Things of interest this week

Spencer gave a talk in primary today. I may have teared up listening to my eldest read his whole talk with naught but three or four words he needed his dad's help to read. Learning to read has been one of my favorite milestones to day in my kids' lives.

It took me 34 years but I finally got stung by a bee, probably a wasp, yesterday while mowing the lawn. I didn't realize what it was until today. I thought I had gotten hit by a piece of wood kicked out by the mower, but it felt like a needle hit my ankle. There was no stinger so it didn't occur to me until this morning when it was all red and puffy and obviously a small allergic reaction. Thankfully it turns out I'm not deathly allergic to bee stings. Check that type of dying off my list. 😁

We took the kids to the lake yesterday afternoon. They loved it, of course. Chloe was delighted to float around in a little baby inner tube. We came home dyed red from the clay soil. Thankfully it washed out because our poor swimsuits were pretty worked over before I washed them. 

Friday I took the kids hiking at one of their favorite train tunnels nearby, and then blew their minds by taking them to a waterfall they didn't know is in the same place. They blew my mind at how capable they were at climbing mountains. Aaron especially. Spencer led out and did a fantastic job leading. Aaron was ultra confident, but smart about it. He's not quite three, so he's still pretty short. Whenever he couldn't reach going down the steep slope to the waterfall he just turned around and slid down holding whatever handy root he found. That's not a skill that always comes natural to kids. I was impressed. We'll be doing more hiking this summer. They loved it. 

Chloe has decided she's a full time walker as of this week. She's adorably slow and looks like a pint-sized frail old lady walking, which is adorable beyond reason, but she walks as often as she can. She'll still crawl if she's not certain of the footing, but she's doing it less every day. 

I just finished making my own face cream. Not oil with just a blend of oils, but genuine lotion with a water and oil blend and a preservative and all sorts of fun powders. I haven't put it on my face yet but the little bit I put on my hand mid process feels amazing. 

Bill and I went on a real live date Friday night! I think that would be a first for 2017. It's been a rough year folks. Our anniversary and my birthday were overshadowed by my kidney stone surgery. But our good friend came over after our kids were in bed and we spent a quality couple or three hours away from home just the two of us. It was heavenly. And we took this picture. Obviously we had a great time. Haha!

The piano

Settle in friends. It's a bit of a story.

This story really starts 8.5 years ago when Bill and I got married on a Martin Luther King, Jr. weekend because we didn't want to wait until summer and we didn't have time to go on more than a couple days of honeymoon.

We watched a bunch of presentations for things we didn't really want to buy and got loads of free gifts. One of them was a hotel stay in Cancun for a few days. We made all these amazing plans and got to the airport the morning of the trip only to find that my name didn't match on my plane ticket and passport due to married name change and Delta wouldn't fix it. I can't even tell you how irate I was. I haven't flown with them since. We missed the trip. It was awful.

However, it did set me up to get a piano later that year when I got called as a choir pianist. We picked up this little number for the price of our refunded tickets and it's served us well for years. It's a nice little digital piano that is good enough to enjoy playing on but not so nice that I would want it forever.

I haven't been actively looking for a piano, but then again, if one were to fall into my lap, I'm all over that. Wait, what? A piano could fall into your lap? Why yes, yes it can!



Behold, the first picture of the piano that fell into my lap.



My friend had the good fortune of having her parents give her their piano and she offered hers up for free on the ward Facebook page. I jumped on that faster than I've done anything lately, lol.



The piano came to me black with this black/white bench. There was a section on the side that had peeled off and while the piano had looked lovely in my friend's living room, I wasn't in love with the flat black color in my house. I picked at that spot a bit and was shocked to find it peeled off in huge chunks. Shocked, but super excited. See, I already have experience refinishing furniture, and I immediately started dreaming of how I could make it look.



Turns out not all the paint came off so easy. It took many, many hours to get the black off. The underside of the black was yellow against the wood, which is really odd. That took ages to get off in some places.



Once I had scraped off as much as I could I got down to the business of stripping. I typically use an orange stripper solution to begin with and then an acetone/paint stripper blend and steel wool to get down to the raw wood. I decided to skip the orange stuff at first and went straight to the blend with steel wool. I got about this far, the leg and a bit of the side and changed my mind. It was backbreaking work scrubbing that stain off.



