last day of april!!!

and ... i don't have photo-of-the-day pix for you.

chill, man.

i DO, however, have chicks. remember, i said i was going to do a newborn shoot of chicks? my eyebrow lady called me two weeks ago so see if she could hire me to do a newborn shot of these chicks; one of her co-workers is a total sweetie and is always throwing baby showers, but doesn't have any children of her own. so when she said her eggs were hatching, my friend and her co-workers cooked up this "welcome baby chicks!" shower plan. and i think i might have been the big winner!

seriously, does it get any cuter?

tomorrow will be part 1 of the final-week recap in photos. i've asked becca to guest-blog so you can finally hear her voice and put it alongside her words. and she's heading out tomorrow to prep for running the indy mini marathon on saturday ... we can all wish her luck! then saturday i'll try to post my part 2, in between pinkifying harper's room and getting rid of the "baby stuff." (ie orange walls and vintage nursery rhyme prints she's had since the day she was born. she's over it.) tomorrow is a trip to ikea, joann's, and target to get what we need. let's just hope harper doesn't change her mind halfway through the project and hate what she is currently okaying. because that's highly possible with her.

cheers.

days 8 & 9. and bathroom update.

pix from yesterday ...

becca's mode of communication with her hubby until the end of the month:

and i forced myself to look up - figuratively and literally - after the disappointment of the new shower:

and today, becca's cat, isabella, was seeking some quiet time away bruiser:

and marc broke down henry's first bike, the one with training wheels, and covered the "major damage" design and blue/black/red colors with something more harper-approved:

and while he was feeling handy, he checked out the shower handle for me, and discovered that if he pushed it up ever so slightly, the water got ever so slightly warmer. so he talked to the contractor (who was conveniently busy and didn't return my call until about 4:30 today), and was walked through the process of taking off the flange to access the screws that loosen the handle and allow more hot water threads to be turned on.

or something like that.

well, the contractor cut the tile so close to the plumbing that the screw is only partially visible. to get to it with a screwdriver, *someone* will have to come out tomorrow with a tile saw and make the hole bigger. and *someone* will be called every hour on the hour until he shows up with that saw.

and i'm done with the whole thing. i'm packing up my girl, meeting my friend heather and her daughter downtown, and we're going to go look at the spring garden show at macy's. i need a breather.

and by the time i get home, my parents should be here or be close.

and maybe *someone* will have shown up with a tile saw.

i love my new bathroom!*

*except for one itsy-bitsy little detail, which i will divulge below.

it turned out amazing, even though it took four months longer than anticipated, and about $3000 more than we were told to budget.

remember where we started?

ick, right?

and then we went through all of this.

and finally, about three weeks ago, he was done. then i had to finish touching up the paint, putting on a second coat of sealer in the shower, paint all the baseboard and door trim, marc had to install said baseboard and trim, had to put up all the other fixtures ... figure out how to hang the curtains ... order curtains ... iron curtains ... etc.

well, it's done. except for hemming the curtains.

the little details are making me totally happy. the little tin pitcher from ikea was the perfect thing to hold the raspberry branches from pottery barn. the wood "bowl" from target makes a charming receptacle for extra toilet paper. and the plant stand from smith & hawken was exactly what was needed between the vanity and toilet to hold q-tips and a bowl for placing rings, etc. while showering.

however ... here comes the "*" ...

when it comes to showering, there's a problem:

there is no hot water in the shower.

i let it run for 10 minutes today, as i was giving the shower a test-run before my parents arrive on friday for easter. and ... no hot water. i had it on full-blast hot for about 10 minutes, and it never even made it to lukewarm. now, it did warm slightly, which makes me think that the hot water valve just doesn't open all the way.

so now the conundrum: if i call mr contractor and ask him to please give me hot water, the possibilities are:

a) we have to take down the glass shelf and towel bar, he has to dig through the new wall to access the plumbing, then repatch the drywall, and i then have to repaint two coats of primer and two coats of paint, plus rehang everything and then clean up.

or

b) we access the plumbing through the closet in marc's office, thereby having to take everything OUT of the closet, find a place for it, fix the plumbing, then fix the closet, but in the meantime my parents have to sleep on the couch because the office/guest-room-once-an-air-mattress-is-placed-on-the-floor will be out of commission; which, actually, will not make marc happy because that's where he WORKS.

and do we pursue these options today in hopes of having a functional shower by friday? or do we say screw it, use only the one working bathroom AGAIN during a family visit, and deal with the shower on monday? i'm leaning toward the latter, because i still have way too many things to do before lunchtime friday to be ready.

good grief. i don't even care how pretty this room turned out. i'm friggin' SICK of it.

quite the weekend

saturday:

becca sent me this ...

along with the thought ...

"I absolutely love cheese, and this is 35 heavenly calories.  So good, sometimes I eat two!  I guess that kind of defeats the purpose of it only being 35 calories...as the commercial says, have you laughed today?"

yup. just did. you sent me a photo of a tiny little pathetic triangle of low-fat cheese. good grief. eat some brie, woman! oh, and don't bother running eight miles today ... there's no point in that, either. once you have kids and hit your 30s, it won't matter.

(said only with love ;o)

my contribution to the day was this ...

henry had a big day. he finally learned to blow bubbles!! sure, there were lots of spitting noises and sticky, gluey masses of hubba bubba hitting the earth, but he did it!

my husband had a big day, too. remember last week he was in texas, taking some big exam? well, here's how big it was:

marc works for a company called red hat. it's the anti-microsoft. it's super geeky. and marc is a super geek's super geek. so for the past year and a half he's been traveling all over the country each quarter, taking these one-week-long classes and then an all-day exam at the end in order to become a rhca, a red hat certified architect. meaning, he's certified by the company to be an expert at "architecting" red hat systems for clients. there are five exams in pursuit of these little letters behind his name on a business card. each exam carries the history of a 70% failure rate.

marc just found out yesterday that he passed his fifth and final exam on friday.

he passed it on the first try.

he passed ALL five exams on the first try.

and he is now one of only 180 or so certified red hat architects in the WORLD.

that's pretty big time.

so yesterday was a good day.

then we headed to bed around midnight and i peeked out the curtains to see this:

the snow was falling like crazy and was already covering this little barberry bush by the front steps. and what did that barberry look like eight hours later?

poor little barberry.

even sadder, though, was the lilac which, until then, had been valiantly trying to bud:

sigh. oh well.

henry played outside for a good hour, then harper and i went out after lunch for an hour ourselves and made a snowman, a snow baby, and snow cat. and now, 24 hours after it began, it's nearly all melted.

so while my sister's photo of the day echos the time of year where she lives ...

mine does, too.

see you tomorrow. hope your weekend was just as lovely as ours was!