Abby’s party was supposed to be an outside party this upcoming Saturday. However, rain is in the plans and so we’re now set to have an indoor party with (possibly) more than 35 people at our house. Good thing we’ve got good amounts of space in the living room, family room and kitchen/eating area! Forecasts change, though, so things could be just fine 🙂
Author Archives: Randy Peterman
Bruised From the Inside Out
Evy is going to be the next Mia Hamm. Or at least she’s going to be a highly unlikely candidate for the Womens’ National Basketball Association. She has kicked Jessica so many times in the belly that Jessica is starting to get a bruise on it. I think that’s funny, Jessica thinks it hurts. Either way Evy is showing great intensity!
Extreme Kitchen Make Over
Hi, I’ve removed my shirt to look more like Ty Pennington while I write this post. On second thought, that’s pretty gross, don’t imagine that… I’ll put it back on if you promise to keep reading. Below are pictures of our kitchen repainting (which is still in progress – but I had to post something now let my fingers forget how to type).
[To help reduce the load time of my site I’m going to put a link below for you to follow to see the rest of this post, as well as the images that will make up most of this post. If you’re viewing ONLY this blog entry there link will not be there.]
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Painting
This weekend will consist of me painting the kitchen with Jessica. My parents have graciously offered to watch Abby while we go all out and paint the town red. Or at least the kitchen. Jessica has picked out some bold colors and patterns, but I think it’ll look quite good. If we can paint the kitchen this weekend we can paint the baby’s room next and then I’ll be able to get the garage finished and we can have a house of phun. That is to say a house that is mostly complete.
I say mostly complete because I do want to go up some day. Heaven, yes, but a second story up would also be nice so that I could have a master bed and bath that are worth going into. And if we go up, then I’ll probably knock the wall down between “the girls’ rooms” and make that one larger room and that will allow the other room that is now the ‘master’ room to be another bedroom. In short the room count will stay the same, but the size of the rooms on average will go up.
Oh, and right now, before we can paint the kitchen red… we’re painting it gray. When we’re done graying I’ll post a picture.
Gender Defender
I have run into various parents that for whatever reason do not want to know what gender their baby is going to be. This is a really, really odd thing for me and something I don’t understand. Therefore, I’ve put a lot of thought into what may be the motivation for this decision. Unfortunately, since I’m a bit of a nut-job and because I have an over-active imagination I’ve come up with the following set of thoughts:
You are going to find out what gender your child is at some point in time, aren’t you? What is the problem with finding out 6 or 4 or 2 months early? If you’re not going to find out, why not hire a nurse, nanny and child care staff and then you could have the baby, ask the nurse to cover the baby up before you see the ‘lower’ part of the baby and then you’d still not know. Further, you could only see the child for non-diaper changing or bathroom related times. To help stave off any actual gender related concerns you could name the child Terry, Leslie, Kerry or Pat. Furthermore you could attempt to limit your child’s exposure to anything gender related as a whole and therefore call yourself and your parental partner parent unit one and parent unit two.
Then, of course, one day you will not that several things may happen:
Shaving, buying of feminine products, voice changes and of course the real gender identifyer hygeine products in general. It is my opinion that if it is a boy these products may not go up in demand until maybe 16 or 17 as most boys don’t figure out bathing until they realize girls care about that sort of thing. But I digress…
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with not finding out until the baby is born – that’s something that each parent (set) needs to figure out – but we wanted to find out so we could start buying tampons early, I figure there’s gonna be a major price increase on those some day, just like oil, and we’ll have a major stockpile.
Grahamz-Its
OK, so we’re out of Cheez-Its. This is not insurmountable because I can easily shred some cheese onto graham crackers and throw them into our toaster oven. It doesn’t quite taste the same but sometimes you just have to make due. I find that cheesy cinnamon graham crackers are tasty, but not quite as good as other forms of biscuits with cheese. Abby finally had to get a knife out and hold me up for the last of the Goldfish crackers. It’s getting pretty bad… I think I need help.
If I could only find a way to just stop snorting the powder from the bottom of the Cheez-It bag I think I’d be OK. The worst problem with this is that it coagulates in my nasal passage and I find myself coughing up ‘cheezburgers’ every once in a while. I think I can stop if I could just switch over to rye-krisps or wasa bread. I hear that other cracker-heads have been able to get off of crackers all together and just form habits with safer substances like french bread, ice berg lettuce or sunflower seeds. Its mostly the habit of putting the crackers in my mouth and getting the crunch sensation so I’m pretty sure that if I find another source of crunch I’ll be off Scott Peterson Free. Wait, no, he’s not free. Dang, these glutenous goodies are going to do me in.
Cut the Cheese, Daddy
This morning after riding my bike Abby asked me to come downstairs with her and play kitchen. I agreed as I haven’t played kitchen with her in a very long time (yes, I’m a neglectful dad in the playing kitchen department, for some reason I feal ill equipped for this task). She carefully hand-selected a block of plastic cheese, a plastic red delicious apple and placed them in her clear-vision pot. She placed the pot on the burner which immediately erupted with the sound of boiling water. The water reached its peak boiling temperature and she grabbed the scalding foods out of the pot and placed them onto a plate for me. She then got a knife and fork out and demanded I cut… the cheese.
Bike. Ride. Ing
This morning I woke up at 5:30. I immediately hopped out of bed like a spry young man wanting to go physically exert himself so as to maintain his fit physique. Actually, Jessica said, “Did you hear that?” when the alarm went off. I did. I also wanted to immediately go back to sleep. However, I decided that if ever I was going to whip this last 25 pounds I’ve wanted to take off ever since I moved to Denver I was going to have to actually get out of bed and work out.
So I went riding and it was fantastic! The sun hadn’t really come up yet and so it was light but not overly bright, and the coolness of the night was still hanging around (the Denver region is rather diurnal). What a wonderful exercise bicycling is. I got to see lots of flowers, some ducks, cars, sidewalk and the Cherry Creek Reservoir [which doesn’t look as nasty from down here as it does from space, apparently]. Good times.
Like Sanding an Hour Glass
I got a DeWalt sander a month or two ago for a refinishing project I never got to (Yes! My first non-started project for the house). However, yesterday I got to use it on our kitchen cabinet doors and it rocks! Actually, it doesn’t rock. It sands smoothly with very little vibration. I have used several different sanders in the past and this one by far holds the record for the most useful sander with the least user fatigue.
If you find yourself needing to sand something and don’t need an orbital or belt sander for the project (and you better find out what kind of sander you need or you could be sorry) this is a very, very nice sander.
End of Summer
The end of summer is rapidly approaching… I could tell because today at lunch while running an errand the two young boys who live across the street were just sitting with their dog watching tree trimmers/groomers cutting the neighbors trees into better shape. Yup, they were officially bored enough to watch adults work at cutting trees.
I don’t think I ever got that bored, but I’m sure I complained about not being entertained at all times. Fortunately they’ll be back to school in a few weeks.