This is what it looked like with the orange stuff on it. You put it on, leave it for a few hours, then scrape it off and the varnish mostly comes off with it.







The legs ended up getting double duty on the stripping and were way whiter than the rest.




I was so excited with how well it was going I jumped right into staining. I had a red oak color I started with but I wanted it more red, so I did a second coat of red mahogany. I was happy with the color and went on with my first coat of tung oil finish. That's my favorite clear finish for most furniture I redo. But refinishing furniture disaster struck! Turns out the red mahogany was the end of the can and a bit thicker than it ought to be. When I put the tung oil on it, it smeared the stain all around and left it looking patchy. I was heartbroken. I don't even know how many hours I'd put in thus far. Weeks and weeks of work interspersed with my normal crazy schedule. These pictures don't do it justice, but itreally was kind of splotchy. I stopped work for a day or two and just looked at the piano because I really wanted to finish, but I wanted to love the result too.





And eventually I decided that I really did love this piano and this wasn't a temporary piece. When we first opened it up we discovered it was a Baldwin, built sometime during the 1970s. It has a lovely sound and is solidly built. Once I had stripped it I was surprised and pleased how little damage it had. I didn't have to patch anything. The corners are a bit worn in places, but I like the charm it adds. So I figured if I wanted to keep it forever there was no reason to rush this process and regret it for years.



Thankfully the stripping went way faster the second time. I was able to make sure it was even and ready to stain. Once I finished the whole stripping process I actually left the main piano alone for a few more days because I didn't want to risk messing the finish up again. It had its own beauty with all the previous stain and paint removed.




I did go ahead and remove the foot board, the lid, and the piano bench cover and carefully stained them outside in my carport. They each took the color a little different, but I love all of them. They're so gorgeous.



I learned a lot about the staining/finishing doing those parts separately. I've done lots of re-staining projects but it's been a couple years since I'd last tackled one. I relearned some tricks of the trade and finally got the courage up to tackle the full piano.



This time it went so much better. I made sure the stain didn't get too thick. I didn't rub the finish in too much and make the stain streaky again. I was patient. I had to wait 12 hours in between each clear coat. I actually waited 24 hours.



This is actually the backside of a piece of wood that holds the keys in place. That green felt replaced some old gunky red felt that had soaked up some of the stripping solution. I removed all of the keys early in the process after accidentally gooping them up with stripper solution and that made things more accessible.



It took me five days to put six coats of clear on top of the two coats of stain. I reassembled everything yesterday. I picked up some pretty knobs for the lid. The only thing left is to get some wheels. I have a set I thought would work, but on further thought they're not heavy duty enough. Otherwise it's done. I vacuumed out all the dust and grit, and this baby is beautiful, it sounds nice, and it's clean. I checked my pictures to see when the whole process started. April 22nd. Wow! Six weeks of work for this beauty! It was worth every day of that time. I have never been more proud of a piece I've created. It's the most satisfying thing I've done in years.

Photos

We had a request for pictures of everyone so I made an effort to get shots of the kids and even Bill and me. I'm not loving those, but hey, the kids' ones are super cute. I just don't like selfies that much. But I'll post the kids' ones. :)

Meandering thoughts

I like to blog every week but lately I've found I don't have anything that jumps out at me that I want to share. This has been an uneventful week. I'm still working on my piano. It's coming along nicely, but I'll save the pictures for when it's closer to done.

I got a $14,000 EOB for my surgery back in January today. That was a little eye opening, but not too much so because I knew it wasn't correct. I called in and sure enough, they thought I'd needed a referral and I didn't, so they're resubmitting it. I will be forever grateful for my job that got me so much better acquainted with healthcare so that I can speak insurance speak and decipher the bills better. It's still so convoluted, but that's a very useful side benefit of my work that I never expected. And I won't go into a discussion here of how it's absurd that four months post procedure I still haven't received but a few bills. It's ridiculous that it takes this much time and is so hard for providers to get it right. That's a rant for another day.

And I've really just been thinking about how I don't have any pictures to share in this post because lately I've felt like I want to try living life more than documenting it. I want pictures, but mostly right now I just want to actually enjoy what's happening in the moment. Like yesterday. We pulled out the sprinkler and the kids had tons of fun. And the day before that we had a water balloon fight. I almost didn't do it because I was tired, but I'm so glad I filled up those balloons. It was fun. This last slog of grad school really is such a slog. It feels very heavy on hard work on both mine and Bill's part. His in doing his work to finish his dissertation, me because I'm working more hours to help the finances a bit as this drags out a bit longer than expected. Those are good things, but it feels more like drudgery most of the time than a triumphant completion of earning a PhD. We have very little down time right now between parenting, work, and school. It's tiring. So for now I think I'll not take pictures if I don't feel like it, because the water fight and playing in the sprinklers were way more of a novelty than they ought to be. I'm much more likely to be sitting on the sidelines being a stick in the mud and that's not really that much fun. Here's to trying a little harder to enjoy the fun instead of watching others enjoy it.

Piano Progress

I am making slow progress on the piano redo. I took some pictures to document what it looks like right now. All the paint is off minus a few hard to reach places I'll get to soon. There's a good bit of residue on the legs as well as below the keyboard, but I stripped one leg and was pleased to see that what I thought would happen did in that most of the damage on the leg is to the finish, not in the actual wood. When I stripped off all the finish it looked infinitely better. I did a little bit of work on one tall side as well to see how it would go and it's going to take a ton of work, and in shifts because all that scrubbing with steel wool makes my arms sore, but the finish will come off and the bare wood is going to look amazing when I add new stain.That's a long way off, but it's fun to have a project and I work on it a little bit here and there. This one is going to take longer than most of my furniture projects, but the result is worth it to me.

First Steps

Chloe has been standing unassisted for a few weeks now. She's pretty pleased with her little trick and she's gotten to the point where she can actually stand up pretty well from the floor and get all the way to standing. Not gonna lie, it's impressive.

The way this girl works, she's not much into trying and trying and trying to figure milestones out. She's more of the not thinking about them at all and then one day it enters her mind that she can do something and boom, she's doing it type. So until she thought of walking herself, she wasn't going to do it.

And that's what happened tonight. We were watching Moana and the kids were bouncing off the walls from excitement of watching it. That movie is so high energy. Chloe caught the energy and was just going crazy. She stood up next to the couch and I offered my arms out to her. I was only a couple feet away, but just far enough she had to take a couple steps to get to me and boom, she did it! They were pretty unsteady, but I saw the look in her eyes. She was like, hey, I could just WALK to mom instead of crawling. Oh boy, nothing is going to hold her back now. She's ten months old and five days. That's virtually the same age as Spencer when he took his first steps. The other two walked at 11 months and 13 months, so she's winning development milestones here. I'm so excited for her to walk.

Blessings

Back when Bill and I got married 8+ years ago we were married over Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday weekend so we didn't have time for much of a honeymoon. At the time we were big into going to presentations for super expensive items we weren't really going to buy only to get the free gifts. They only convinced us once to buy, and I still haven't used that thing, so that's a testament to their sales skills. But one thing we got was a few days' stay at a hotel in Cancun and we excitedly planned it as a delayed honeymoon. We showed up in the airport that morning to discover that the name on my ticket and on my passport didn't match because of marriage name changes and Delta refused to help us with it. I was heartbroken. I haven't flown with them since. I may in the future, but it was awful. They did refund us the full price of our tickets, which is unusual. And the bird flu happened to be going through at that time, so going to Cancun wasn't a great option right then. But still. I was heartbroken. We've never made it down there since. Instead of doing that we decided to buy a digital piano with the flight money. I've never regretted that decision. We purposely chose to get a piano that wasn't so nice that we would never want to replace it with the real deal. I've not regretted that decision either and yet I've thoroughly enjoyed the piano we have had for the last eight years. 

Last night a friend posted on a group page that she was giving away her piano. You better believe I jumped all over that. She had been given her mom's piano and was giving away hers that is still in good shape. I'm over the moon about it. We're picking it up tonight. I can't wait to have the new to us piano in our house. 

