Toddler Selfies and Basement progress

This winter has been busy. With my conference in January, followed by Brian's surgery, followed by my surgery, then we got to February... February had Brian's class training out of state, and it was a short month. Now we're halfway through March and I've been to another conference. I'm more productive than ever before with my PhD work. Even with the end "in sight", there's still a lot more to be done. This means most weekends I try to steal a couple of hours at the coffee shop, during nap time, and before my bedtime to continue working. This means I'm relying on Brian's help with Juliana and the house more than ever before, and he's been so helpful and understanding. I didn't realize he had the goal of having the lower basement almost done by her birthday (less than a month away now!), so we're trying to redistribute the toddler-less working time for both of us to maximize what we can get done. Thankfully, Juliana's frequent wake ups during the night have significantly decreased, with only an occasional bad dream wake up here and there. It seems we've settled into a new, more acceptable schedule of in bed with lights out about 7:30p, asleep by 8p, and up between 6/6:30a. She's napping a pretty consistent 2 hrs right after lunch, but might wake up at the 1 hr mark and need to be patted ("Pat me!") until she falls back to sleep again. Outside of the everyday "normalcy", I'm focused on finishing up to graduate and starting the job search. Now, pictures of what we've been up to...

One weekend "warm up", I decided it'd be a great idea to venture outdoors and clean up the soon to be flower bed. When we got our top soil last summer, we decided to save costs and go for the unscreened top soil, so we also got a fair collection of trash and debris with our top soil. I figured Juliana could help pick up the plastic and metal and help put it in a trash can so we can start to think about getting ready for mulch and plants. Little did I know how wet and soggy the ground was from the rain and melted snow! Here she is, covered, caked in mud. Poor thing, her shoes got so bogged down she couldn't get herself out of some of the muck, and refused to put her hands down in the mess to get herself to stand up!

Toddler selfies are pretty important to her. She'll start requesting pictures. Or pretend to take a picture of herself by putting her face on the opposite side of the phone screen (the side she normally sees when I take a picture of her, so it makes sense) and say "Cheese!" She's also really into her ponytails... She'll request 1 or 2 and then say "Thank You Momma" after I fix it for her. And if the phone isn't available to see what her ponytails look like, she wants to look in the mirror...

Now that she's sleeping in a "big girl bed", I figure it's just a matter of time before she climbs out of or outgrows the pack n play, and with all our traveling (and thinking towards Hawaii in May), we found an inflatable toddler bed on Amazon. It fits her crib sheets (the corners of the inside brown mattress lift up to tuck the fitted sheet under, and it has "bumpers" on the sides (although I really don't think those would stop her from rolling off. She was really excited by it. The first night we inflated it in the play room, she wanted to sleep on it that night for bedtime, but we said no. We've packed it away now, and we'll see if we bring it out on our next road trip...

She was so proud of herself for putting her glasses on top of her head... Oh the woes of being "little"... The Infant size sunglasses are the only ones that fit the ear to eye distance and width of face distance to actually function as sunglasses (the toddler size, next size up are too big, but we have some Hello Kitty ones ready to go), however, they are too short for the ear to top of head distance to really work to sit on top of the head.... So we have to constantly fix them.

Sometimes, she cries out after her 2 hour nap, but then wants up, to leave her bedroom, and then puts her head back down on me and falls back asleep. So Saturday, she slept for about 3 hours, the last hour with me...

 And then, I guess for a change in position, on napping Daddy...

More Toddler selfies... And trying out the green hair bow barrettes I made for her to wear on St. Patrick's day.

So proud of herself for putting a sticker on Daddy's nose...

Sunday morning, Brian's turn to sleep in, Juliana and I headed downstairs to watch Tangled. She actually sat through the whole movie, I was impressed. She got really wiggly the last 30 mins or so, when the story "slows" according to toddler standards because the characters are falling in love, loose ends are being tied up, etc, but for the most part she was entranced the whole time. She also insisted on laying on the "pillow" (imagine an extremely exaggerated tongue movement on the "ll" in that word, it's her new favorite thing to do when talking about Lolli, or pillows).

We built a cave/fort upstairs, which she kept saying she could see the moon when she laid on the pillow and looked up. Then it also provided space to feed her "hhon-gee" (hungry) babies (and Elmo).

Bedtime pony tail... She fusses when we take ponytails out for bath time to wash her hair, and will stop fussing when we promise to put in a new ponytail after drying her hair and putting her pjs on. Normally in the morning her hair is still in the "up" ponytail position, but the actual ponytail is missing.

And now basement updates! Back in February, when Lolli, Pop, Caitlin, and Evan visited, they helped us get the new gas insert into the fireplace (sorry, don't have a picture), and put dry wall up on half the walls in the fireplace half of the lower basement (again, no pictures). But in preparation for that work, Brian's dad came and helped get the gas line put into the fireplace for the gas insert, and put the gas line for the hot water tank and furnace over to the other side of the room where those mechanicals are.

 When we got the new hot water tank awhile ago, Brian went ahead and put it at the center of the house position in the laundry room side of the lower basement and sort of MacGyvered a gas vent and supply line to it. We knew that we would eventually move the furnace to the left of the hot water tank to move it toward the center of the house to make it more efficient, so Brian's dad helped make the gas line's all correct so that all we needed was to call the HVAC guy to come actually move the furnace.

 We were pleasantly surprised last week when the furnace guy said he was coming to move the furnace, so Brian "worked from home" (or at home?) and helped get everything hooked up and in place! Here's the furnace now next to the hot water tank, and out of the center of the lower basement!

 I couldn't believe all the room now in the laundry room!

 The furnace used to be right under the middle pot light in this picture. This weekend, Brian worked hard in the basement getting these 6 new lights installed into the laundry room (it's dance studio bright in the laundry room now!! Makes me ALMOST want to redo the lights in the rest of the house....), and cleaning up the space so we can get ready to finish up framing walls in the laundry room side.

Moving the furnace has made such a HUGE difference! We turned down the thermostat by 2 degrees, and it was the same night that temperatures dipped again to -6 versus the "balmy" 20 we had been seeing! The furnace now runs for maybe 5 mins versus before when it ran for 10-15 mins. The only unfortunate thing, was in the process of moving, the furnace guy discovered that the coil for the AC had been patched and the patch blew... So, luckily the furnace guy has a coil and will come replace it this week, but we're also now faced with the reality that we will probably need to replace the furnace and AC in the next couple of years (or sooner if the new coil doesn't work or something else goes wrong...). The plus side of this is that a new furnace/AC would only be MORE efficient and cost savings energy wise than what we currently have. After we put in heat to the upper basement last year, our gas bill went down by about $20/mo under the budget plan. A new furnace should further decrease the gas bill but also really affect the electric bill. We've also noticed that the temperature differences between "floors" are dramatically reduced. The basements still are cooler than the upstairs (especially if we leave the thermal curtains on the big picture window in the living room open, heating the upstairs further), but the money and time we've put into the HVAC in this house have been totally worth it!! Now that the furnace is out of the way, we (who am I kidding, Brian...) can really move quickly finishing up the family room side with the fireplace, and the laundry room! I can't even begin to express how excited I am to have clean space to do the laundry in! Plus, it'll be so bright, treating those pesky stains from strawberries or paint on Juliana's clothes will be so much easier!