And wildlife.

Okay, here is Berry's nativity scene, as promised in my last post... the chicken is lower left, the "stunk" is lower middle and the squirrels are those non-descript little striped things at lower right. She was unhappy with Joseph's nose so she scribbled it out. She was very upset that Mary turned out "messed up and scribblish" so she made all kinds of angry little extraneous additions. It appears, too, that Mary has a cape (the blue thing that looks like a mohawk is a cape) and a level of anatomical detail that might displease some Sunday School teachers. I am tickled.

Away in a manger...

Berry has just drawn a nativity scene. Gathered around the Baby Jesus are a chicken, a squirrel and "a stunk".

A stunk is a skunk.

This is pretty much my favourite thing ever.



{When I can sneak it away from her to take a picture, I'll post the photo here.}

Excuse me???

I've just discovered Man-man standing on a chair at my Mac, tracking Amazon orders, playing a little Owl City on iTunes, and "ironing" a dollar bill with my mouse.


{*A technical note: this photo is from four months ago. Back then he was just reading the Washington Post. Nothing fancy. He's since learned to multi-task.}

I have confidence in, confidence in meeeee...

Berry (who, as a reminder, is four) was sitting at the table just now singing – actually kind of bellowing – "I AM SIXTEEN GOING ON SEVENTEEN" for the 86th time and I couldn't hear myself think and in frustration I started, "You are so––" and in my split-second pause to think of a non-destructive term, she supplied: "––amazing?"

Okay.


. . .

Oh boy

"I fell."

My 20-month-old says this about 70 times per day, and he's always right.

***


"I fell." My 20-month-old says this about 70 times per day, and he's always right."I fell." My 20-month-old says this about 70 times per day, and he's always right.

Oh look!

You know I was complaining I had no photos that showed the really sad "before" state of our kitchen when we moved in? Well, I found them!

Before Part 1 (and please appreciate the true awfulness of the suspended microwave):


After:


Before Part 2 (featuring a tiny Berry in flight):


And after:


Yay!

...and After!!

At last, the new kitchen!!!! New granite benchtops, super-deep under-counter sink, travertine wall tiles, removal of ugly wallpaper, paint in latte tones, spiffy pull-out Moen tap (faucet, Americans), Bosch cooktop and oven. I haven't even figured out the 800-odd features of the last two, but I gather it's something along the lines of: if I leave them unattended I might come home to find they've baked me a layer cake and set the table for dinner.

A little reminder of what it looked like before:

That's the old stove where 9 meant hot, 6 meant tepid and 1 meant nuclear. And that code varied between hotplates, just to add to the sense of cooking "adventure". I don't miss it at all.

And here are more after pictures {if you click on the images, they'll show up larger}:

The kitchen already had custom-built hardwood cabinets, so we left them completely alone. But everything else – brand spanking.

Here's the view from my sunny office through to the kitchen:

And here's a gratuitous close-up of my favourite tea towels in the whole world – "Borrowed Spoons" from the super-talented Heather of Skinny laMinx:

After almost two months of kitchen chaos, I am one happy, happy girl...

The kitchen: before, and progress

I wish I had a "proper" before shot of our kitchen, because it didn't look like this when we moved in two years ago.

Where the brushed stainless range hood is, lived a breathtakingly hideous and huge black microwave oven (yes, suspended above the stove and incorporating a range hood... of sorts...)

We tossed it the first month we lived here, along with the sad old black dishwasher, which made upsetting noises. So in fact, the "before" picture above is much better than what we saw when we moved in.

We've been moaning about the wretched wallpaper in our kitchen ever since we bought the house. Textured cream with marbled beige and gold through it. Ew.

What we didn't realise was that there was worse underneath. Behold....

And we had no idea there was even worse under that! Gasp:

We (and our neighbours Tom and Deonne, bless them) spent forever removing three awful and poorly-applied layers of wallpaper, only to discover that the villains who whacked up the very first layer hadn't bothered to use liner paper underneath. So.... hours and hours more, just to render the walls paintable.

Here are a couple of the contractors working on the kitchen:

Here's one of the stages that made me think, Oh my...

Below, Tom and Nathan sanding back the wreckage on the walls. Sanding, sanding, sanding...

Little Man-show, who became obsessed with letting us know what needed to be vacuumed...

Below, another stage where I thought, Oh my... (although you can see the top of the lovely new Bosch oven, beneath the tiler's chaos!)

The beginning of the tiles going up:

Some more of the tile, early stages, and a glimpse of the granite benchtops under a fair bit of debris:

And that's where I'm leaving it for now! Because I don't have an after photo yet, even though there is an After.

In a day or two, I promise...!

Happy (belated) Australia Day

Driving home from preschool, Berry says from the back seat, "Mommy, PLEASE. Please tell me you're not Australian. Please."

Why do I get the feeling this whole national/cultural identity thing might get tricky for us?


{Australia Day was the 26th and I forgot to mention it here. How very unAustralian of me. I did, however, follow up with a pavlova. Evidence above.}

***

Cloud nine

Last night (after weeks of claiming she can't sleep properly because "my bed just hates me") Berry got a thick new pillow-topper pad on her mattress.

This morning – after sleeping right through the night – she came to me and said, "Do you know what I slept like? Just like a princess AND a angel AND a fairy! I was just so cuddleish."


***