This is a pretty stressful phase of life for my family. I'm ping ponging between doing great and being really stressed. This month in particular has been financially taxing. But yesterday I felt so blessed as this opportunity to get this piano popped up and I also determined that as a result of some extra money earned we can cover all the unexpected costs that came up. It's nice to feel taken care of even when this spot we're in is hard. 

An ode to computers

While Bill was out of town a couple weeks ago my computer suddenly died. And I do mean suddenly. It cut out in the middle of a movie the kids were watching never to start again. It's been a bit of a whirlwind trying to get that taken care of. A great friend let me borrow her laptop for a few days while Bill was still gone. For the last week I've used Bill's laptop, which is fine but looking at the screen for too long makes my eyes hurt.

I had an iMac and I dearly loved it. It's six years old and until the moment it died it was in perfectly good working shape. Unfortunately, replacing it with a new one was just a bit out of a price range that made me feel comfortable to drop money on right now, unplanned. We are so close to the end of grad school and a move across the country and saving for a house and paying off student loans and all sorts of things I want to put money towards more than a new computer. Yet my computer is my main work device so I have to have one that works. I've been in a pickle for a while trying to find the best solution.

We finally decided to get a new PC instead of a Mac and shopped around to find one with similar specs that I wanted. We ended up getting a normal desktop computer with tower, monitor, keyboard, mouse. I got it today and started setting it up only to discover that there is no way to adjust the screen brightness except through a horrible menu accessed directly on the monitor. I use that feature multiple times a day, so as weird as it sounds, that ended up being a deal breaker.

Bill is a super savvy shopper though and lo and behold he came up with a solution. We found another computer that had virtually the same specs but is an all-in-one just like my iMac was, but just a PC.

So after just hours with my new computer I'm packing it up and shipping it back and the new one is ordered and will arrive in a couple days. Hopefully the computer buying saga will end and it will be back to business as usual.

All through this process I've felt super blessed. Bill got a paycheck we hadn't planned on for some previous work done. I've upped my hours of work the last few weeks and am seeing a significant increase in my paychecks. I was able to sell the broken iMac for $145. Talk about holding its value. I appreciated that. We have been really blessed so that even though it wasn't in the plan to replace a computer just now, the money is there. It's lovely.

Weather and videos

This week we've had a series of thunderstorms come through. There's been tons of wind, which is very abnormal for this little corner of South Carolina, and tons of damage. Earlier this week I went to pick Spencer up and discovered that trees and power lines had been knocked down in a line just missing the elementary school. That was startling. Their power was out and the road was blocked in both directions. I discovered a super windy road through a subdivision by the school that I didn't know existed and it turned out to be the only way to get to the school. It was pretty chaotic that day.

Several nights we've had crazy amounts of thunder and lightning. The thunder shakes our whole house. I remember storms like that growing up in Colorado Springs. Turns out they're just as intense to weather as an adult as I remember them being as a kid. We have a dead tree in our yard that hasn't been removed yet. Tons of other trees have fallen but so far that one is still there. It's pretty far away from our house and the wind blows parallel to our house so if it did fall it should go away from us, but that's kind of nerve racking. There was a while this fall and winter where we were in a drought, but looks like that is past. We've had inches and inches of rain this week.

There's not really much else going on at the moment. It kind of feels like a time warp actually. Bill and I are both working a ton. Time seems to stand still but we're already a week into April, so obviously it isn't.

The kids are doing lots of fun things. Spencer is learning tons of awesome tricks on the trampoline. Genevieve is the queen of the rings we have in the carport. Aaron is perfecting his ability to pester his siblings. He's living up to his little brother status to perfection. It goes both ways. Genevieve has gotten into cutting hair. She cut her own bangs this week and she trimmed a chunk out of Aaron's side burn too. Chloe started standing on her own this week too and she cruises a bit along the furniture. She can drink out of a straw these days and I make kefir smoothies daily and it's pretty much the best thing in her day. She starts hyperventilating if we don't give her one fast enough when she sees I've made them. Today is the beginning of Spring Break. I haven't a clue what we're going to do, but I'm sure it'll be fun.

Here's a picture Spencer drew. "Jump in the puddles."

And here's a few videos I've posted elsewhere, but they're good here too.