A busy weekend!

Hi, birdie. Here is a new female woodpecker. She is so cute :) Look the face that she is giving me.


Arianna and her blanket. Yeah, like I had posted before, this is a new thing. Thank God, she likes many blankets. She uses it to lay down on it, to put on her hair (like in this picture), to put her stuff animals to sleep, for me to take a nap, etc... So many functions...


Mike was feeding her some yogurt, but I found this old sunglasses (She hated them before), but this time she played with them for awhile.

Hey, blue don't eat my Sugar Lime Cookies!! I'll try to post the recipe later since I had someone asking about it. They are really good and fresh. If we can only get some sunny days consistently.

So here is a semi-before of our first floor - living room/ play area. We are always trying to figure out the best possible space and organization for Arianna to use all her toys/books, etc... So, in this picture we had brought down an old entertainment center that we used to use before we moved to this house and since we needed a corner entertainment it sat for two years in one of our bedrooms. But now, it will hold some of Arianna's things.


Here is Arianna's Corner! We arranged her books in the top 2 shelves. She has a lot of books, and she "reads" almost half of them daily. It is really cute when she is reading and making up stories, now if we can only understand all the things that she is saying.


In the bottom shelf, we have three boxes with mostly stuffed animals, tea set, letters, and numbers. Top shelf, lots of blocks and cups. She also has her table with puzzles, her clock, and her notebooks to draw (I hide the crayons, otherwise we would have lots of art work in our walls. Although, she is nice most of the time, and does not do it, why tempt faith, right? I think she approves of the new space :)

We had been working in a kind of big project -Our basement. I finally packed all of our stuff and moved to the laundry area (we are doing half of the basement into a family room). Here is a picture of the carpet that Tony ripped from our floors. Who knows how long it sat, but it was pretty disgusting in some areas. I was so surprised at how quickly he was able to do it, so much that he ended up helping me paint- well, he painted while I help with the taping! Thanks Tony.

Here is a picture of the walls with tape waiting to get a makeover.


Our floors, they used to have some type of tile. They were few pieces left under the gray carpet, so what you see is the glue. We were debating whether to try to take the glue or not, but the floors were in very good shape, and they had put carpet over it without doing it, so we did and looks great. After all, the reason we ended attacking our basement is because we had a small leak into it when one of the bathroom's sewer backed up.

Overall picture of our basement when you come down from the stairs. It is an old house, but we like it. We used to have a huge house in a new subdivision, now we have the opposite ;)

Here you see the walls are painted! It is called fuzzy peach. How tropical (the name).

Here is Jack! Everyone that follows Facebook nows that a kitty showed up to our patio doors, lived on or under our deck for about a week, and finally we could not let him outside. It was raining horribly and the poor thing was trying to stay dry by standing next to out patio door. I guess there is about 4-5 in. of coverage where the rain does not hit. It was awful seeing him there, so I figured that if I brought my carrier (that I used for the other kitties we have) and he went in, I will put him on the basement. And he did. So, we took him to vet next day. He had a microchip, they called the people, left messages and after 2 weeks, no repply. Tried to see if anyone wanted a kitty, no one could. So, he is the other reason we are working on the family room so we can go there. We are going to try an introduction with Betsy and Misty, but I figured the basement is better than outside.

Beautiful saucer eyes!


Me working on the carpet. We got up, ate something quick and contine working until we were done!


Mike working on the carpet with Jack inspecting our progress. Such an efficient boss!


You get the idea, the wall color with the new brown carpet. Very warm and cozy. Now, we need a nice couch for the TV, games, and movies. I will take more pictures once we cleaned all the empty boxes and we organize where the bookcases will go, etc...


Mike and Arianna happy that we had finished the carpet. Now, we just need some dinner! (Oh yeah, Ari was very helpful and played around with the empty boxes, the good thing was that we were able to keep working while she was downstair with us.)

A brake. Blanket and some Noggin videos. She loves Laurie Berkman's songs from Jack's Music Show.


