Mike’s Family Blog

Here we are in Nampa, Idaho just about to head to the Opening Ceremonies for the Special Olympics World Winter Games.

It was a good drive out, very scenic and very little snow.  I think we had about 10 miles of snow covered road as we drove into Idaho from Montana, but otherwise, the roads were dry.

The kids have done well while travelling.  Jonathan was happy as punch sitting in his seat with a DVD player in front of him as he watched movie after movie.  His only complaint was that his bum was getting sore after a couple of longer days.

With the larger group of us, it was difficult to plan for exact rest stops, so I prepared well for it.  I put geocaches into my GPSr for almost every potential rest stop or town that we might need to stop at.  When someone would pipe up that they needed a ’stop’, I’d look up the nearest geocache and that would mark the distance to the stop.

The scenery was fantastic.  We took some pictures of Painted Canyon in Theodore Roosevelt National Park as we drove by.  Too bad we didn’t have time for a stop, very pretty.  We did make a point of stopping at Shoshone Falls in Twin Falls Idaho.  They call this the Niagara of the West.  At 212 feet, the falls is 36 feet higher than Niagara and it has a 900ft wide falls at its springtime peak flow.

I’ll be posting some pictures in the gallery, stay tuned.

So it’s been a few months since I posted anything last. So I figure it fitting that with the last post being about bad spray foam, this one’s about the fixed window.

Back in July, we had cut away all the foam and glass that had burst forth. This past weekend I finished the job by adding a sheet of plywood and then putting some vinyl siding over it as seen in the photo below. Took a bit of time, but not a difficult fix.

More to update soon.

So here we are, in the middle of rebuilding the bathroom and we had to come to a decision in regards to the window. Do we board it over and re-do the siding making it look as if there is no bathroom? Or do we follow the suggestion of two respected family members who have some long life experience in such matters. Their advice being, leave the window in, cover it up to make it look like a frosted window, block it in with plywood and spray foam between the plywood and window.

Well, after some debate, we decided that the advice was sound. After all, we wouldn’t have to do any work on the outside, the spray foam would give us the necessary insulation from the elements and it was a heck of a lot less work.

But, the one thing that we all neglected to consider was the actual expanding power of the spray foam. Instead of filling in the gap nicely and moving vertically to fill the void, which it did as well, the foam decided it would be fun to expand horizontally as well. Okay, so now it has a choice, push through the small drill holes in the plywood or test the strenght of the glass itself.

Sadly, the glass lost the battle. Now we’ve got a blown out window that had been covered by a couple of sheets of mylar and it looks like a pregnant belly about to burst forth an alien.

So guess what our next step will be? Yup, you guessed it, take out the window, clean up the mess, trim back the foam and then cover it up with plywood on the outside. Then we’re either going to screw a pair of faux shutters to the plywood or we’ll go back to the original plan and put siding across.

So I guess you could say, it was a case of great in theory, bad in practice. I’m sure you’ll get a chuckle out of the picture. There are some more bathroom pictures in the gallery.

Today, Jonathan turned 3!  Wow, time flies.

This past Sunday, the 8th, we had a party for him in the back yard.  His Grandma and Poppa were in from Ontario to visit and take in the festivities.  It was a fun day with kids running around all over.  Look for some update in the photo gallery soon.

Meanwhile, today, we took Jonathan to his first pro baseball game.  With our deepest thanks to a lovely young lady who will remain nameless (because she’s shyish about that) Jonathan, Grandma, Poppa, Mommy and Abigail all had amazing seats at ground level just to the side of the visiting players bench.

Myself, I was in the same section, but 17 rows up.  BUMMER eh!?  That’s okay, I had fun with the group I was with.

Anyways, until he fell asleep around the 6th inning, he was having fun.  It was nice (for him) to be able to stand and watch the game without bothering the person in front of him.  (of which there were no people as there were no rows in front, just the foul ball mesh.

It sounds like he had the treat girl wrapped around his finger because she kept throwing treats at him all day.  But because I had to leave early to get students back to school, I missed what else went on.  Jonathan got to meet the Goldeye’s mascot named Goldie!

Below are some photos.

So tonight we give Abigail her first bath at home.  (And a first bath picture still to be posted.) However, I thought I’d share the after-bath funny.

So there I was, wrapping her up in a towel.  I picked her up to cuddle her and get her warmed up (and calmed down from all the crying) when I hear a big wet-sounding flatulence come from her hind end.  We’re laughing and preparing to unravel the towel to check her when Lisa exclaims “She’s dripping!” She had more than had a wet one, it was a full blow out!  Not only had it filled the towel under her bottom, it soaked through the towel and was dripping on me, on the floor and whatever else was under her.  So I quickly moved her over the bathtub we had just pulled her from.  After a moment, we put her right back on the counter to clean her up.

The whole episode gave new meaning tothe phrase ‘air dry.’

So it’s Sunday night and I’m enjoying a rip roaring good NHL playoff game where San Jose and Dallas go into a fourth overtime. The game finally ends at 1:30am and it’s lights out. Fast forward 3.5 hours and Lisa’s waking me up… I think I’m in labour. Well, if that’s not the statement that wakes you up quick!

How far apart, asks I.

About 6-8 minutes. Lisa replies. It started at 3am, but I let you sleep for a bit. (Good thing too, darned quadruple overtime, I’m thinking now.) So up I get whilst asking her all the necessary questions to determine what our timeframe looks like. I made sure to have some breakfast else I end up passed out due to lack of nourishment later on if it goes too long. By 6:15am, Lisa’s Mom was at the house to stay while Jonathan woke up. We were on our way and at the hospital by 6:30.

