Just a Wednesday– the Deck and more

Hi everyone!  Here’s hoping you are all having a great week. 

Truth be told, I’m having a hard time keeping up with blogging, so forgive my sporadic posts lately.  I work a full time job and take care of our baby girl at the same time, so *lately*, that doesn’t leave much (any???) time for basically anything else. 

It wasn’t too hard until about a month ago (blogging aside).  But now…well, it’s getting pretty tough!  We’ve been pondering our family’s future and what role I want to or should have in it, so hopefully we’ll come to a solution in the next several weeks.  At that point, I should have a little more time for keeping up with everything else in life, including blogging.

Meanwhile, our deck is progressing beautifully!  I can hear drills and saws going now as the pergola goes up.  I recently discovered that ALL my “before” pictures of our deck….are totally blown out.  I screwed up with some setting, and now I need to spend some time trying to edit the photos back to something recognizable.  Such.a.bummer.

But here’s a great shot of the rotted joists previously holding up our deck:

And the huge pile of dirty-rotten-no-good-untreated-pine that cost us a small fortune to get rid of:

Once I can fix those before pictures, I’ll go into more detail on all the treasures we found ripping out the old deck.  Oh.ma.gawsh.  I’d really like to tar and feather the doofbag who built that deck.  We had NO IDEA how bad it really was.

But anyway, onwards to happier topics!

In baby news:

Avery finally learned how to roll over from her tummy to her back….and as I write this, she rolled on her own from  her back to her tummy for the FIRST time!

She loves to stand and can hold herself upright with something to hang onto.

She’s making some of the cutest little squeaks and squeals now.

She went swimming for the first time and loved it!

She still is a champion non-sleeper.  She averages 10 hours at night and between 1-2 hours during the day.  She also wakes an average of 5 times a night and needs our help to go back to sleep.  We’ve tried a bunch of different approaches to sleep training, and I think we’re finally onto one that is working, but it’s a slow trek.

We’re smitten.  As you can tell from all the photos

Funny story: she had a diaper blowout today while we were running a quick errand.  Being a quick errand, I didn’t bring the diaper bag, and I was just carrying her in my arms while we were in the store.  It took me a while to realize we had a problem….then a little while longer to realize we had a big problem, and this problem was not only coming out the leg holes and top of her diaper, but her onesie was quickly soaking it up, and I had a nice big smeary chunk down the inside of my arm where I was carrying her.  Oh my stars, it was a mess.

Needless to say, toilet paper and paper towels don’t help much in a situation like that, but we did the best we could and rushed back out to the car to get home as quickly as possible.  A change of clothes for her (and for me), and a bath (for her and for me) later, we finally had it under control.  It was a doozy!

And with that, I’ll exit stage left.