March 2011 Photos

Zusha made a lovely shtreiml from Clics:

When the weather warms up even a tiny bit, we break out the bubbles. The kids love them, but they make the kids too wet and too cold in the winter.

Adi loves feeding Mel and insists to have a turn to hand feed him when she sees his food around. :)

My in-laws took us to an impromptu trip to Ikea. Only Gedalya came along. Adi is too hard to care for while shopping, and Zusha was sick. Poor kid was sick enough to go to bed early on his own, and to tell us he doesn't feel well enough to go, even though he loves to go to Ikea.

This park is 1.2 miles away from us, but I like it more than the one we have around the corner, so we go there sometimes.
See Adi's new trick?

She climbs halfway up, turns around carfully, sits down and slides!

Perks

The perks of living half a block away from your child's school:
I noticed the snack Zusha chose for himself this morning lying on Adi's high chair tray. I guess he forgot to pack it into his backpack. At the time, Adi was with a therapist, and Gedalya was watching them. So I grabbed the snack, popped out of the house and ran down the block. Zusha's class has hooks outside their classroom where they hang their backpacks and coats, so no one was the wiser to my little errand. I just stuck the snacks into his backpack and ran back home. Yay!

Oh, and by the way, my external drive with photos isn't connected to my computer at this time, so I can't post pictures. I do however have old pictures of the gigantic snow storm we had at the end of December that are already uploaded to Shutterfly!

 The drifts were taller than Adi!

 

Here Gedalya is stepping over the fence from the neighbor's yard into our own. Did I say "stepping over?" I meant walking normally.

This really was some snow storm!

Zusha's standing knee deep in middle of the street. Traffic was halted for days!

We made a fun igloo! The boys are already looking forward to next winter in our *new* apartment so we have more room to build igloos. :D

On some of these snow days Adi joined us.

But since she was a really new walker (just a week or two) walking in the snow was no picnic!

So some of those days Adi stayed home and watched us. :)

Mel also stayed home and watched us the squirrels.

 

 It was an awesome snow storm! Everyone enjoyed. Although I may have not enjoyed having snow thrown at my camera lens...

  

Although the boys might have enjoyed that.

 

And now we're safe till next winter. :D

The Bad

Of course, with anything in life, there is good and bad. And how is it possible to have a large apartment on a quiet and safe street with a yard as big as the house, right across from your son's cheider without having some bad?
So here is the bad. The apartment is OLD. It hasn't been updated since the 70s at least. The moldings are cracked and falling away. The doorways have their frames sticking out. The light fixtures everywhere needed work. The doors are loose on their hinges. The ceilings are low.
All the walls are wood paneling. I actually like that. It makes the house look like a cabin in the woods, which is appropriate because the location and extra space we have give it a countryside feeling. Not everyone likes the paneling, and a few of the therapists have suggested I paint it, but I like it. The kids' bedroom has light, natural wood paneling. The master bedroom is painted light blue right over the panels. The dining room is paneled in dark wood. That's the only thing I don't like. If it was lighter, the room would have more light. One wall in the dining room is all white brick and it has a fake fireplace, which is cute.

The kitchen. Oy, the kitchen. Let's start with the least of the offenses: the wall of the dinette. It's made to look like it's made of irregularly shaped stones cemented together, like a stone path. But it's just a panel. I don't really like it much, and eventually I'd like to remove it and put sheetrock and paint. It's a big area and would cost to do it.

The actual work area in the kitchen- the cabinets, counters, etc... are junk. They are SO old. The cabinets look good from the outside but are close to rotten on the inside. The counters need lots of care.
I got a cleaning lady to come before we moved in and told her to scrub the kitchen. Well, she spent three hours on it, which I thought was excessive, but figured- better more than less! Imagine how I felt when I moved in and realized NOTHING was cleaned! Not the kitchen, not the bathroom, not the downstairs bathroom, none of the other cabinets in the basement. The only thing the cleaning lady did was the storage rooms because I was there with her when she did them. The other stuff I couldn't supervise because I had other duties at home... we haven't moved yet.
I can't describe how filthy the kitchen was. With one swipe of a moist cloth, the cloth became BLACK. I had to clean each cabinet for an hour before the water would run clear from the cleaning rags. So I couldn't unpack the kitchen for a couple of weeks.
Why a couple of weeks? Because, to make a long story short, there were plumbing issues which took too long to fix. The landlord took a cheap charlatan guy who messed around for two days, and in the end had to hire a REAL plumber who had to undo everything the fake one did, and start from the beginning.

