September

Charlotte is off to church!

Turning the play room into a bedroom was really quite a big remodel.  I imagined how big it would be--how much work, how long it would take which is why I had been putting John off the idea for years (he suggested doing this a couple years ago when we first began running out of bedroom space).  Alas, even knowing how hard it would be, not physically being able to get a bed and dresser into the rooms upstairs for each kid, I knew it needed to be done.  John was willing to do the work as it would buy us a couple more years in this house, because I had been threatening to move summer of 2016 and he doesn't want to leave his shop, understandably.

We removed the gigantic hearth and the ancient, messy, and completely broken gas fireplace/stove.

John insisted on removing old boards and splicing in new ones so that our beautiful new floors wouldn't have an obviously patched look:

We also had to make way for a large armoire/closet here, so we had to rip out the built in shelving unit.  It was really hard for me to make that call because it was a nice shelving unit, and it would require additional patching of the floor.  If this didn't happen however, I knew we would have to keep hanging up the kids clothes upstairs in the one closet that is up there, and I felt there was no point in making this happen unless I could create a sufficiently practical bedroom space.  Behind the built-in shelves the previous remodelers had not bothered putting sheetrock, so we had to rip out this paneling and John had to patch with sheetrock.

And Rowan is 6 months old!

He has the best smile of any of my babies;

Arabelle really enjoys doing chores the first time in her life that she has ever done them.  Sadly after the first time she is bored of them and nothing can entice/threaten her into doing it again.

Jeffrey has been getting into earning/saving money lately.  He lost his 8th tooth and tried to negotiate for $15 from the tooth fairy.

Arabelle called this a "talking dog", strange thing is I an kind of see it:

Charlotte's creation is on the left: