Jason traveling a lot for work, and Kat left to her own with a very busy two year old while being 8 months pregnant. Due to low platelet counts and her history of HELPP, Kat had to see the doctor and have blood work done weekly. Between doctors appointments. women's bible study, MOPS, Library Story time, and the occasional play date, I think it will be 2013 until we are unpacked and settled!

Our list of projects will keep us busy for a long time. The first thing we did was to make Daniel's room totally awesome in attempts to ease the transition. We even bought him a huge John Deere Front Loader as a welcome to your new room present the first night we stayed there.


Jason (with some help from his dad) has already trimmed back several overgrown trees, ripped out the pond, repaired rotten beams on the shed, cleaned out and guarded the gutters, replaced six windows, repaired the drywall in the nursery, started painting a bit, and more. We'll try to show the progress as we go.

Playing in the New House

I guess we need to unpack some of his toys. . .

City Island

Taking advantage of a pleasant evening after hurricane Irene flood waters receded, we took a trip to Harrisburg's City Island to assess the damage. We had been there just a couple weeks before so the destruction was easy to see. The usually buzzing island was very quiet and mostly empty. It was a bit eerie actually.

Daniel found a huge downed tree to be a fun climbing challenge and the cow seemed to make it through the storm unharmed so we entertained ourselves with that too.

Swimming

Summer ended too quickly with a cold spell and perpetual rain. Oh how I will miss playing in the pool. I had a lot of free time this summer, not having a home and all, so we got to spend a lot of time swimming. Daniel isn't too fond of playing in the water at this point, although he was getting better and braver toward the end of summer. He preferred running around throwing toys into the pool and mowing the pool deck to being limited in movement in the water. When Jason is in the water though, he is more apt to jump in and play.

Mitchell Trip West

Jason had a long trip and was away for several days this week so my mom, Daniel, and I took a road trip to visit some of my mom's relatives. We started by meeting Mom's cousin Judy at the Pittsburgh Zoo. (Yes, Daniel gets to go to the Zoo a lot. It is helpful that our zoo pass is good at just about every zoo around.) Daniel took to Judy right away and we all enjoyed yet another really nice zoo. Some of the exhibits are amazing - tigers, wild dogs, African Savanna, and Monkey house to name a few. They have an aquarium too that we had to skip because Daniel was starting to fall asleep. Maybe another time; a two year old can only take so much excitement. Daniel on our way to Judy's for the evening. Poor little guy was totally pooped!


This is Daniel and Judy playing together after dinner that night. He hasn't laughed that hard and long in a long time. We all just sat around and took it in. Thank you Judy for everything!

In the morning we drove to a nursing home in Brookville to visit the last of my mother's aunts. Daniel and I didn't go in, we didn't want to overwhelm aunt Vaughn, so we played in the little village of plastic houses for a while.

Later, we stopped in Dubois at Hoss's for lunch with some more of my mom's cousins. The parking lot was full of Harleys! I don't know what the occasion was exactly but they had a fire truck hanging around too. We were encouraged to hop aboard and check it out - we even got shut in and took a little ride around the parking lot. Daniel was very tired seemed to be fascinated at the same time.


Our last stop was Lanse for an overnight with my cousin Matt and his family. They have four kids (ages 7-11), a few acres of wooded domain, free range chickens, and lots of stuff for a 2 year old to explore. I wasn't feeling good at this point so I slept rather than take pictures, but they had a great time playing. We'll have to go back again soon.

Maryland Zoo

Taking full advantage of our Zoo passes and the beautiful weather, we drove to Baltimore for the day to check out the zoo. It is a really well laid out zoo complete with fun interactive children's areas and great animal habitats. I was impressed. (Since this was a full day of fun and beautiful animals, I will just let the pictures tell the story.

Rock Stars

Rockin' it out with some friends at a small group get together.