Honestly had a great time at Adam and Nena’s wedding reception on Sunday night. Loved meeting their friends and seeing family. Definitely a good time had by all. Our best wishes and hopes to them for a long and happy life together.
Did not have such a great time working on the house this week. After spending many muscle-aching hours up on the roof cleaning off the dead moss and accidently breaking many tiles, I’ve concluded that a re-roofing job is in order. As far as I can tell I’ve got all the cracked tiles replaced for now, but the dead moss still covers so much of the roof that it’s possible if not probable that cracked tiles remain. As these broken tiles will allow rain water to penetrate the roof, it’s not a good thing.
But we’re going to ride it for one more rainy season. That’ll give us some time to manage the approximately $5000 needed to re-roof, plus it will allow us to decide if we want to spend even more to change the roof line now in a more substantial and expensive remodel. At this juncture I’d guess that we’ll decide to leave the roof structure as is and remodel down the road, but it’s hard to know how to prioritize large expenses.
For example, do we re-roof now ($5000)? Or maybe put in a fireplace insert for the winter ($2000) to heat a house that could really use it? Do we fix up our crazy cracking driveway ($10,000) or apply another round of temporary patches? Do we insulate downstairs in the family room? Finish the bathroom? Add the custom-sized closet doors ($750) to the bedrooms? Put a natural gas fireplace insert upstairs ($3000)? Add a second story deck out behind the garage? A patio outback? Put in a new back door—one that Erin can actually open and close and that we’ll all use regularly? As you can see, even a partial remodel list is enormous and expensive. It’s easy to get overwhelmed just with that much.
Complicating matters is that Erin and I don’t know how many kids we’re going to have. We’ve been blessed with two thus far, but, God willing, we were always going to have at least two. Elisha’s arrival means we’ve hit that minimum number, and we’ve really got to think carefully about what we want to do going forward. Call it the end of no-brainer sex, if you like. (I do.) We’re not aiming higher than four in any case, but even a change from two to three seems substantial. (The difference between one and two has not yet proved to be a major hurdle, likely because Jonah’s a great kid and has treated Elisha well. His primary interaction with her right now is kissing her head, hands, and toes.)
Great time not had in receiving the disappointing news that the babysitter we had lined up for the school year won’t have nearly the time available that we’d hoped. Basically we’ll have her for 3 hours (8-11 AM) on Friday and that’s it. So unless we find another, my album goes back onto the wish list of life, and I’ll hope to get it out in 2006. Yes, this puts me in a funk, and not the good kind of funk either.
On the brighter side, watching Elisha grow is loads of fun. She rolled front to back (twice) on Monday. She likes to suck her thumb way more than Jonah ever did. She sleeps like nobody’s business, frequently now making it through the night (at least in the last week—we’ll see if it lasts) and much of the day. Bottle and breast feeding are going very well. She smiles a lot and she’s even started with a little laugh that I can’t help but find adorable.
Jonah seems to be getting more responsible. He was never much of a tantrum thrower, but even that seems to have mellowed out. He really only throws a nutty if he’s tired or feeling particularly misunderstood, and many times he’s cool even under both those circumstances. The result is that we can take him a great many more places than might have previously, though I suppose I was always more gun-shy about that sort of thing than Erin.
Erin’s school year has been sort of a mixed bag. She’s handling it well, but there are a lot of changes from new classroom to new English class to new principal and so forth. All that can’t help but make things more stressful. And it’s not like either of us is getting tons of sleep, even with both kids frequently making it through the night.
I re-read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone the other day. It’s a lot better than I gave it credit for. I also saw Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense concert DVD recently. Not a huge Talking Heads fan, but it may be the best concert film I’ve ever seen. Highly recommended in all its grand weirdness.