July

July was full- mostly of swimming! Also, a few of my kids discovered that if they put goggles on before I spray them in sunscreen then none gets in their eyes and everyone is happier. 

We had our 14th wedding anniversary and this was the only picture I got of the day! This little daddy-daughter nap was darling though!

Hudson had a really great day with his BFF Richie. They had an old TV waiting to go to the dump and asked his mom if they could take it apart. If you know Hudson, you can imagine this was heaven to him! We still have part of the circuit board down in his room. This kid loves technology and most of the conversations this summer have been his *long* opinions and thoughts about all kinds of technology and things he’d like to invent. 

My girly-girl likes to always have a purse with her when she leaves the house. Even if it’s just to the back yard.

The FDA officially approved the Covid vaccine for kids older than 6 months, which means they unblinded the study Lila and Davis are in. Davis was already unblinded when he turned 5, so we knew he’d gotten the real shot. Lila was then unblinded and we found out she got placebo. I wasn’t too surprised, since she had zero reaction to the shot whatsoever, I had been suspecting this news. That meant that we could either pull her from the study, or keep her in and get her the real Moderna shot. I opted to keep her in, so we were back at the doctors office this particular day for her real shot. She knows the drill now, poor thing has had so many shots this past year! She was nervous, but she kept talking about how it all works and how she’d get a sucker after. She was a champ and only cried for a minute and held so still for the shot. Also, she had no reaction at all to the real shot either!

The deck- oh the deck. This thing has taken over so much of our summer! When we moved in we knew we needed to do major work to the existing deck which was so old and rickety. After living her for a bit we quickly decided it wasn’t worth repairing and would need a full reconstruction. And then life got in the way and the expense and effort put this on the back burner year after year until this year we finally committed! 

My parents generously gifted us some money to help with the cost and we saved up a bunch and finally we were ready to pull the trigger. Ben hired someone he knew from growing up in Virginia. His name is Nick and he’d done some work for Ben’s parents and had done a good job. Nick was starting a business and Ben wanted to help him out. So we did. Ben demoed our old deck mid-April with Nick supposedly starting our building late April/early May. That ended up getting pushed to mid-May before Nick actually started and immediately it became clear that things were going SLOW. His initial time table of “2 weeks” came and went with almost nothing done. Then his helper quit on him, so Ben volunteered to help out to discount the price a little.

It’s been the slowest process, especially since our builder would frequently go a whole week or more between actually coming to work, working for a few hours and then not showing up at all for another week. I was super frustrated. Ben stayed really calm and continued to work on it whenever he could. Almost every free moment was spent out there working. To be fair, Nick did a lot of the initial framing that Ben was very nervous to do on his own, so we were thankful for that. But it turned into “Nick helping Ben build the deck sometimes” instead of “Nick building the deck because we hired him”. You can tell, I’m still pretty frustrated about this.

We got the project about 80% done when Nick pretty much quit. He said he was too overwhelmed to finish the project. So then it was mostly up to me and Ben to finish it up. Between a lot of YouTube tutorials, a lot of thinking and trying to figure stuff out, a few phone calls to others who might be able to lend some expertise, by the end of July we finally have a totally finished deck! And it turned out beautiful. And now we can kind of laugh at the hilarious (read frustrating) moments we had, like when Ben and I were trying to cut railings at 10 pm in the dark and totally ruined the railing and had to buy more. Or how I helped Ben build the stairs for hours in the hot sun in a dress (because I just came out to help for a minute and ended up staying for hours). Ben learned a lot about construction through the process and kind of enjoyed doing it. I enjoyed mostly none of it, but we did save thousands of dollars compared to what the more experienced deck companies quoted. 

 

Evenings while working on the deck- Lila usually wanted to be out there with us. She’d clap her little hands and cheer for us when we finally got something put in correctly which was adorable. I went to check on Hudson and Davis one night because we hadn’t heard them for awhile and I found them in the driveway, spinning their bike wheels like crazy, running a bike shop apparently!

We rarely visit splash pads, but we did this one time and for about forty minutes it was a blast!

On the last day of July, we celebrated Harry’s birthday. Chase went through our entire Harry Potter cookbook and marked a bunch of recipes and we made them all together. We had my mom and dad and Nate and Halie down for dinner and watched the 5th movie together. It was a fun day!