I'm not quite sure where to start . . .

I've got a whole summer of posts about the kids that I want to get caught up on, since this seems to be the only place I've been documenting their childhood (I really need to actually write something in their baby books sometime!). But for tonight, I thought I would post a few pictures of one of the new rooms - the family room.

The kids (especially Jaymes) love being able to look out into the backyard. We are so relieved that this project is mostly done. I would NEVER in a million years recommend that anyone with very small children remodel or add on to their house while living in the house. The constant extremely loud noise, the lack of privacy with having three men working in the house all day every day, and most of all, the mess and amount of clean up that I had to do / still have to do, is enough to make me go crazy, I mean really, I almost lost it a few times! Working on the house has consumed all our time, and I feel like we haven't had a very good summer. People warned me that the sheet rock dust was going to be everywhere, and boy was that true. I'm slowly working on it, and things have gotten a lot better, but I'm not exaggerating when I say every single thing in my house needs to be either washed, vacuumed, or dusted. For example, one night I was looking for some pajamas for Jaymes, and the very bottom item of clothing inside his dresser drawer was full of white dust! I still have to wash curtains and vacuum blinds but then I should be finally caught up on that. It sort of felt like we were moving, as I had to pack up everything in several rooms, so I'm slowly bringing boxes back in from the garage and unpacking those.

We definitely would not have been able to do everything without the help of our parents. The kids went to stay with Monte's parents for 6 days while I painted 6 rooms. 6 days!! I had never been away from Jaymes for more than a few hours, then we were apart for 6 days! He is quite the Mama's boy, but I hear he did just fine without me, and got quite attached to Grandma. I was beyond excited to get them back after being away from them for that long. Also, my mom came a couple of different times and stained and varnished all of our woodwork for us, that was a huge help as well!

Even though it was a huge pain to live through, I'm very glad that we did it (but I never want to do it again!), and we have more space now. I'm working on some before and afters, so I'll get those posted soon.

Oh, and can you believe my baby is turning a year old next week?!!