The Move

I know, I'm a lollyblogger. It's not going to get any better this week, but maybe, just maybe next week I will sit down and post something meaningful with lots of words. We are moving tomorrow. Finally, we will be in the house.

Look! Pictures!


Here is our bedroom after we painted the walls. It used to have pink and white stripes, and now it's a beautiful soft green colour.



Here is Mary's room, almost finished. I must say that whoever came up with the idea to paint trim should be put in jail for a long long time. It turned out okay, I'm not a professional painter, but it's nice.



Frances's room after being painted. It used to have dark blue and white stripes, with a burgandy border and words like "touchdown," written around the top. Ick. Now it's a beautiful brown, but it's not quite finished. Ian thinks it's too sophisticated for a little girl, but I love it, and I'm going to add some fun bright colours. One wall is going to feature the wonderful quilt that Goody made for Frances.



Frances chilling on the new couch.



The faux fireplace in the basement. It seems that I am cursed to live in houses with the most god awful ugly fireplaces. The things the people we bought the house from did to that basement area is criminal, including painting over beautiful dark wood beams across the ceiling.



Here is the "playroom." It is an unfinished area of the basement that they panted the cement walls in. It needs a ceiling and something on the floor, but I think it'll be a good spot to keep all the toys.



Here is our little maritimer. I was given this Sou'wester at our wedding reception in Dartmouth. Mary found it today and spent a good part of the afternoon wearing it.



Mary and Frances. It never ceases to amaze me what a wonderful, loving sister Mary is. Frances absolutely adores her, and Mary loves to take care of the baby. Frances is wearing a diaper shirt embroidered by Goody, it says "I'm the baby," just so I don't forget. :)



Frances flaked out on the couch, and Mary gave her the flower.



Rock star Mary on our new deck. Unfortunately those glasses broke later in the day.

Please Advise

I have a problem with my eldest child. Up to this point she has been a relatively well behaved toddler, but she has recently started exhibiting a behaviour I've only seen on Nanny 911 before now. She bites. She bites a lot, and she bites hard. She doesn't do it when she's having a tantrum, she doesn't do it when she's angry, she does it for fun. She'll be giggling and playing, and suddenly lunge out at Ian or me like a giant chihuahua. Today I was standing in front of her, and she tugged on my hand to pull me down. I thought she wanted a hug, so I of course obliged, and while I was hugging her, she bit my right boob so hard that I have a bite shaped bruise. I am not impressed, and I don't know how to deal with it. When I yell at her, she just laughs at me. I smacked her bum the other day, and she just laughed at me. My step-mother recommended that I bite her back as hard as she bit me, but I can't even bring myself to spank her hard enough to actually hurt, I don't think I can bite her. Not to mention the fact that I don't think resorting to childish behaviour is going to solve the problem. Ian says that I should put soap in her mouth every time she bites, but I really don't know if that'll work either. Anyone have advice for me here? I don't want to end up with a bossy British nanny judging me and my horrible cannibal children on network TV.

She Smiles!

I've had a hard time with Frances from the very begining. I've loved her, sure, but I wasn't in love with her, and I certainly didn't like her. I think a lot of the feelings that people associate with PPD are really quite natural, especially when you're all alone with a child. I mean, this unpleasant little stranger came into our lives, turned our lives topsy-turvy, and disrupted our family balance. It's a demanding little person, yelling all the time, expecting everything to be dropped at a moments notice to cater to it's whims. It's strange, while I did go a little loopy after Mary was born, I didn't feel this way about her at all. I loved her and was in love with her from the first second I laid eyes on her.

Anyways, the point is that I fell in love with Frances this weekend. Up to this point she's smiled every once in a while, but they were practice/gassy smiles, not the real thing. This weekend she started smiling for real. Yesterday evening I was sitting on the couch holding her and watching TV. I happened to glance down at her and there she was, gazing up at me with a huge, adorable smile on her face. See?





We spent a lot of time this weekend at the house. We took about 700 nails out of the walls, our next task is to putty the holes and pick out paint. We also put together the dining room table and chairs, as well as a china cabinet for all my mothers china and crystal that she brought. We have a real dining room table! We have a dining room! The space in that house makes me giddy...compared to the place in Edmonton it's a mansion.



Mary "helped" a lot with the construction of the china cabinet. It took 6 hours to put the bloody thing together. I puttered around doing dishes in the dishwasher (we have a dishwasher!!) and pulling nails while Ian laboured away at the cabinet. It looks great now that it's finished and I can't wait to fill it with stuff.



It was awfully hard to come back to the apartment last night. I love our house so much, even with all the work that it needs, I wish we could just live there already. It'll be worth the wait though, once we get the place painted it's going to be beautiful. We did make it home though, and Frances and I slept like babies.

Lots of Pictures

We got our house today! We picked up the keys this morning and wandered through. It needs a lot more work than I remember, but I still love it, and I can't wait to get into it for good. Here are some pictures. Once we have everything looking the way we want it, I imagine there will be more pictures.

This is the view of the front of the house:



Here's the living room. The whole place needs painting pretty badly. We are going to leave the kitchen and dining room as is, and the basement is okay, but the living room, hallway and all the bedrooms need desperately to be painted.


Here's the beautiful kitchen. We are going to change the hardware on the cupboards, but other than that I think it'll be left pretty much alone.


Here's Mary and Poppa Larry (my Mums husband) officially welcoming us to Milestone. My Mum and Larry are visiting from Abbotsford B.C., and we are very glad that they can see where we will be living now.



Yesterday, after a long day with Mum and Larry.