Now I have most of the cabinets cleaned, most of the kitchen unpacked. The entire basement is unpacked, so that's a big relief. We have many boxes left upstairs, but those are my husband's books. I'd unpack them, but he is very particular about which shelf they should go on and all that, so I have to wait for him to do it.
We are getting a handyman this week that we hired ourselves to fix up the small stuff and some of the big stuff. I guess it's good that the weather isn't great, because I am not tempted to leave the house. I can stay home and clean/organize/unpack.

Pesach will be both harder and easier. There is much less to clean than there normally would be, but I finally organized my kitchen, and now I will have to remove the liners, wash the cursed cabinets again, find place to put the chometz utensils, and line the cabinets back.

All good things need work and effort, and I'm looking forward to the day when we are FULLY settled in!

The Good

I'll cut to the chase.
Although I'd like to be all poetic and suspenseful, Adi only allots me a short amount of time for personal use. :)
This apartment is a dream come true for us.

*It's across the avenue from cheider. Just half a block walk, instead of a mile!
*It's TWO FLOORS! We have the basement and the first floor. The first floor is slightly smaller than our old apartment. The dining room is the same size, the kitchen is bigger, the bathroom is bigger, the two bedrooms are smaller, and there is no third bedroom.
*The basement is half finished, and is a little smaller than the first floor. It's actually the same size as the second floor (another family will be renting that). The first floor had the kitchen and bathroom added on, so the basement and second floor don't have those areas. There are two storage rooms in the basement, two gigantic closets, a laundry room, and a very large main room. The laundry room has the boilers in it, and the landlord said he will build a wall around them for safety. He hasn't done it until this past Friday. That means we weren't able to let Mel into the basement for the first month living here. That was so inconvenient. But now we let him in there and put his stuff there, too. It's so freeing to have the litter box out of the kitchen!
*It's on a dead end street. That's awesome in more ways than one. We are the last house on the block, so we have full view of the freight trains that pass by a couple of times a week. For a couple of train-obsessed boys, it's heaven! It's also a quiet street where I can let the kids walk around without worry.
*We have a GIANT yard. That's the thing that sold us on this place. Seriously. There is a front porch that is big as it is, but then we also have a nice sized cemented area right outside our side door, a long path where the boys ride their scooters, a large area with soil that can be made into a garden, a parking space for at least two cars, a 13'x13' area full of sand where we will put up a climber, and a long back yard full of soil where we are attempting to grow grass.
*There are two bathrooms! It's so convenient not to have to wait your turn anymore.

It's also easier to go in and out because we are on the first floor, so no dragging kids up and down stairs. But with the good, there must be some bad as well, which I will post about next time.

*Peeking Out from My Hiding Place*

I'm almost embarrassed to show myself here after a month and a half! But I have taken longer blog hiatuses before and have gone back to regular posting. So here I am. I don't know how much I will get in because Adi's therapy session is almost over, but I'll give it a shot!

We moved one month ago. We needed a new place for several reasons. Our landlady wanted the cat out, with or without us. Moving for a cat is nuts, but it wasn't just that. I thought about it- is the apartment so wonderful that it's worth re-homing the cat to stay there? The answer was no. After 4 1/2 years living there, it needed some renovations. It was getting too small for us. I secretly hoped to find something closer to Zusha's cheider, even though walking 2 miles a day was great for all of us, Zusha ended up skipping many days because my husband didn't always have time to walk him before work.
Since I was looking for a new apartment, something with a yard or balcony wouldn't hurt. ;) And from what I discovered during my searches, apartments within our price range were always either shiny and newly renovated but small... or in need of lots of care, but large. I figured I could live with a slightly smaller place if it was in great condition, or with an imperfect apartment as long as it was spacious.

Adi's coming... next installment coming soon! (I hope...)