Of Emily, remodeling, bread pets, and other stuff...

Once again, it's been a while since I wrote in this blog, and I apologize for that. A few friends have asked that I blog more often, so I will try.

So what is going on in our household? Well... too much to even write about, of course! I'm never bored.

At the moment, we are doing a restroom remodel. Tony thinks that we are only replacing the tub, but we will actually replace the flooring and sink, etc as well. We already replaced the toilet. But the tub.... oh, the tub! First off, I picked out one of those bath surrounds to put in there instead of tile. The surrounds they have now look really nice. Had I not seen them at Lowes, I would have never been open to the idea of having plastic panels around my tub instead of nice tile. Really, though... they look nice.

Now, one has to realize that our restroom is tiny. I can sit on the toilet and lean one way to wash my hair in the tub and the other way to wash my hands in the sink. No, I haven't actually done this, but I really think I could if I wanted to.

So, realizing how tiny our restroom is, you can only imagine how fun it was to maneuver a tub out of there. It took us hours.... literally hours. Before we even played with the idea of taking the tub out, we knocked the rest of the tiles down, to take the drywall out and replace it with duralock (isn't that what it's called? It's like drywall, but for places like around a shower). As it turns out, the builders who slapped this place up used drywall instead of something graded for a tub, tile, and water. The result of this wackjob was mold and disintegrated drywall.

As all home repairs go, once we started doing one thing, we found another thing we would have to do. So, we started out with replacing a tub. This seems like something where you would pull a tub out and put another in its place, right? But it's not. Now, we have to replace the plumbing, the drywall, and the flooring. As it turned out, we also had a leak, resulting in standing water under the tub, that seeped under the linoleum on a pretty constant basis, creating a disaster that we didn't know was there. We have an amazing amount of work to do in such a tiny room. We are do-it-yourselfers, so we will be doing it all ourselves. What an adventure!


And, in other news.... Emily is officially registered for kindergarten! She starts this Fall. I'm excited, nervous, and overwhelmed. She is such a free-spirited and strong little chica.... I hope that she isn't forced into a different mold. I love who she is and want her to be "her" forever. She's funny, smart, witty, strong, and so much more. She's the silly little girl who loves to surprise me. For a while, she was having a hard time counting past 15. So, I told her that when she can count to 20, we would go buy another webkinz. She looked at me with that little stinker smile and said, "Okay, okay... 1234......20". She counted to 20 perfectly. So, on the way to pick up a webkinz, I was telling her how happy I was that she can count to 20 so perfectly now and that I would buy her a webkinz for each 10 more that she counts. So, she let out a long sigh, with that smile that I know all too well, and counted to 50. Those things are expensive! I certainly didn't expect to buy 4 in the same day. Later she told me, "Mom, I can't tell you the things that I know because I have to keep it a secret until the right time to tell you." I know what she's getting at.

Being the tricky little mom that I am, I said, "What? nut-uh. Like what? I know everything you can do!" So, she proceeded to count to 100. Ahhhh, so she has that all figured out! Now, she's doing addition, subtraction, and simple multiplication, and being able to get past 20 is very helpful in practicing these skills.

When she was an early 5, we were in the grocery store. She was in the cart sorting the yogurts (we buy a lot of yogurt) into piles. I noticed that she was counting the piles, but just went about my shopping business. After a few minutes, she said, "Mom, I know what two twos is! Four. I know what two threes is! Six. I know what three threes are! Nine." She just went on and on with this. I was completely shocked.

She can read 3 letter words as well. The other day, I told Christopher, "you should come in here and hear how well your sister is reading now!" and Emily responded, "Yeah, Chris.... B-R-A-T brrrrat!". I never thought we would have sibling rivalry here, but apparently there is a little bit of it. Of course, we all got a huge laugh at her new found skills. If you've ever watched the movie, Roger Rabbit, Emily reminds me of a line in that movie.... When Valiant says, "You mean you could've taken your hand out of that cuff at any time?" and Roger responds, "No, not at any time, only when it was funny!"

Speaking of funny, Emily has a new thing. Hopefully this is a normal phase they go through. She likes us to buy baquette (long, hard, thin loaves of bread) for her. She doesn't eat them, they are her pets. She has a toy dog leash that she will put on one and walk it around, take it places with her, and take care of it. We have affectionately named these pets, "Bread Pett". So, when this phase first started, Tony was completely unaware. Who would have ever thought that the bread on the table was actually a pet? So, he came home from work, and a loaf of bread was the only thing on the table. As any person would do, he walked over and tore off part of the bread and started eating it. Emily walked in and completely melted in to tears. As she was sobbing, I was trying to explain to Tony, who had a look of utter confusion. So, I went and got Emily another "Bread Pett". I came in the door with the bag of groceries and set them on the floor while I ran to the restroom. When I came out, Emily was again in tears and sobbing. The Beast had grabbed "Bread Pett" out of the bag and proceeded to take it outside, kill it, and eat it.


I tried to talk her into a stuffed animal, maybe? A pet that is less edible might be a better idea, but it didn't work. So, once again, I picked up a "Bread Pett" and instructed everybody to make sure "Bread Pett" did not get harmed in any way.


And last, but not least, the butterflies. We love science here, so Emily got a cool thing called a butterfly tent from Nonna as a gift. It came with live caterpillars! We followed all instructions, and our caterpillars made their chrysalids, then came out as beautiful Painted Lady butterflies! We kept them for a week, then released them in our garden. It was an amazing experience for all of us, and every time we see a Painted Lady, we say it is one of her butterflies. I managed to get a decent photo of one of the butterflies after it had been "hatched" for about 3 hours. They stay in one spot, with crumpled wings, for about 2 hours, then start flying. We learned a ton of stuff about butterflies that I never knew, and had a great time taking care of them. When we would go in the tent, if we sat still, they would come over and land on us.