The Basketball Court

I needed to vent/record an interesting part of our lives and I thought, what better place to do it than a blog with low readership:).  

This is the contractor fixing our bball court at 10:30pm.

Our journey starts in August when I hired a guy off of a friend's referral to do a basketball court for Joe for his birthday/Christmas/etc.  I misheard the friend who said she paid upfront.  Apparently she paid Lowes for the materials up front.  I paid the contractor all of the money upfront.  He came and dug a hole for a while but disappeared for a while. He later said his best friend died in a motorcycle accident. He came back kept digging and then disappeared again.  Apparently he beat up a guy who had sexually abused his daughter and just got released from prison. He was in jail for a while and used our money for bail.  He came back and said he was going to finish the project/pay us back, but he gradually stopped responding to our attempts to contact him.

I prayed about what to do and felt we should wait if we want to save money. Come late February we were done with the mud hole and we decided to file a small claims and go with a different contractor.  We hired a more reputable contractor through homeadvisor.com.   Some friend/sub contractor showed up saying the contractor's wife's brain cancer came back and she was having emergency surgery.  It seemed like the sub contractor never saw the proposal and really wasn't communicating with the contractor.  Things were changing from what they said they were originally going to do and they poured a way that makes us nervous...but the pad is poured.

Than tonight at 10:30 some dog came and barked at Joe and I through the window...standing on the wet cement!  The picture above is the nice sub contractor at 10:30pm coming to fix the paw prints.  We fill like everything is combining against us on the basketball court. That's all for my ranting. #firstworldproblems:).

After picture...Yeah!!!!

Heart Melter

This girl just melts my heart.  She is such a sweet, happy, calm baby.  I can't get enough of her.  We're so blessed to have her in our family.

My Art Project

 I found the above picture at a garage sale probably 4 years ago.  I loved the frame, but not the picture.  I could never find anything to put in it.

I decided to paint my own picture.  I think I like it but I'm not sure...I've looked at it too much.

The Picture Spot

Our neighbor has this rock with pretty landscaping around it and the kids always want me to take a picture of them by it.  We pass it as we walk to pick up the kids from school.  Here's another picture of it.  As a side note, this is how Lily usually looks at kid pick up.  Some princess dress and play princess shoes that slow her walk down significantly.

Piece of Cheese and Birkley Clothes

Birkley Clothes

We have a friend that gives Lily her little girl's clothes.  Lily loves these clothes and only wants to wear them and not her other clothes in the mornings. 

Piece of Cheese

Lily had a good amount of combined birthday and Christmas money.  They thing she picked was this "piece of cheese."  She loves it.  It's a flashlight in a rubber thing that kind of looks like cheese.  She'll have a happy life when she's satisfied with less:).

Time

It's been pretty fabulous having time to do my projects.  Whitney is an excellent baby and Lily likes to help me.  On top of that I'm not primary president any more.  Woo hoo!

I love these bed spreads I got but the ribbon embroidery makes it so they get ruined if a kid even sits on them.  Recently they haven't even been on the beds. I got shear material and covered the parts of the bedspread that have that ribbon embroidery and now the bed spreads are out again.  Yea!

Another overly meticulous thing I did was lengthen my this bed's bed skirt and lined it.  We added food storage under the bed, which made the skirt to short, and it's always been too see through.  I get a big kick out of doing little stuff like this.  

First Loose Tooth

Lincoln finally lost his first tooth in January.  Lily helped him out by hitting his mouth.  That seems to be the trend for how we lose teeth in this family.