What we have been up to.

Lowell has been frantically trying to get a paper done so that he could talk about it with his advisor this week. That paper has been sent away so for now the frantic is done and the paper continues. Once again Lowell is involved with putting the St Margaret’s choir through their paces. Our music director broke her ankle and so Lowell is helping get the choir ready for Easter. When he is not sitting in front of a computer he has been doing some workouts. L and K find this fascinating, they participate for 5 seconds and then watch for the rest of the workout.

L is busy “artzookaing”. This new activity is based on the CBC show Artzooka it involves creating art out of all kinds of things. Grandma spent an afternoon with us helping L make a train tunnel. Thank you for coming up with the project idea it was right up his alley.


K is busy learning words as fast as she hears them, exploring books especially lift the flap books, and watching out the window for puppies. Unfortunately for K you can’t tap on the window at our house and see a puppy like you can at Grandma and Grandpa’s.

I have been reading “The way of the Pilgrim” a book about what it means to pray without ceasing for my Lenten discipline (Lowell’s discipline is watching the kids Thursday nights so I can go to small group). I have been sitting in front of my sewing machine most evenings after the kids are in bed altering a suit and a flower girl dress. Next on my list is a black bowtie and cumberbun. I have also taken up a quilting project which is just way too many things in too short a period of time.

The month in review

It seems that we haven’t been making it to the computer to blog very often lately. Sorry to those still far away or those that we still don’t see as much as we would like. We had a great Valentine’s Day party, this was our second annual Fondue. Mommy had lots of help arranging the fruit and eating it too. “It is was GOOOD, but a little bit hot!” according to L.


K is finally starting to enjoy books. She will sit in your lap and listen to a story now, but she also likes to sit alone in the rocking chair with her favourite “beee”(blanket) and read to herself.

L is generally happy and enjoying life…

…but this week L has been fighting something or other. He has had a fever for the last 3 days with no other symptoms. Hopefully today will be a better day.

The last month

I know that 0 degrees Celsius will bring snow, slush and dirty vehicles and that it won’t stay, but we are enjoying the warm weather today. I took L to the community centre before lunch and he had another chance to practice skating. There was a light layer of snow on parts of the ice surface and K had a blast just running. This worked well for L’s learning because when he forgot himself in chasing K he did pretty well.

So other than this warm day my kids are adapting fairly well to being Manitobans. Daddy and L went for a walk the other night to burn off some of that cabin fever, K had to stay home with me. She spent the entire half hour getting dressed to go outside. At various points she had mittens and L’s rubber boots on as well.

L was not wanting to wear his long johns the other day, I told him he needed to because it was minus 30 outside. He replied “Yours is 30 mine is (minus) 1”.

Our basement has been usable for a few weeks now. There are still bits and pieces that gradually find a home, but for the most part it is a great improvement. The kids enjoy playing downstairs; K likes to just run around (although the slope in the floor is a challenge) and L likes the fact that he can drive his remote control truck around or set things up and play with them for a few days before he has to clean them up.

K is taking to colouring or playing with her brother’s playdough. For a kid who doesn’t sit still for a story it amazes me how long she can sit at the table and play. I guess it doesn’t seem long when you are busy talking on the phone.

I enrolled L into Kindergarten yesterday. It doesn’t feel real just yet, but I don’t really look forward to it. Yes it will be exciting, but it is nice having him around too. We chose a French Immersion school for him. L already knows the Kindergarten curriculum: the alphabet letters and phonetically, he has started printing and he has some basic concepts of addition and subtraction. As Lowell said French Immersion might not help him, but it won’t hurt him.

The Holidays

The holidays kind of snuck up on us this year. Perhaps it was because we didn’t have to book flights far in advance and make sure our shopping was done before we had to leave. At any rate, Christmas arrived and we were hardly ready for it. Once the celebrations started, it felt like we were on a roller coaster, going from one party to another. It was a lot of fun while it lasted, but I think I am speaking for everyone around here when I say that it was good to have a week where we didn’t really go out at all.
Pam found a pair of skates for L at a garage sale earlier this year. We’ve only strapped them on twice so far, but L is already showing signs of improvement.

One of the good things about the Christmas holidays is that it gives us an opportunity to see (Great) Grandma F. When I sat down to chat a bit with her this year, she commented on how remarkable it was for her to be enjoying relatively good health at this stage in life given the boughts of rheumatic fever she had when she was young. We’re blessed to have her with us. I’ve been meaning to take a multi-generational picture for a while now. This year we finally did it.
The Christmas tree just about didn’t make it up this year. It was packed away in the garage with about half of our other possessions while the basement was being remodeled, and we didn’t have access to it till about a week before Christmas.
L and K have a great mom. She makes reindeer cupcakes!
Even though the play microwave was K’s gift, L had nearly as much fun playing with it as K did. When L was about K’s age, he couldn’t get enough of the kitchen set that was in the nursery at the church we attended in Amherst.

