Five Months

I'm a day late.  I blame it on the bathroom.  I can pretty much blame everything on the bathroom these days.  Anyway, on to the subject at hand.

Stella is five months old.  I can't believe how fast the time goes by.  Last time she went to the doctor, he said we could start giving her solids between 5 and 6 months.  She's gotten very curious about what we eat now and will even reach for food as we put it in our mouths, so I think she's ready.  I'm planning to start her on some solids next week.  We'll see how it goes.

So what is the little one up to now?  Well, last time I blogged, she had rolled over a few times and had then given it up.  I would venture to say she's an expert roller now.  At least from her back to her front. Just a couple days after my last Stella post, she started rolling over again and has never looked back.  She almost always rolls over to her tummy if I set her down on her back.  She can roll from her tummy to her back, but it's usually by accident.  I think she realizes she should be able to and she tries to all the time, but she hasn't figured out that she needs to get her arm out of the way.  So, if her arm happens to be out of the way, over she goes.  If not, she tries and tries and then gets frustrated that she doesn't get anywhere.  For awhile, she could only roll in one direction - to the right.  She was not an ambi-roller.  But, this last week she's started to roll in the other direction and has been working on that and doing well.

She still gets comments on her hair everywhere we go.  It is not falling out and, in fact, just keeps getting longer.  It's to the point that it's always in her eyes and I'm wondering if we should try to get it trimmed.  I know it seems ludicrous that I would even consider having it cut, but really, we're constantly brushing it out of her eyes.  She likes to play with it, though.  It's really cute.  While I'm feeding her or when she's going to sleep, she'll often reach up and play with her hair a little bit.  Mostly just rubbing it because it's soft.  Once, I put her down for a nap and when I went in to check on her, she had fallen asleep with her fingers in her hair.

She seems to like music.  I'm trying to start her early on the good stuff:  The Beatles, Johnny Cash, The Killers, etc, etc.  One of her current favorite songs is She's A Rainbow by the Rolling Stones.  She also likes to dance.  And by dance, I mean I hold her and dance around.  Because she doesn't have the motor control to be dancing around by herself yet.  But that will come.

Stella and Scout have quite the budding friendship.  They have a mutually beneficial relationship.  Scout is the source of endless entertainment for Stella and Stella is the source of endless spit up for Scout.  Yes, Scout still enjoys the spit up.  So much so that it's gotten to the point that if Stella spits up and I'm not in the room, Scout will come get me so I will move the baby and she can lick up the spit up.  It's still disgusting and still very convenient.

It just amazes me how quickly Stella develops from one day to the next.  Like how today, she all of a sudden seemed to realize that she should be able to get places.  So, she started pulling her legs up and moving as if she were going to crawl.  If only her arms weren't lagging behind in the process, she might actually do it.  One thing's for sure, this girl wants to go places.  She is ready to get moving!  She's also sitting now.  She's still pretty unsteady, but she can sit long enough for me to let go and take a picture.

She's definitely a mama's girl and when she's tired, no one else will do.  Although, she is getting better with her daddy.  She's usually pretty happy and very social, but when she's tired, she just wants me.  She is enthralled with any new environment and loves to go for walks where she can look around and take in her surroundings.

And, you might notice a few more smiles in these pictures.  She's a little more accepting of the camera now.  And she's very curious about my phone.  She usually reaches for it if I'm doing anything on it.  I fear the future when she will actually be able to get my phone and do things on it like play games or watch videos.

She pretty much has both of us wrapped around her little finger and we're excited to see what she does this coming month.

What We've Been Up To

We've been pretty busy around these parts.  And, this is apart from changing diapers, cleaning up spit up, and feeding a baby.  So, here's a little update on what we've been doing.

The bathroom.  There's always the bathroom.  Unfortunately, it's still not done.  But, we are making some serious headway and it's getting very exciting.  Mr. Frisby is taking next Thursday and Friday off work to devote to the bathroom remodel.  So, why is it taking so long?  Here are a couple pictures that will help explain.

This is our bathroom, completely gutted.  This remodel is serious business.  No walls, no ceiling, no floor, no nothing.  Fortunately, as I said, we're getting things done and this is no longer the case.  But, when you strip a room down to practically nothing, it takes time to put it all back together.

This is a picture of the bathroom sub-floor after Mr. Frisby leveled it out.  That was a fairly big setback.  He was ready to start tiling the floor and when he checked to see if it was level, it was not.  One of the floor joists was the culprit.  It was just a little high.  So, he spent an entire Saturday taking out the part of the sub-floor that was over the joist, planing down the joist, and then building a frame to attach to the joists on which the new chunk of sub-floor would sit.  It took a lot of time, but now the floor is level and tiling has commenced.

Scout has also kept us busy recently.  I took her to the groomer.  She came home with a sweet haircut and a problem with her eye.  Poor dog.  I knew something was wrong when we came home from the groomer and she was squinting one of her eyes.  I knew something was really wrong a few hours later when she would no longer open that eye and it was all watery and oozy.  I took her to the vet that afternoon and they said it was a scratched cornea.  Usually heals well, but it's super painful.  Two check-ups and 7 days of antibiotics later, she has a clean bill of health.  But, I learned something in the process.  Trying to put antibiotic ointment in a dog's eye when it's very sensitive is like trying to wrestle an alligator.  It took both Mr. Frisby and I to pin the dog down to get the stuff in and I ended up bruised and scratched.  Thank goodness that's over with.

Here she is fresh from the groomer.  You can tell she just got home because she still has the little neckerchief on that they put on her.  It looks really cute, but she HATES it.