Up to triage we go and through the necessary tests. Lisa’s doing great, what a trooper! By 7:30, she’s checked and found to be 6cm. We’re quickly scooted out of triage and into the private birthing room. As we get there, Lisa’s already asking for our attending nurse to tell her that she’s ready for her epideral.

No problem, they say. But first we need to take some more readings and do the necessary bloodwork before we can give it. 8:30am, bloodwork is sent away and preparatory IV is started. By 8:50, the contractions start getting a bit more intense and at 8:58, Lisa says that she’s got the urge to push. So call the nurses station, we do and our attending is there in under a minute. At 9:00, she’s checked and found to be fully dialated and bulging. So the nurse makes the call to have the doctor come down. As she’s doing that, the water goes. At 9:01, the doctor comes in and says, okay, give us two seconds to get set up and then you can push.

At the point, Lisa’s doing everything she can NOT to push, but this baby wants outta there now! Finally, the doctor says to go ahead and after about 4 pushes, at 9:04am on May 5, 2008, Abigail Renna Isabella entered the world! She weighs in at 7lbs 6.3oz and 21 inches long.

The rest of the morning was a blur of activity, cleaning, checking, feeding, pooping…

Then I left to go get Jonathan. At just after 1pm, I brought him up to see his baby sister. I think he thought it was really neat. We had given him a little stuffed lamb to give to Abigail and just after meeting her, he dove into his backpack to bring it out. He was tickled pink to get to hold her on his lap and near the end of his visit was asking to do it again.

After Jonathan and I left, I continued a tradition that started when I was brought to meet my sister for the first time. I took Jonathan out to McDonalds.

At the time of this writing, all is well with baby and Mommy. They are resting and now I go that way too. (I’d have gotten this done earlier, but it took Jonathan until just after 9pm to fall asleep.)

More photos in the gallery.

Friday night, The Wiggles were in town. If you’re not familiar with them, they are children’s entertainers from Australia. (Website here.) Jonathan absolutely loves The Wiggles. They are very entertaining for kids and a welcome relief from some of the more, uh, annoying kids entertainment. (See Barney.)

So we coughed up for floor seats to the 2nd show and Jonathan had a blast. For the first half hour, he was so awed by the fact that he was seeing them live, he could only stare. After a while, he warmed up and started dancing.

Below are two videos, the first is of Jonathan enjoying one of the songs. The second is a video of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. They asked the audience to open up their cell phones, PDAs or whatever so that they lit up as ’stars’.

Video 1
Video 2

You know what they say… when you’re going through Hell, don’t stop. Well, I’ve got a new one. When you’re going through renovations and have to shut off the water to the house to accomplish them, don’t stop!

So there we were, a leaky kitchen faucet that needed replacing. This ’should’ have been a fairly quick and painless replacement.
Problem number 1, no shut off valves. (There were only two in the house. The main one and the one for the hot water tank.) Still, this shouldn’t be a huge deal. We picked up some compression type valves. Cut the copper, clean it up, pop on the compression valves, screw everything together and you’re done.

Problem number 2, the wood below the formica under the old taps had completely disintigrated. This was a compound problem. The wood was so crumbly, that it loosened the fittings. The looser fittings were more prone to leakage. So the wood was almost always damp. So, in order to fix the leaky faucet properly, we’d have to replace the whole counter.

Okay, so let’s price this out and find the least costly solution.

1) Rona: 2 sections of counter (long and short) + materials, a little over $200. I cut everything and install it. Our old, 22″ deep. The new option, 25″ deep. We’d have a bit of an overhang. (Problem with this was the corner cut. Could I make it straight?

2) Rona: A custom order with the proper cuts and depth. I’d still install, but no cutting, thus lower risk of screwups. $350.00

3) Home Depot: The same as #2 exept in price. $550 !!! Same supplier, just WAY more esxpensive!

So I went for the complete DIY package.

Well, for the most part, we successfully pulled it off. The biggest problem turned out to be what I feared in the first place, the corner. However, it wasn’t the angle that did me in, it was that the long piece had a slight ‘U’ shape to it. This meant that when tying the two corners together, we ended up with a lip in the corner of a couple of millimeters.

SOOOOO close!

So we got it all back together and finally turned the water back on about 15 hours after we began. The great thing was, no leaks on the first shot! Boy was I ever sore today after getting up. Very tired too. So if you noticed anything amiss in my message, I attribute it to exhaustion. I’m typing this while fighting to keep my eyelids from shutting.

Ah well, before and after pictures are in the gallery.

Added this evening to the gallery.

Since Dad introduced me to geocaching, I haven’t done much posting on the blogs about it.  We’re out having fun.  I recently had a week where Jonathan and Lisa were in Quebec for the Special Olympics Canada Winter Games.  So I went on a caching tear and did over 60 in the week they were gone to put me over 300 finds.

Anyways, today’s post isn’t about that.  Today, I took Jonathan with me to do a quick cache before picking up Lisa from work.  The cache we found (Called Carole’s Christmas Tree) has been out since around Christmas of 2007, only a couple of months.  When we found the cache, I was pleasantly surprised that inside was a unique First to Find certificate.  It wasn’t for the first ‘person’ to find, it was for the first ‘child’ to find.  Well, that was Jonathan!  So here’s a picture of him holding his first FcTF certificate.