A “Finished” Basement

The contractors have left and we have our basement back. We can’t say that our basement is finished—more on that in a bit—but we no longer have to let the contractors in and out. Hooray! We like it and we look forward to settling in and making use of our new space.
Even though we are mostly satisfied with the finished product, the renovation didn’t go as smoothly or painlessly as we would have liked. We got really tired of the general contractor by the end of the project, because, as it went along, we got the distinct sense that he was just in it to squeeze as much as he could out of us and the subcontractor he had hired to do most of the work. I had to learn how to put my foot down and, at times, speak my mind. By the time Christmas loomed, we were as anxious to have him out of our basement as, I’m sure, he wanted to leave. Eventually I just said that things were good enough. We paid him the last of his money and he left, leaving me a few odds and ends to look after myself.
We didn’t want to spend the money to break up the existing concrete floor, so we had to work around it. The old floor sloped steeply around the drain, and so one of the things I had to do was build a level platform in the laundry room for the washer, dryer, and freezer to sit on. K and L think the new basement is a blast and they had great fun running back and forth on the platform while I was building it.

I finished building the platform and then went to hook up the washer. When I opened the taps, water went everywhere. Having sat closed for two months, the old shut-offs had developed leaks. Off to the hardware store I went to get some plumbing supplies. We are very happy to have laundry facilities of our own again. We were both tired of carting loads of dirty diapers with us when we went to visit family.

The bathroom is no longer in the middle of an open room. We think we’ve done relatively well given how little room we had to work with. Unfortunately, the contractors didn’t get the shower quite right and they have to come back to fix a leak. We hope that fixing it doesn’t involve taking the entire shower out.
It felt like a nice large room after the contractor’s tools were moved out.
Unfortunately, until I finish the shelving in the laundry and furnace rooms, all of the stuff that we moved out of the basement into our garage is now back in our basement, piled in the middle of the family room. Sigh. When we moved back from MA, we never really bothered to unpack the stuff that was in the basement. We didn’t want go to the trouble if we were just going to have to repack and move it if we decided to remodel. I told Pam the other day that we will finally be unpacked from our move when the pile that’s now in the middle of our basement is gone.

Kids

Life goes on at a whirlwind pace. K finds something new to get into everyday it seems. Her newest fascinations are footwear and stirring. As if getting dressed for winter wasn’t hard enough now we have to search the house for 4 different sets of boots because K has carried them away and left them wherever she tired of them.

Friday we had a combined birthday party in Pansy. Both C and L appeared happy with their gifts. If we hadn’t tried to avoid the Christmas birthday party we could have waited closer to the end of the month and had a birthday party for all three Friesen boys, their birthdays fall in a 7 week span. I like this photo of the next generation of 3 Friesen boys.

Today is the second Sunday of Advent. L and I are celebrating this season together by creating a Jesse tree. Advent means Coming, we wait for the coming of Jesus another theme of advent is God’s faithfulness. The Jesse tree comes from Isaiah’s reference to the root of Jesse (11:10). As you can see we only have 3 ornaments on our tree, but we are 7 days into Advent…time is a factor, but I also want L to be excited about the story and creating something and sometimes he isn’t interested in doing a craft. A good friend of mine has made an amazing felt tree with ornaments that you just velcro on, I think that will be the direction we take when we concentrate more on the stories and less time on the fine motor skills. That however will be a project for the new year.

Almost Finished

We are now into the second month of our basement renovation and we’re starting to get tired of having to live around the things that used to be in the basement. Good thing the project is nearing completion. Painting will probably start later today or tomorrow and we’ll begin seeing the rest of the finishes like flooring and trim shortly after. The space is starting to take shape and we’re looking forward to being able to use it.

Compost Bin

I have been wanting a compost bin. I finally found instructions online for something that I thought was within my capabilities for building. Lowell very nicely volunteered to cut the wood for me which I gratefully accepted since the scroll saw intimidates me. Way back in Shops class I remember using a table saw, a band saw and a jig saw. That was a long time ago and none of those saws are as free form as a scroll saw. So last Monday we got started. I had to work Tuesday so my plan was to finish it on Wednesday. The weather was supposed to turn nasty on Wednesday so Lowell volunteered to work on the compost bin Tuesday afternoon. He didn’t want to take over my project, but really I don’t need to have a woodworking project under my belt. As it happens if I was going to do it all myself I would probably still have 16 pieces of wood in a pile, but now I have a great compost bin.

Thanks Lowell.

Happy Birthday

to a girl who is 1.

The concept of presents is still lost on K, but she did have a great time carrying the gift bags around.


K celebrated with both sides of the family, she had a cake the first time and a pie the second time. It didn’t really matter to her as long as she could get her fingers into the icing/whipped cream.


K is one going on 3 years I think. She pays close attention to what her brother has and gets to do and wants to do the same. L and K trick or treated this past Halloween. K knows the word treat now, knows that it comes out of an orange bag and never misses L’s request to have one.


K is busy walking everywhere or pushing around a stroller that she got for her birthday. She has a few words in her vocabulary; she recieved a phone as a gift and loves to walk around saying “Hi!” (we are working on “Hello” for a little variety). She also says “Bye Bye”, “Night night”, “Dad”, “snack” and “cat”. She loves watching the cats through the window and at Uncle J and Aunt S’s, but gets a little freaked out if they come towards her or are lying in her path.

Progress

Our basement is slowly taking shape. The walls are roughed in and there is insulation in the exterior walls. Most of the plumbing and electrical has also been completed. We were told today that they would be painting next week.