New Project!

I've been needing a new project. So today I decided to tackle the stairs.  Here's the "before" picture...

 I have just pulled up the carpet at this point. Still trying to figure out exactly how to finish them. Couldn't determine that until we saw what was underneath the carpet. We got lucky, there's real wood under there, so that leaves us with a lot of options that aren't too difficult. The boys aren't overly thrilled that we're in construction mode again, they don't like the house being torn up.  Hopefully this will be a relatively quick and simple project though. At any rate, here's where I stopped for the day.  Clearly LOTS of work still to be done.

Alex's Week

Last week was a big one for Alex.

He got the ants for his ant farm and we had tons of fun trying to get them into the farm from the little tube they came in.  You would think it would be a relatively simple process.  I guess it's not too bad, except for the fact that the ants the company sent are harvester ants. Big red biting/stinging harvester ants.  But rest assured, the bites and stings are not harmful, just irritating, or so the packaging said.  Getting the ants into their home involved stunning them by sticking them in the refrigerator for 15 minutes and then attempting to dump them into the ant farm.  Problem was they warmed up super fast and climb the walls, oh and they don't actually want to leave the tube so they cling to it, so it was a race to dump them in before they warmed up too much.  They also move pretty fast when motivated.  Anyway, after several rounds of stunning and dumping we finally got them all in.  Now we feed and water them every so often (there's a schedule for this) and watch them dig their tunnels.  It's sort of mesmerizing actually.

Part 2 of Alex's big week... he got braces! He's probably the only kid I know that was deliriously happy about having a bunch of metal glued to his teeth.  It's not too bad - just brackets on his upper teeth, and just the front at that, and some metal spikes on the back of a couple of teeth.  The good news is that the lower teeth will probably always be fine.  But the uppers, well, that's a totally different story.  This is round one, he'll most likely have to go through this again in a few years.  Long story short, he's got some teeth coming in very badly and this round is to straighten out the front, close a gap and maybe create a space for the teeth that haven't come in yet, maybe just maybe they'll fall into place neatly. He's done a great job with it, not too much complaining about the aching/discomfort of the whole deal.

So that's what's going on in Alex's world.