Oh, hi! 🙂 I know, I’ve been a little absent lately. Lots has been going on in our house, lots of changes, not a lot of house progress though 🙂

First off, last week I didn’t post at all, but about two weeks before that I didn’t post at all either. What were we up to? Oh, we just went to Alaska

And it was AWESOME! Chris and I are finally trying to take family advice and give ourselves a little bit of a break every once in a while. We went on a long weekend vacation to Las Vegas last year when I was about 8 1/2 months pregnant, but before that it had been at least a couple of years since we took a REAL vacation. And since we didn’t do much when I turned the big 3-0, we decided to take an Alaskan cruise as a belated birthday present to me. WITH NO KIDS. Oh my god. 8 days with no kids. Our family is amazing for letting us go on that vacation. Seriously, beyond lucky. Don’t worry, that doesn’t get past me.

I’m hoping to write a post about it for later this week because we got to do some awesome things.

What else, what else?

Well, the house is painted! But it’s not done. I’ve really waffled back and forth about when to reveal it to you. But I REALLY want to have the new front door because the house looks awesome and the front door still sucks. It’s just not as exciting. I want to have that POP to show you. So I sit here patiently waiting till we get the call from the hardware store that our door has arrived. And then we can install and paint it. SO EXCITING!

Want to see the front door hardware we got though?

It’s the Baldwin Seattle with a knob instead of lever (so many more contemporary levers out there, but I love knobs).

Then we’ve got to plant the succulents in the front, hang lights (which were on back order that they never told me about) and generally gussy things up.

I also convinced Chris that we should build a playhouse for the girls. Woo-hoo!

Not like there’s not enough on our plate at the moment 🙂 But I have a hard time paying for something we can do ourselves. Especially when buying a good, wooden one costs a kind of hefty price tag. I tried to design it in a way that we can construct it FAIRLY easily. Chris finally came on board, yay! 🙂 But of course figuring out where to put it in the backyard made us walk the yard and sort of make a master plan for things. So that’s exciting. We will of course not put any of the plans – besides the playhouse – into play for a while, but it’s exciting to have an idea of how we want to lay things out.

And speaking of the backyard….we cleared the SHIT out of the front yard and backyard. Well, I lied, we didn’t do it because, GASP, we paid someone to do it. The yard was a fucking hot mess, there was overgrown shit everywhere, there was poison oak (which I am incredibly allergic to) and there was a lot of green waste to get rid of. We got a good quote from a landscaper and decided to bite the bullet and just have them clear everything out. Let me tell you, it’s made me want to landscape the shit out of everything because there’s a much cleaner slate that is just begging for someone to make it pretty.

Work life has gone a little crazy, which has resulted in a lot of changes. In the last 3 months Merritt has had a bit of a whirlwind of change. She’s a pretty laid back baby, so we’re lucky about that. And all the change has happened with Zoe with her, and she loves her sister more than anything, so that helps a lot

About 4 months ago work was getting much busier for me and I was no longer able to just get my work done during nap time and with Merritt in tow. I have really liked taking both my kiddos around with me just about 100% of the time their first year of life. They have gone to meet clients, gone with me to showrooms and had site visits. I’ve tried to get my computer work done while they were napping. It worked for a while with both kids. But around that year mark I start to get a little crazy. And our business has started getting busier and my brother has started getting VERY busy. I’ve still got all his admin and bookkeeping work, and now he has purchased two properties that Chris and I are rehabbing. There’s still this one

We’re in the middle of planning the interior – getting drawings made, working on the scope of projects and putting together a budget. It’s turning out to be a fairly large project. Which is exciting, but time consuming. And the facade is about to start to be restored. That has been an adventure as well. I’ve never worked on restoring a facade so it’s been a big learning curve working with the restoration department of the SF Department of Building Inspection.

Not only that project, but Adam purchased another

Oh, sorry, is the tree in your way? 🙂

This project will not be as invasive (the facade will not be restored for example), but the interior will probably not be as large of a transformation as well.

But anyway, that was the HUGELY roundabout way of saying why Merritt has had such a big 4 months. 4 months ago my friend was coming 2 days a week between her morning and afternoon nap while Zoe was at day care so that I could have a larger chunk of time to get work done because I was feeling super stressed out. Then she made the switch to one nap at about 11 months. Once she had fully committed (sometimes she still gets tired, but she will just NOT take that morning nap) we stuck to the schedule for about a month, made sure she was good with it and then she started going one day a week to my dad and Wendy’s with Zoe. That went well, so then it was time to put her in day care. It was hard for me to pull the cord and have her away 3 days a wee- just like with Zoe it was hard. Here she is on her first day

But soon work got crazier (Adam bought the additional property for us to rehab) and he gave me an ultimatum – he wanted to give me more work because he and I feel comfortable working together and I think do a really good job, but that things were starting to get busier and busier, so he wanted me to put the kids in day care another day a week so that I could really commit to working more full time. I had to really think about what I wanted to do. It’s really important for me to get to hang out with my kids. I want to be with them and have time with just us. But I also get a lot of joy out of working. And both are incredibly important to me. I agreed with Adam – in order for me to be a better mom, having them in day care 3 days a week and at my dad and Wendy’s 1 day a week for 4 days total a week would be better: I would actually have the proper amount of time to get all my work for my brother done and all my work for our business done (and Chris has started doing more work for Adam as well). I would not feel so much like I was running around like a chicken with my head cut off because I was so stressed out that I was running out of time. And most importantly, on the day during the week that I do have the kiddos, I am actually going to be able to be a most present mom – no phone around, no stress about an email I can get off in the 4 minutes they’re occupied – we can just have FUN.

It was a necessary change for the kind of mom I want to be: a working mom who has a career of her own, but also has some quality time caring for her kiddos and making memories during the week while they’re at this young, formative age.

Phew!

So that’s the “quick” summary of what’s been going on around here. Of course I’ll write bigger posts about the goings on (I can’t wait to share about the facade design!), but I felt like I had neglected you wonderful folks, so I needed to stop and take a second and share what’s been going on. So hello again! 🙂