05/03/2012

1.  Two potential builders came out this morning to look at the house and get what they needed to draw up an estimate.  The builder we liked from last time can't fit us into the timeline we're looking at, so I signed up for Angie's List and contacted a few others that I found in the area.  I liked both of them that came today.  The second one reminded me so much of my brother Brigham!
I'm excited for this project, but Ben is getting cold feet again.  This is what happened last time (3 years ago when we were going to add on just one room), at about this same stage in the game.  I hope he doesn't pull the plug again.  I know that adding on to our house is not a necessity.  We could certainly survive living in a two bedroom apartment if we needed to!  But man, it sure would be nice to have more space.  Just today there were about 4 separate occasions when I was wishing we already had the addition done.  It's too hard for the boys to all be doing their own thing in the space we have now.  At least, it is if they're going to be doing their schoolwork in a location that is accessible to me, which is still important since they're a few years away from being totally independent in their schoolwork (if they ever totally are).  Today Joseph was trying to do his piano practicing while Brigham was doing his math and Mosey was trying to finish up his history.  Brigham is physically unable to do math without singing to himself.  :-)  The piano is loud.  And Mosey was trying to read history and answer the questions in his workbook.  But he needed me there with him to help him out, and it was just TOO LOUD.  I can't go upstairs, outside doesn't work because he needed a table and chair to sit up to and write out his answers.  Instead everyone just got irritated with each other.  So we'll see.  I wish Ben could stay home during one of our regular school days so he can observe how things go around here.  I think he might see the necessity more clearly if he had a better sense for our day-to-day during school.

2.  I'm pretty proud of myself for my dinner-making skills this week.  Listen to what I've made so far!  Monday we had omelets (OK, not so great, but a step up from Pasta Roni, I think), Tuesday I made a broccoli cheese and rice concoction which was entirely eaten up in one sitting, Wednesday I made black bean burgers (shaped like hotdogs to be eaten with leftover hotdog buns), and tonight I made beef and broccoli and rice.  That's FOUR DAYS in a ROW of cooking real meals!  Actually FIVE because I made taco salad on Sunday night.

3.  The boys have been loving the pool the past few days.  I need to go out and take pictures one of these days.  Tonight Ben and the boys were in the pool for well over an hour while I was cooking dinner.  I love hearing their happy yells out there.  Brigham spent most of the time trying to wrestle Ben, who responded by picking him up and throwing him across the pool.  Brigham loves stuff like that-- he is such a fearless, rough-and-tumble kind of kid.  Ben thinks he would really like football, and I bet he would too.  But I'm a little too protective of Brigham's intact brain to be very excited about the idea of him playing football.  :-)  After dinner, Ben and Brigham watched a bunch of Youtube videos of football's hardest hits, or something like that.  I thought it might sober Brigham up a bit, but I think it had the opposite effect-- he still thinks it looks fun.