In the crafty side, I finished a baby blanket for a friend. I liked it except that this time one side was a bit more big - still made with love. So, I think it works, and I would keep working on getting better.


We had bought this doll at the thrift store while looking for some artsy stuff, but she did not have any clothing. I decided to crochet this dress for her with the leftover yarn from the blanket. Ari loved it. She kept saying "mommy, doll has dress. Good dress". :)

New toys...

I finally cleaned the "coat" closet (located at the entrance of our house). It had been our "black hole" for a while, and I found 2 new toys (bought about a year or more ago). One was letters, numbers, and math signs. The other one was a cloth book. So, I waited until Mike was here so he could open them with Ari. She was so excited, she was waiting patiently for daddy to open them.

Future Garden of America? Well, she does not mind getting dirt on her hands....I can't say the same about food!
Ari and flowers. She goes around telling me "bowwer" (flower) and the color of each of them. I like that she does not mind been outside so gives me time to fix some stuff that I need to do in the garden.
Nice smile. She loves to run and play around. We were playing "Tag.."

Her favorite ball, we played soccer with it (since she can kick it better than catch it). This also reminds me two things that she finds hilarious right now. One, when you put her on her car seat, she likes it when you say "click ,click" when you are putting the seat belt. Two, she made a really smelly poop when she was sick, and I went "ewe", and she laughed so hard. Now, she goes ewe herself and laughs a lot.

Well, here are my seedlings (tomatoes) that I just transferred. Don't know, it does not look promising... at least, I tried. I'll see what happens.

Here is the clematis with all the flowers opened! I wonder how many will give next year. First year was 1, second year were 3, this year are 15!

A rose is born! I guess the plants are liking the spot were I planted them since they are staring to give us new buds (flowers and/or leaves). That makes me happy :)

Here is a picture of my iris dutch in full bloom, it will last about 1-2 weeks more, then we will wait until next year.

I had said no more planting -no bushes, trees, etc..- only flowers, annuals, and a few vegetables. But, I could not pass 2 bushes more (really good sale). A red azalea, and in honor of Star Trek... A Vulcan! That is the name of this rhododendron.

Anyone knows the name of this plant? It has white flowers during June, the purple color on top and green on the bottom?

I looked at this picture and realized how marked the seasons are here. Just not long ago, there was no green at all...

In honor of Evelyn, I took a picture of our bat house (we have 2). There were put there by the previous owner. Like the bat sign?

I guess we will be having new neighbors. The female robin has been nesting now!

And this picture is for Tiffany, I rearrange my pantry. Ari helped too. She helped to take the things out, and put the ones in the bottom in. How nice of her.

Opossum, basement and Ezri

I took some nice pictures of the opossum that sometimes sleeps under our deck! It was 1-3pm and Mike had thrown away some left over onion rings and panettone. I will post them later!
In other news, we have been working really hard during Mike's week off in the basement. I guess, since we have Ezri down there, it motivated us to get "down" to business and clean! Of course, we always forget the before and after pictures, but I will take the after once we are done. We still need to organize our shelves, but they are in the right locations now and we put some nice carpet and tiles! We even made our little crafty and train corners! So, we can spend time with Ezri while doing some stuff and Arianna will have a place as well for her books and some toys :)
We gave away a lot of toys (Veteran of Vietnam and to my sister for her church) and books (to the library). We also gave away some nice knickknacks, few movies, and some other stuff I cannot even remember... I guess Tiffany had the same idea. I called ours "Winter Cleaning for Ezri".
In Ezri's news, she is an amazing kitty. She does not like to run out which is good, we are still very careful with that and we try to use the back door. We are trying to introduce her to the other two cats, Betsy is the one that is most interested. (Misty does not seem to care). So, we are hopeful, but I am not sure...

Oh, Arianna is doing a lot better. We are not sure if the fever was the teething (she has 6 coming out) or some other stomach bug... the good thing is that she is doing fine now and she loves her cats (including Ezri)!