Oliver: Seven Months

He makes this face a lot and I love it. 

What a sweet little goofball. 

So this month we tried solids-- ahahaha! That didn't go as planned. Avocado seemed to traumatize him and banana wasn't much better.  He seems to be warming up to it now, but still isn't a big fan. He definitely wasn't ready at six months. Today we're going to give carrots a shot. This whole food thing is fun anyway, though, even if he's not too into it yet! 

We started putting him on a blanket on the floor with a bunch of toys surrounding him and he likes to sit there and just play and play. The dog guitar is a big hit and he's obsessed with his First 100 Animals book. He also started standing a few weeks ago, which is crazy! We noticed he could do it because he would stand up on our laps every time we would pass him to each other on the couch. So I stood him up next to the couch, and yep! Balance Man. He doesn't pull himself up to sit or stand yet, though. My mom said that I skipped crawling completely and went straight to standing and walking, but I don't know if Oliver will do that. He seems to be experimenting with crawling-- when he's sitting he'll lunge forward to get a toy and then stay on his stomach and kick and kick. He's pretty good at pivoting around, though. He lies on his tummy and maneuvers himself in a circle to reach all his toys.

 

Let's see, what else. He's just so fun. All of this is so fun. He's getting teeth! His two front bottom teeth are coming in and this morning I felt a molar. That explains his weird sleeping habits lately. Normally he goes down early and sleeps through the night but the last few weeks he's been staying up later and waking up one or two times. Not every night, but enough for me to know something was going on.

We're going to take him to the pool and beach soon so that's going to be awesome! It (weirdly) took forever to warm up around here so I'm really excited to get started with all the fun summer stuff.

Project Life: March/April Favorites

Scrapbook nerd, don't even care.

Oliver's giant baby book continues! I just started the THIRD album, what on earth. Here are a few of my favorite layouts from the last couple of months. AS YOU CAN SEE I'm kind of bad about using lots of pictures and not a ton of materials, but it's because I have so many pictures and of course I can't make up my mind about which ones to use.

Also, I've gone overboard about making sure to take pictures with Oliver so now I have more with him than Jeremy does. An eternal struggle.

(Not much journaling in these, but I blurred out the one card that had some.)

(The photos on the right are from the part in pat-a-cake where I make him pat my hair and he goes nuts.)

Refinishing the Floors Part 1: The Eternal Sanding

I hate that these pictures have different lighting/angles, but stick with me!

Living room and master bedroom
Entryway
Hallway
Second and third bedrooms 

I forgot to make Jeremy take a picture of me sanding, but BELIEVE ME, I was there.

So, the story of the floors. Our new house is a 1954 ranch with lots of charm that we're terribly excited about, but the floors are in awful shape. The kitchen is yucky old sheet vinyl and the hardwoods have been hidden for years under carpeting that the previous owner ripped up before putting the house on the market. (He decided to leave the refinishing to the new owners-- lucky us!)

We just finished all the sanding Saturday night. It took us three days total, one for prep and two for sanding. (Although it was spread over a week because we had to work out schedules and babysitters.) It wasn't difficult, exactly, but it's a lot of work and feels like it takes forever. If you're just doing one room you can probably have the sanding and staining done in a day, but we sanded four rooms, the hallway, and the entryway, so ARGHHHHH. (I haven't calculated the square footage yet but I'll put that in part two.) I also didn't bother to get a quote for a professional job, but I figure with cost of labor it would have been kind of insane.

Neither of us have done anything even remotely this big before, but we read a lot about it and watched youtube videos and it seemed doable. And what's the point of owning a house if you aren't going to jump in and DO STUFF, right? You have to rent a big drum sander and smaller edger from Home Depot and buy sandpaper for it (36, 60, and 100 grit). First, you strip off the old finish with the 36 grit. This leaves the floor pretty rough but removes all the old grossness. That stupid edger was the worst thing! I used it a few times but it was crazy and I had to wrestle it to keep it from zooming away. It wouldn't even get close enough to the edge! What's its purpose in life, then? Why does it exist? I read a tutorial that suggested not renting it-- that tutorial is correct. I had to go around the edge and in corners/around doors with my little palm sander. Also, whoever put down carpet repainted the baseboards first and thoughtfully left a smear of paint along the edge. THANKS!

See those dark spots in the first collage photo? That's all the water damage in the living room. Thankfully we were able to fix it up with oxalic acid (wood bleach) and lots and lots of sanding. There were some pretty clear traffic patterns that we wanted to make sure to lighten-- it didn't have to be perfect (and it isn't) but it would look pretty crappy if we left it uneven. I would say we've spent about twenty-ish hours on this so far-- fifteen for sanding, four or five for prep (bleaching and pulling up staples, nails, and old shoe molding). It's incredibly satisfying to see what we've done so far!

