The Stevens Family

As an effort to get the boys some fresh air last week, I thought we'd go out and do some eagle watching.  We took a drive to the Lock and Dam north of Burlington (I don't know it's number), and immediately saw our first eagle as we drove up the road to the dam.  It was hanging around a deer corpse on the side of the road, and flew up and over our car as we drove down the road.  It was a great "first sighting" and got the boys very excited about seeing more eagles.
We were the only ones there that day, so the boys were able to run free and stretch their legs a bit.  There weren't huge amounts of eagles, but it was enough for us!  We had so much fun that we went back over the weekend with daddy, and even made a trip to Keokuk to see if we could have some better luck. 
I've been practicing with a new camera, so this was a great opportunity to try out my zoom lens.  Enjoy!

A bit later each year, but better late than never, right? A few years ago I made a giant To Do list for our house and I've tried to update it yearly to reflect what we've accomplished.

Here is the key:

Red: Accomplished in 2007

Blue: Accomplished in 2008

Green: Accomplished in 2009

Black: To Do

Jayden's Room - NOW the "Toy Room"

• Touch up floor paint
• Install and paint quarter round and floor trim
• Finish shelving (this is partly done)
  
• Install dimmer switch
• Blank covers for obsolete outlets
• Install lighting in closet
• Paint door

Master Bedroom

• One more coat of paint on walls
• Edging on ceiling
• Plate covers
• Finish Trim
• Install Door
• Install closet lights
• Run cable to our room

Upstairs Hallway

• Finish patching cracks
• Sand
• Primer and paint ceilings and walls
• Install lighting
• Switch plate covers
• Paint woodwork
• Install shelving

Kid's Bath

• Finish Floor
• Plumbing
• Order faucet for tub
• Sand walls
• Primer and Paint walls and ceiling
• Finish painting bead board
• Put up trim
• Put up and finish door
• Install Lighting
• Hang medicine cabinet

Stairway

• Sand, primer, paint walls and ceiling
• Sand and varnish woodwork (this is partly done)
  

Living Room

• Finish woodwork
• Finish installing built in media cabinet
• Finish dresser
• Finish and install french doors
• Touch up paint

Family Room - This is now the Dining Room

• Touch up paint
• Put up woodwork
• Finish woodwork
• Install built in bookshelves

Dining Room - This is now the Family Room

• One more coat of regular paint
• Top coat paints
• Woodwork
• Switch plate covers
• Door on closet

Half bath

• Put in ceiling
• Plaster, sand, primer, and paint walls and ceiling
• Paint bead board and woodwork
• Plate covers (all but the lightswitch)
  
• Hang medicine cabinet

Kitchen

• Electrical
• Plumbing
• Drywall walls and ceiling
• Plaster, Sand, Primer and paint walls and ceiling
• Install and paint woodwork
• Sand and varnish floor <--We painted instead
• Install lighting
• Install cabinets
• Install appliances

Outside

• Scrape paint
• Primer (partial!)
  
• Paint (partial!)
  
• Begin landscaping
• Finish Bay Windows
• Porch Floor (partial!)
  
• Straighten Porch (partial!)
  

Gavin's Room - NOW the "Boy's Bedroom"

• Burn paint off closet door and bedroom door
• Primer doors
• Paint doors
• Fix floor
• Install quarter round
• Touch up wall
  

On Tuesday, Jayden had his first day of preschool. He's been so excited about starting school, he was bouncing off the walls all morning. He'll be going every Tuesday, Thursday and Friday afternoon. We got out the door about a half hour early, so we took the time to get a few pictures.

We've come a bit farther from out previous Porch Demo post, so I thought I'd share!

Yesterday Josh, my mom, Perry and Jayden started working on our front porch. If you've been to our house you probably know that our porch was a bit, um, rough...really, it's pretty embarrassing. Luckily for us, my mom has most of the materials we need to rebuild from her building downtown that we're able to get things started right away.
Here is what we started with. Lovely isn't it? I mean, really, who doesn't like exposed cinder blocks at the front of their home to welcome their guests? Not to mentions the birds and squirrels that liked to make their home in the corner, and the "rebuilt" porch post that looked like a scratching post thanks to the squirrels and that was pretty much rotted away.


Here is the other side. Not much better. The board you see laying there was a frugal attempt to keep neighbor cats out from under our porch.
And notice the lovely jagged floor boards edging the front of the porch. You may even notice a few boards that were remnants of a better time when lattice was used in place of random boards.Here they are, getting to work. My mom had all of the two by fours at her place, Jayden jumped right in to help unload.
I had to show houses that afternoon, so I missed out on the fun demolition, but when I came back, the demo was DONE! The porch is braced up, no floor, the posts are off, and Josh even built these LOVELY cinder block steps for us until we get everything rebuilt.
So far, so good!

We had Gavin's Birthday party on Sunday, February 22nd. I've discovered that it's much more difficult to plan a Birthday party in the winter, so we decided to keep it simple and intimate since our family is starting to get spread out a bit.
Our first order of business was assembling the slide that the Wilkins family got him. It will great for him to have his own appropriate sized slide when we get to play outside this summer!
From there, we had cake. I worked very hard on his cake, mostly because we kept his party so low key, I still wanted him to have pictures to look back on and know that we did something special. This was my first fondant cake....and last I'm sure...unless enough time goes by that I forget how much work this type of cake is.
The cupcake on top was meant for Gavin, but he didn't want a thing to do with it!
Rather than just having cake and ice cream, I thought we'd do an ice cream sundae buffet.


After not even touching his cupcake, we thought we'd give him a slice of cake. As you can see, he didn't want anything to do with this either. The weird part is, this kid has a HUGE sweet tooth. He'll scream and cry if he sees a cookie, piece of candy, or anything yummy looking. His brother did the same thing with his first Birthday cake.
He did, however, like the ice cream toppings.
From there, we opened presents. At this point it was past his naptime, so we had to be quick! Jayden was kind enough to help. He got lots of fun toys and great clothes!
Here he is modeling a new outfit from Nana:
During Gavin's nap, the older boys went outside to play. They had a BLAST playing in the snow.
Overall, we had a wonderful time. Thank you everyone for sharing this very special day with him!

A cute video of Gavin enjoying some Birthday Balloons:



I'll post a bit more info soon!

I wanted to wait until after his one year Birthday, but I got tired of constantly washing the dried in food that tangled up his hair. His hair was really pretty unruly, but I knew that once he had a haircut he would not look like a baby any more and it's hard to prepare yourself for that. So last night, we chopped the curls. We bribed him into sitting still with some Conversation Hearts, Jayden has apparently introduced these to him earlier in the day while I was on the phone. If you know Gavin, he has to constantly play with food that is in his mouth, so one heart kept him preoccupied for a couple of minutes at least.
Anyway, here is the before:

And here he is this morning:

Well, I'm slacking, and I'm sorry. I've been so busy lately working and I've had sick boys for the past week. I've had so much that I've wanted to blog about, because we've been doing some fun things (except for the sick week). This will simply be an abridged version of the last month of so.
Some of the fun things we've done:
Whew! That's it for now! Back to work :)