Block walls

Another thing on our list of home improvements was to stucco our walls. Here you can see the walls before the stucco but after I had our painter apply some dry lok to prevent water seeping through. You can also see the orange stucco that the previous home owner had done.


Here's the after. We stuccoed over the orange stucco because the finish wasn't the same as the house.


Here's another view of the orange wall.


After picture.


Before


After


Here's all the pool equipment open to the sun.


Here's the wall to hide and protect the equipment. The brown stucco is because they touched up those areas with stucco from my neighbor's walls. My neighbor had the foresight to have them color the stucco whereas I didn't know that was even an option. We have to paint the house anyways so not a big deal.


Here's the tight opening to get in.

Dark chocolate dipped strawberries

Happy Mother's Day!

More storage never hurt anyone

Our new house didn't have any garage cabinets so that was one of the first things on our to do list. Once you have cabinets, you can't really go back. This time around we used advancedgaragesolutions instead of spacesolutionsaz. They basically have the same product except advancedgaragesolutions has adjustable shelves in every section and includes a shelf in all the uppers. Plus they were a little cheaper.



Here's the before picture.



Here's the other bank of cabinets. Overall we have 25 feet of cabinets plus a 4 foot workbench.


Here's the before picture.


Here you can see some of my handy work to wire an outlet at the work bench and upper cabinet (for future under cabinet lighting).


Finished picture of the electrical.

I'm 12 months old today!

That's right, I've hit a major milestone. I have satisfied 1 of the 2 requirements to sit forward facing in the car. The only requirement left is to weigh over 20 lbs and I'm just 6 oz shy of that. I can't wait. With all of the real food I'm eating now, I'll be sure to pass that threshold any day now.

No bars at home....

Every since we moved we haven't had good cell phone coverage at home which is a problem when you don't have a land line. AT&T recently released their 3G Microcell ($150) which provides 3G service in your home and routes the calls through your Internet connection. We've had it for a month and so far so good except sometimes when making a call we hear the other person pickup without hearing the phone ringing.

I'm 11 months old today!

A lot has happened. First off I took my first steps. That's right, I'm able to walk on my own. Okay walk is overstating it just a tad. I can take a few steps. I like to push my bus though and can easily cross the room with it.


I also got my first bite mark today. You can even see the individual teeth marks. Hopefully this isn't a sign of things to come.

Ostrich Festival

Every year Chandler has their annual Ostrich Festival. We had never gone before but thought it might be fun to check it out. Here's a picture of the kiddie carnival area. The Festival reminded me of the Danbury Fair that I use to go to as a kid except instead of car races, they have ostrich races.


If you look closely you can see the Ostriches.


Here's one of the riders. For some reason only the blue rider could stay on.


They also had an Emu chasing event for the kids.


"What are you looking at?"


My highlight of the festival, Ostrich burgers. Yum! This reminded me of our trip to africa.


This was Lauren's highlight of the festival, the dog jumping.

Nickname

They call me "Fangs".

I'm 10 months old today!

A lot has happened this month. I have a total of 4 teeth so far, I can crawl and sit with the best of them, and I've started pulling up on things. I predict that by 11 months I'll be walking.

Transportation day

One of the local churches has a transportation day where they have over 40 different vehicles that kids can check out. Lauren is checking out a fire engine in this picture.



The real star of the show was the helicopter. You can see the helicopter coming in for a landing which sounded cool until you realize that it's landing on a gravel dirt area. We didn't actually get to see it land because I was shielding Lauren with my back from the blowing debris.



You can see the dirt patch and all the family and kids on the perimeter.



Lauren was really excited to sit on the school bus.



There was even a flyby.



Good old fashion transportation. Lauren was excited about the horses although she wasn't the only one.....



She had a helmet on but it kept falling off. This particular shot was a staged photo after they had already removed her helmet.



Unfortunately time was running short so not all the "kids" could check out the vehicles.



Future pilot?

Happy Chinese New Year!

Watch out Dole!

Slicing fresh pineapples is a pain. You have to make so many cuts and then you have to remove the eyes etc. so I bought this pineapple slicer/corer. I wasn't sure it would work when I bought it but after using it, I'm glad I bought one. You cut off the top of the pineapple and then just turn the slicer into the pineapple. The slicer removes the core and slices the pineapple as you turn it.


Then you just pull the pineapple slices out. If you wanted to do a fancy presentation, you could fill the empty pineapple with some food.


Perfect pineapple slices just like out of a Dole can. :)

New car seat

We recently bought another car seat, Sunshine Kids Radian65SL from Albeebaby.com since Cole is starting to outgrow his infant carrier. We really like our Britax roundabout but the one bad thing about them is that they are really wide. You can't fit 2 of them side by side. The Sunshine Kids car seats are highly rated and have a slim profile. They are also really heavy since they have a steel frame. In this picture you can see the Radian65(left) next to the Roundabout(right). Notice how high the Roundabout sits as well as how bulky it looks.

Would you do it again?

The answer is no. We decided this time around to put up a temporary pool fence instead of a pool net like we did in our last house. The net is great because once it's on you never have to worry about the kids getting past it. But the problem is that you need to have the discipline to put it back on every time you take it off. This didn't always happen. The other issue is that you can't clean the pool when it's on. So now our old pool has a nice ring of algae around the edge.


Here's the before picture without the fence.


Here's the other side. The pool fence is by Pool Guard.


Here's the before picture.


One of the reasons we went with this company was that they were going to make an additional fence piece that would jut out from the wall a few feet so that you couldn't swing around the fence. You can see the extra fence in this picture.

Telephone or Network.....

Our new house was wired with Cat5 wiring throughout the house but unfortunately they were all connected for telephone lines. Who uses a land line these days? Since we don't have a need for a telephone, I converted the wires to be network lines by adding some connectors and plugging them into the router.


Here's the Ethernet cable crimper I had to buy in order to put the connector on. It's surprisingly easy to do. One problem I ran into is that there are 2 standards for how you arrange the wires in the connector. You can see the standards here. I wired one outlet with the wrong standard but it still worked fine. I'm not sure why but as long as it works, I'm not complaining.


Here's a before picture of our network panel.


Here's the after picture.