We've Been Busy!!

Two weeks ago I promised I'd do a catch-up post...and then life got in the way and now there's more to catch up on.  Oh well! No time like the present! 

Last month, I had to go to Portland (mostly Vancouver, WA, but who's counting...) for some work-related conferences (I was a featured speaker, no big deal).  Since Olivia flies free, I took advantage of the situation and took her with me because I really love flying with a baby to spend some quality time with my parents.  The last time we flew, she was only six months old and much less mobile. This time I had to bring all my mom tricks...and snacks.

I think she's eating a dinner roll that came with the wrap I ordered.
She thought sitting in the airport chairs was the cat's pajamas!

Mostly I allowed her to crawl all over the totally filthy airport carpet.  Seriously, after she did this, her sweatshirt was visibly filthy. MOTHER OF THE YEAR.

As soon as we settled on the airplane, she totally sacked out.  Success! So far, she's been an amazing traveler, which I love.

We even took an obligatory carpet selfie at PDX.  She also can't believe they'd rip out such beautiful carpet.  (The new stuff is ugly, btw).

Olivia spent two days at my parents' house away from Andy and I for the first time.  She immediately came down with a cold and also spent most of the time being freaked out by my dad (they don't call him Scary Larry for nothin!)

Not quite sure about this one...

I think overall she really enjoyed herself (she loved petting the giant dogs and seeing the chickens every day!) and I'm glad she's getting to know her grandparents since we can't see them as often as we'd like.  It helped that they have awesome toys like this cool walker:

By the second day, she thought Opa was a-ok! Also I think she was punishing me for leaving her and she wouldn't let me hold her.  FINE.

Nick and Miranda came down to spend the evening and we got to meet baby Nora.  SHE IS JUST A DOLL.  Also, she's super mellow like Nick, whereas my baby is about as chill as a sack full of caffeinated weasels.

Nick doesn't think they look alike. Obviously he is blind.

Nora and Olive got to know each other...

Seriously...I have never seen a baby with such a perfect head as Nora!

 ...and then things went downhill when Olive decided to punch poor baby Nora in the face:

Miranda and I decided that we are horrible mothers because we can't not laugh when we look at this picture.  Someday, these two will be buddies and we'll show them this picture of the first time they hung out. I love it.

Olive also got to spend time with her cousins Piper and Grace.  Here's Grace trying to show Olive how to crawl correctly (non-Army-style).  Olive is having none of it.

I definitely see some relation between these two.
You can't tell from the picture but they have the same blue eyes. Genetics!

After I got back to Anchorage, it was time for Andy's birthday!! To celebrate, we had dinner at 5:00 p.m. on a Saturday at the Lucky Wishbone with about 10,000 senior citizens.  The Lucky Wishbone is an Anchorage institution (it's been around since before statehood!) and is mostly famous for its fried chicken and shakes.  I'd heard good things about their burgers and, after also trying Andy's chicken, I think the burgers are where it's at.  The Lucky Wishbone reminds me of every place that my grandpa would ever take me out to eat at in Portland.  Casual, good food, nice people.  I highly recommend it!

Olive LOVED it.

She is REALLY into eating meat right now and she thinks chicken is especially tasty.  I think she ate just about a whole chicken thigh by herself.

Now that the weather's nice and I'm not enormously pregnant/taking care of a newborn like I was all last summer, we've been taking on some outdoor projects!!

A couple of weeks ago, we picked out a spot for a new fire pit in the backyard.  We started by drawing some circles on the ground using the old string tied to a stick method.

We bought a bunch of cement pavers at Home Depot.  I wanted gray ones but they were out and we were too lazy to go to Lowe's or another Home Depot to find others.  In the end, I actually like the red.

For all yard projects it is essential that you have a good dog to assist.  Mostly he chewed on sticks while he watched us do manual labor.  He's not stupid.

Digging out the grass (thankfully we have really soft soil and this whole process took an hour or so. I think if we had the same soil in Anchorage that we had in Salem, I would still be digging this two weeks later).

Once we dug out the inner circle, we put a ring of pavers inside to check level and measurements. Then we removed the rest of the grass.  Looking good!

We laid some gravel and sand in the bottom of the hole, leveled it, and then put the pavers on top.

WORKING HARD

It was remarkably easy to put together...much to our surprise!

We made the ring three pavers high and it was done.

Not too shabby!

To make it pretty (and keep the grass away from the pit) we had decided to put gravel around the pit (hence the second circle).  We found some nice edging material that would hold the gravel in and make it easy to mow around.  The hardest part was molding it to the circle, which basically just required us to leave the stuff out in the sun all day and work it after it had become pliable.

I am uncomfortably close to showing plumber's crack in this photo.  Sorry.

And here's the finished project - in action even.  We finally had a fire in it this past weekend (Andy had the flu over Mother's Day weekend which was rough on everyone in the house, though I would not have traded places with him for anything!) and it's so nice to finally get out and USE our yard. Ripley sat outside with us by the fire, but found the whole process uncomfortably close to camping and couldn't wait for us to let him back inside.  We've really let him go soft...

From the deck:

Even Olivia likes to hang out around the fire pit!

She LOVES our cheap-o plastic "adirondack" chairs.

So much so that we bought her a tiny one.  SHE ADORES THIS CHAIR.  Best $8 I ever spent. Thanks, Fred Meyer!

In all, the fire pit took us literally one day to put together, and since we were working around nap times, it wasn't even a whole day of working.  I would say it was a four hour project (not including the trip to Home Depot...plus another trip to buy more gravel after you do a poor job of calculating the area of the ring around the pit), and I think the whole thing cost about $200.  Not too shabby!

And should you think that's the only manual labor that we've been doing...

While we were building the pit, this dude stopped by...

And dumped three yards of compost blend onto our lawn.

We bought a wheelbarrow and got to work! There's new dirt in the garden beds, all of my pots (that literally was a whole yard of dirt, just to fill the pots) and we're moving it around the yard, too.  I was hoping that by now I would have arms like Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2 with all this shoveling and lifting, but no such luck.

So like I said, we've been busy!  As I noted in previous posts, Olive has been EXTRA mobile lately, pulling herself up on everything and crawling over every inch of the house.  She hasn't discovered the stairs yet, but we finally put up our old pet gate (which explicitly says on it is NOT to be used as a baby gate, but we figured it would be better than piling our gym bags up in the doorway) outside the family room downstairs so she could use it as a confined play space.  Literally three minutes after I put it up, this happened:

I guess we figured out why it wasn't appropriate for use as a baby gate.  Thankfully I think she forgot about the cat door because she hasn't been through it since that first day.  Needless to say, though, she's pretty crafty and she keeps us on our toes!

Speaking of Olive, this post has been low on baby pictures.  The grandmas will never forgive me!

She and Ripley are thick as thieves lately.  He tolerates all of her "petting" and is always close to her (mostly because she's usually covered in food)

Speaking of covered in food...I think I have done about 4,000 loads of laundry in the past month.  At this point, we decided it's just easier to feed her without any clothes on.

Her first spaghetti - she's a pasta fan like her mama!

Phew.  I'm exhausted just reading all this, but I know I still have a lot on my to-do list.  The pile of dirt continues to call its siren song from the backyard and I have a ton of annuals that I just bought that are in the process of hardening off and need to be put into pots.  And to top it off, this week we're getting our house painted! We're taking full advantage of the amazing weather (already in the 60s!) we've been having and can't wait for the summer to get into high gear.  One thing can be sure, it will fly by fast and be snowing before we know it, so we have to enjoy it while it lasts!