Summer - Week #4

Independence Day!  We started off the morning by going to the West Bountiful parade and lunch with the Green family.  Matt stayed home with Bradley (B was sick on this day and Matt was still recovering from the day before).  I love this parade.  It's so much smaller and less claustrophobic than a lot of the other parades in the county and the best part about it is that the route goes right past Morgan and Amy's home... how comfortable and easy is that?!

This year I told Lauren that she needed to focus on helping the little kids with their candy as opposed to gathering her own stash.  She was upset at first (it's hard to grow up!) but she was so great with the younger kids and of course they all shared the candy with each other anyway.

Nana organized a fishing pond for the kids to do during the day.  The kids loved it, especially Lauren, who is cheering in her picture because I told her she was not too old to fish. ;)

The night of the 4th we pooled all our fireworks with the neighbors and watched them together.  Bradley came out to be with everyone although he spent the evening cuddled in his blanket far away from the crowd.  However, he was feeling good enough by then that every time I took his picture he made "zombie eyes" for the camera.  I really love all our neighbors.  The ones on either side of me are empty nesters and didn't join us for fireworks, but everyone in our neck of the neighborhood is so easy going and low key.  In the picture below left are my neighbors across the street Molly & Mark Oliver, and Theresa & Nathan Baldwin.  Both families have boys a year younger than Will and they're great buddies.  Great end to a great day!

Changing gears... the following pictures actually span across weeks 2-5 but this seems like as good a place as any to smoosh them in.  We own two rental homes in the Kayscreek subdivision (it's the area we lived before we moved to Park City).  We just had our first yucky experience, after years of renters, with a family that filed bankruptcy and lived in the house rent free for 6 months... a lot of ins and outs with that story, the governmental rules protecting our renters are upsetting.  Regardless, they are finally out now and we needed to replace some carpet that got torn up while they were there.  Since we were getting new carpet we decided this would be a great time to repaint the bedrooms.  When we bought the house it was painted and decorated SO cute but it was very personalized so we decided to neutralize the bedrooms.  Matt wanted to hire the work out but I had the brilliant (?) idea that this would be a great way for our kids to learn how to work and help out in other ways besides just cleaning our own home.  I am so glad we had the kids help us with this.  They really did work hard and I was really proud of all they did.  Regardless, teaching your kids how to work usually doubles the time involved and it was an exhausting project.  Here are the before pics:

The "during" snapshots.  The rooms were so dark that they required a lot of primer; 3 coats - ugh.  It was such a good thing that we were painting on carpet that we knew was going to be replaced.  I'd like to blame all the paint spills on the kids but I was just as bad as any of them.  In addition to painting, the kids washed walls, baseboards, shelving, and cleaned the bathrooms.

Bradley was a great helper.  He came with me to the home a couple of times while Lauren babysat the boys.  During those times we did the colored paint... as good as the little boys were at painting we needed the top coats to be applied a bit more carefully.

Here's what the rooms looked like post paint, pre carpet:

Now it's time to tell my pity party story...  I was weeding the front garden at the rental home one day and totally got stung by a wasp.  The nest was nestled up under the stucco and I didn't notice it.  Owie! But to top it all off, a few days later I was at the house and noticed all the neighbors had their garbages out.  I went to grab the can to drag it to the road and stuck my hand right into another nest!  I got THREE wasp stings that time!!  I took a picture of my 3 wasp stings and let me tell you, it does NOT do my poor swollen hand justice. :-P  And here is the final product.  I think it turned out great, was worth all the effort we put into having the kids help, and I'm so glad it's all done!! Wish us luck with our next renters. :)