As if Mr. Frisby wasn't busy enough with the bathroom, he also had to build a pinewood derby car.  The scouts did a pinewood derby fundraiser to earn money for a new track.  There were two categories: classic pinewood derby rules and no holds barred.  Mr. Frisby decided to enter a car in the no holds barred category.  His plan of attack was to make the car as light as possible, then attach his remote controlled helicopter to it to pull it down the track.  Here's the car:

Truth be told, I had my doubts.  But, when he tested it out, it actually worked pretty well.  His "helicar" ended up getting third place and a giant Butterfinger.

Little Stella has also been busy, but that is mostly for another post.  For now, we'll just mention that she met her birthday twin.

These little ones were born about an hour apart.  Stella looks way bigger, but it's just the camera angle.  They're actually about the same size.  Thanks for the good times, Double A.

And, finally, we got a new entertainment center.  Or media console.  Whatever they're calling them these days.  It's a huge improvement.  Here's the before of our living room set up:

Bookcase and TV stand from IKEA.  They're not necessarily bad pieces, but they're dark and chunky, so they're not ideal for our space.  But it was what we had.  Now the after.  Here's our new media center from Crate and Barrel:

I'm still working on filling up the shelves and putting everything away, but we like it much, much better.  It opens the space up a lot which is great for us because our living room is pretty small.  This was also a much bigger project than I thought it would be.  The new media center was delivered Friday afternoon.  I started unpacking it and doing some assembly after it came.  Then, when Mr. Frisby got home from work, we both got it all assembled and attached to the wall.  I knew that part would take some time and effort.  But, I didn't realize that unplugging the TV, components, and cables and then reattaching them all in the new media center would take as much time as it did.  Essentially it took us the entire evening.  Totally worth it, in my opinion.

And that's what's been keeping us busy lately.  Hopefully the bathroom will be done very soon so we can have some spare time.  We're starting to forget what that's like.

The Permit Story

We thought we had a pretty good timeline for doing our bathroom remodel.  Then, things got crazy and that timeline was blown out of the water.  Here's what happened.

Two Saturdays ago, demolition happily began on our bathroom.  Piece by piece, the bathroom came out and by the end of the day, we were down to the subfloor and sheetrock.  The next step was replacing all of the sheetrock with water-resistant sheetrock and getting it textured as well as adding new lights and a ventilation fan.  For all of that, we decided to hire a family friend.  Monday night we went to Home Depot and got everything we would need.  Tuesday morning, the said family friend showed up and got to work. Everything went well that morning.  He ripped out all the old sheetrock, installed the fan, and then got to work putting up the new sheetrock.  And that's when things got crazy.

While he was unloading sheetrock, our neighbor started talking to our family friend.  He informed him that he was a building inspector and told him to tell us that we needed a permit for what we were doing.  He said he wouldn't want to Red-Tag his neighbors, so we should get a permit.  Our family friend passed on the message and continued hanging sheetrock and backerboard.  We were completely floored.  We weren't moving walls or plumbing, so why on earth would we need a permit?  Well, as we started looking into it, it appears you need a permit to sneeze here in Morgan Hill, so obviously we would need a permit to remodel a bathroom (Okay, perhaps sneezing is a bit of an exaggeration, but really and truly you have to have a permit just to replace a water heater here).  Our friend finished for the day and we told him we would figure out the permit situation and let him know what was happening next.

That evening my sister stopped by to drop something off.  She is the YW Secretary in her ward and was on her way to YW.  We mentioned to her what had happened with the need for a permit and that the bathroom remodel had suddenly become much more stressful since we had no idea what we needed to do for the permit and what would need to be inspected.  She said, "oh, well our YW President works for the city issuing permits.  I'll see her in a few minutes and I'll ask her about it."  Ten minutes later, we got a phone call from my sister who put the lady on the phone.  She very nicely explained to Mr. Frisby exactly what we would need for the permit and told him that she would be working the desk the next day and I could come on down and she would give us a permit.  So great!  We were suddenly feeling better about everything.  So, Wednesday morning, I headed down to the city office and got us a permit. It helped that I took Stella and she charmed the pants off of everyone there.  With that done, we were set to go.  Except now we needed inspections.

And we have learned that these inspections are the really annoying part of getting permits.  They completely change the order in which you do things because of what has to be inspected and they make things very inefficient.  So, the next step in order to get our inspection was putting in the shower pan.  We hadn't planned on doing that until the sheetrock was up, taped, and textured and the backerboard was all ready to go.  But, it had to be put in for the inspection.  And we couldn't finish the sheetrock because the electrical that we were adding had to be inspected.  And the sheetrock nailing had to be inspected, so even after hanging it, we couldn't get the taping and texturing done until after the inspection.  So, our timeline was destroyed.  Mr. Frisby put in the shower pan last Saturday and after the mortar dried we scheduled the inspection.  The inspector came on Tuesday (not suprisingly, it was our neighbor who didn't want to Red-Tag us).  I was super nervous, but everything went okay.  In spite of getting the shower pan all ready, he couldn't test it.  We were misinformed about what the test would be and how much of the shower pan had to be ready, so we didn't have it totally done (because we were told not to).  But, he inspected the electrical, so we could at least finish hanging the sheetrock and have that inspected.  So, now the sheetrock is ready for inspection and as I type, Mr. Frisby is finishing the shower pan.  Once that's ready, we will have inspection number two.  Then we will really be able to get to work because we won't have any more inspections until the finals.

This has turned into quite a headache, so this bathroom had better be super fly to make it all worth it.  I'm so excited for it to be done!