So! Here's what you need for sanding hardwood floors: 

• Drum sander and edger from Home Depot 
• 36, 60, 100 grit sandpaper
• respirator masks and goggles
• oxalic acid for any dark spots (plus a bowl, brush, and rags)
• plastic sheeting to tape off rooms and vents. This is important. The sanders have bags, and the first day there was almost zero mess. The second day the edger bag had a hole in it (DAMN YOU, EDGER!) and we didn't realize until about halfway through the living room. So.. yeah. We have a mess to clean up. 
• Putty knife, needle nose pliers, and a hammer for pulling up nails/staples/random leftover things 
• Broom and vacuum

Part two will be all about putting on the new finish! 

Oliver: Six Months

Six months!! That's such a thing. Of course it doesn't feel like it's been that long at all. Oliver's getting to be so much fun. He's really ticklish, so making him laugh is still my favorite thing. His laugh is my favorite sound. That sounds kind of cliche, but it's true-- I never knew it was my favorite sound until I heard it. Yesterday we were taking more chalkboard photos (it usually takes me a few days to get them right..) and he started blowing raspberries at us! So that's his new thing, blowing raspberries. We do it at him and he does it back. We sat him up in front of the chalkboard yesterday morning and that's all he would do.

We're going to try food for the first time this weekend! I'm weirdly nervous about it, but it also seems really fun. I think avocado will be first. 

But oh. Let me tell you about the big "welcome to six months!" drama. I didn't really talk about it online because I was pretty traumatized-- last week Oliver fell off the changing table! Jeremy turned around for a second and he scooted right off the end. It was horrifying. Thankfully since Jeremy's a nurse he was clear-headed enough to notice that his pupils were okay, he started crying right away, all good signs. But he was screaming and bleeding and I was panicking all over the place. He was back to normal-- babbling away and playing-- on the way to the ER, but it was still the scariest thing in the world! NO THANK YOU. He had to have a stitch (which he didn't care for at ALL) and then fell asleep before we left. Obviously we now use the buckle on the changing pad. ALWAYS USE THE BUCKLE.

I would like that to never happen again, thanks. But of course everyone in the ER had a million stories about how they accidentally hurt their children. It was oddly comforting. We haven't had any disapproving comments, (thanks, everyone!) just "OH IT HAPPENS!" "OH THAT'S NOTHING!!" Ahaha. 

:( 

It looks much better now. The stitch was taken out on Monday and now he's good as new!

Happy 28

Saturday was my birthday and it was pretty great (mostly because this little guy exists!). All I really wanted was to take some good pictures with him, because I've noticed the downside of always being behind the camera is that I have a ton of pictures of Oliver and Jeremy (which I love, of course) but it means that I have to make an actual effort to take pictures of us together. So we spread out a blanket and took some pictures in the front yard. Then my parents came over that afternoon and watched him while Jeremy and I went to dinner and the beach. (Sidenote: still very chilly at the beach. But pretty!)

We closed on the house today, so that's the BEST POSSIBLE birthday present! Yay! Ahhhh! House!!

Our New 1955 GE Refrigerator!

Egg shelf!

(Obviously it needs some work.)

I found this on craigslist yesterday for $130. And it works! It seems to be in good shape-- it's missing a drawer and needs to be painted/polished, and it has some rust and cracking around the inside of the frame, but I think I can handle all that. It runs, that's the important part. The GE logo on the inside lights up when you open the door and it's BLUE. Come on awesome refrigerator! I had no idea I wanted you in my life.

The serial number is LM-95-KC, and according to the GE website that means it was made in June of 1954. I found pictures of similar models online but not this exact one, so I'm just going to assume that I read the serial number right and that it's from '54.

It isn't the same model but this commercial kills me. We have a butter conditioner! Of course it's called a butter conditioner.

I've never paid any attention to vintage refrigerators because I thought they were terrible with energy and too small to make any sense. I loved the look of them (of course) but thought I would just have to save up for a reproduction. False! I've been reading up on them and they're actually pretty energy efficient (as long as the seal is good) because they kick off and on instead of constantly running. This one doesn't have the auto-defrost feature, which also saves on energy-- of course it means we'll have to manually defrost every now and then, so that'll be interesting. We'll also have to buy a deep freezer for extra space, but we were going to get one of those anyway. The size seems like it'll actually work fine for us, although we'll probably have to get creative around the holidays.

I'm going to make this thing so pretty. 

So this makes the third vintage appliance we have for the new house. Woo! Plus I just bought a '50s/'60s fan the other day, because honestly. Our old bedroom fan just died and the stupid thing was only five years old. This one is at least fifty and it's way more powerful anyway. Vintage appliances/electronics are the way to go! Nothing is made to last these days.

New fan and toys and clock.