Oh Boy!

Yes it is true - we found out that baby Meendering is a boy! We actually found out the first of December - I have just been horrible at posting lately. It was funny because I have felt like it was a boy ever since my sister Julie and my friend Nicole said they thought it was a boy. Jon and I had a great time at the ultrasound appointment. Baby boy Meendering was moving around like crazy so it was difficult to get any really great images but it was still surreal to see him and all the progress he has made since our last ultrasound. It actually looked like a human this time! We didn't get to do a 3D ultrasound which was a little dissapointing - and irritating because they didn't tell us this until we were at the ultrasound, but their other ultasound location they let us choose from does (pehaps this would be a good thing to tell expecting parents when you ask them the locaiton they want to do the ultrasound). Anyway, it is back to the drawing board for us to think of names. We have three girl names we just loved and NO boy names. I feel like boy names are so much harder for some reason. If you have good ideas feel free to leave them in the comments. We can use all the help we can get.

Floor Transformation

So, we sucked it up and paid for the wood floors in the kitchen and upstairs to be refinished. If you remember Sue and I ripped up the first layer of lanoleum off the kitchen floor and pulled out hundreds of staples. We were left with a second layer of pink lanoleum that jon had to chip off piece by piece to reveal the original wood floor beneath. To be honest I didn't even believe it was wood becaues it was so covered in lanoleum glue that had turned back and was all sticky and gummy. Luckily the floor guys we hired were able to sand through it (they were not happy - but they did it). It feels awesome to have those floors done - it would have taken us forever to do that job. Here are some shots of the transformation....

After the 1st layer of grey lanoleum was ripped up....(the second layer that you see was pink - Awesome!)
The floor is back to the original and the kitchen is almost done...just baseboards and we can quit working in the kitchen!
It has made big progress since the day we moved in... (this picture was posted when the house was for sale by the previous owners)

Landscaping in Retrospect

So a few weekends ago we took a break from working upstairs and we ordered what seemed like a ton of mulch for all of our planting beds around the house. We spend a lot of time this summer pulling weed after weed out of those beds (although our neighbors may beg to differ because we just couldn't keep up)! So, we decided to invest a little time and energy to mulch the beds and hopefully prevent so many weeds from coming up and requiring our attention in the spring. I can't believe how much better the planting beds look now with the mulch - it totally pulled them all together and made them look so much more polished. Although I am sure the pictures won't do it justice because all of our plants have died because it is so cold here already - hopefully you can get the idea. Funny think was that we had to shovel the mulch from the big pile in our driveway into our recycling container and carry it load by load to the different beds around our house since we don't have a wheel barrow. To bad a didn't get a picture of that!