Short and cute

Yes, the title does describe Paige, but it also describes her new haircut. I decided to make it easier on the both of us and cut it short. Here's some before and after pictures:

What we've been up to.

We've been enjoying our summer so much the blog has been neglected. So here's a quick attempt to get you caught up.

Bill: took the summer off from teaching classes, it has been so fun to have him home more this summer, we've been spoiled. He's currently participating in RAGBRAI (registar's annual great bike ride across Iowa). He and about 15,000 other participants will spend this week riding across Iowa. He's been training for a couple months and was way excited to go.

Jen: just finished teaching a short set of summer piano lessons to a few students. Is gearing up for the 20 students she'll be teaching starting in the fall. She is also gearing up (more mentally, than anything else) for the 5 hour drive with the kids to Dubuque, Iowa this weekend to meet Bill at the end of RAGBRAI. Should be loads of fun!

Dylan: just finished t-ball and had a lot of fun. Enjoyed being a junior paleontologist at the dinosaur/fossil camp he attended. Has been having fun at the pool and really enjoys the water slide. Is about to lose another tooth, getting ready to start 2nd grade, and celebrate his 7th birthday.

Paige: is still keeping us on our toes with her busy-ness. Is working on potty training and makes it to the potty before she needs to go about 50% of the time. It's a work in progress. Has started physical and speech therapy which she really enjoys (more on this in a later post). Looking forward to starting preschool in the fall.

Liam: just had his 9 month check-up. He's in the 25th% for weight and the 75th% for height. Crawls like a champ, is walking while holding onto furniture and drooling like crazy (as you can tell by the drool dripping off his chin) but still, no teeth.

So there's a quick run-down on what we've been up to. Busy, busy, busy -but having a great summer!

Happy Father's Day

I took some pictures of the kids this morning and of course none of them actually had all 3 smiling and looking at me. So you'll just have to take the best individual picture of each kid and put them together in your mind to make a decent picture of all 3 together.

Here Dylan and Paige are looking, and mostly smiling, but Liam looks a little afraid of Paige.

Liam, still looking scared, not sure what Dylan is doing.

Dylan and Liam looking pretty good, not sure what Paige is doing.

Bill brought the boys' matching tiger shirts back from India.

We hope you all had a great Father's Day. Thanks to our dads for their great examples as dads, husbands, grandpa's etc.

And Happy Father's Day to our daddy - we think you're the best. Love, Dylan, Paige, Liam & Mom.

It's T-ball time

Dylan had his first t-ball game yesterday. It was a lot of fun. He had 3 great hits and got to play lots of different positions (1st base, 3rd base, short-stop and "the middle guy").

Here he is getting ready to hit...and yes, he did open his eyes before he hit.

Standing on 1st, waiting to run to 2nd.


Crossing home plate.



Playing 1st base, which I think was his favorite because he got the ball a lot.

We are already looking forward to next week's game.

Irony

I thought of a few things from the past few days that are too ironic not to post. So, here goes.

1. On the night of the storm, our neighbors parked one car in their driveway and the other in the garage. The one in the driveway survived the storm just fine. The one in the garage, it was damaged by the limb and debris. Ironic.

2. One of the projects we have planned for this summer is re-roofing our house. The shingles are in terrible condition. The garage roof, however, was just fine so we weren't planning on doing anything to it. Now, we get to re-roof the house and the garage. Ironic.

3. Liam is 8 months old and has yet to sleep through the night. We've been doing the 'let him cry himself to sleep' method for the past few days. The first time he actually slept through the night was the night of the storm. But I was still up at 3 in the morning due to the crazy storm. Now that's ironic.

More Storm Pictures

Here are a few more pictures from the storm.

Bill standing next to the limb that's going through the top of the garage.

Here's the tree that used to be in our neighbor's yard. Crazy!

A few of the broken limbs from our tree.

Free Firewood for anyone who'll come get it!

At about 3:00 a.m. Friday morning Bill and I were awakened by a very loud sound. There was lightning, thunder, pouring rain and crazy wind. I wasn't sure if it was a tornado or just a bad storm. We looked out our window and could see that a bunch of limbs from our huge tree were laying on the ground. It wasn't until later that morning when we woke up and saw the real damage:

This was the view from our bedroom window. You can see the limbs sticking through our garage (on the left) and our neighbor's garage, plus the tree filling up our entire driveway.

The top of our neighbor's garage.


The view behing our garage, looking down where the alley should be.

Limbs hanging over utility wires.

Another view of our garage and driveway.

The limbs that harpooned our garage roof.

Notice the limb is sticking through the top and coming out the front of the garage.

Crunch!

Our new double skylight inside the garage (with the limb still sticking through)

Limb sticking through the top and front of the garage

The winds were measured at over 75 mph, which is equivalent to a category 1 hurricane. I think we're lucky the damage wasn't worse.

We spent most of the day yesterday cleaning up with the help of a few really good neighbors. I think it was a win/win situation - we got some of the mess cleaned up, they got free firewood. The tree removal company was here today and all the limbs/branches are gone. Our insurance estimator will be here Wednesday to assess the damage. So now it's just a waiting game to see how generous they will be with their coverage :) Let the games begin!