Boy or Girl?!?

We had our 20 week ultrasound for baby #2 a week ago this past Tuesday.  Everything looked good and they estimated that the baby weighs about 10 oz!  We also decided to find out if we are having a boy or a girl!  I really wanted to find out so that we could pick out a name and see if I needed to find any little girl clothes since all we have are boy clothes!  I'm too much of a planner and organizer to wait until the baby is born to figure those things out. :)

So....here it is...Kyler is going to have a baby...

 SISTER!!!!  Yay!!  We are so excited and most of all thankful that everything looks healthy!  We are now trying to pick out a name...which won't be revealed until she is born.  I feel like picking out a name for a girl is a lot harder than it was to pick out a boys name.  I don't know if I said this but Kyler's baby sister is due on February 5th, 2011.

17 Months Already!

Kyler turned 17 months old on the 12th of September!  It's hard to believe in less than a month he will be  1 1/2 years old!  Here are some things about Kyler this month:

*He LOVES to carry stick-like objects around with him.  Whether it's a stick from outside, a straw, a wooden spoon, etc., he usually has one with him at all times.  For example, on the way back from Minnesota over Labor Day, we stopped at Culver's to eat and got a shake.  Well those shakes come with those long plastic blue spoons, which Kyler saw and wanted...and guess what?  He is still carrying that spoon around the house with him today!  Yes, it gets washed daily as it usually ends up at a meal with him or outside in the dirt, but if you take it from him, he might freak out...

*He has 12 teeth!  Four of those are molars, the other eight are his front ones.  We can see his "i-teeth" starting to come up and a couple are almost poked through.

*Kyler really likes playing outside.  He will bring you his shoes throughout the day if we are inside so he can wear them in the house.  I think this really means that he wants to go outside, but if it's raining or about nap time, he just wears his shoes around the house and enjoys that. :)

*Books, books, and more books!  Kyler is really into reading books right now.  If you are sitting on the floor or in a chair he will usually go get a book and bring it to you to read.  He also likes to read the same book over and over again.  When  you get finished reading the book he turns the pages back to the beginning so you will start reading again.

*Talking...Kyler still doesn't really say any words to tell us what he wants.  He babbles a lot during the day and you will look at him and say "oh yeah?" or make a comment like you're having a real conversation, but have no idea what he's saying. :)  I'm hoping he will start using some real words soon though, I'm tired of him pointing and saying "uhhhh" at different things and guessing what he wants. :)

*Pounding is Kyler's favorite thing to do.  It is usually with one of his stick-like objects that he is carrying around, thus, you have to be really careful with what stick-like object he has.  

First big goose egg!  Kyler was in the bathroom and I heard a "boom" which I really didn't think anything of because he falls over lots of times during the day.  But this was followed by a loud scream, so I went in and picked him up and consoled him.  After about 5 min of consoling, I looked at his face and saw this HUGE bump, so I ran to get a bag of peas from the freezer to put on his head...that didn't go over too well... :)  I think when he fell he hit his head on the cupboard in the bathroom.

 

Bath time in the sink in Minnesota!

Playing in the sand at the lake

Playing with his buddy Ayden!  

A mouth full of banana! :)

Bubble mustache!!

Labor Day at the Lake

The Sunday the weekend before Labor Day (Aug. 29th) we headed back up to my parent's cabin in northern Minnesota. This time though, my parents weren't there, and instead, the Reisetter family came with! The Reisetters came up on Sunday the 29th, and stayed all week, then headed home on Friday before Labor Day. Also on Friday, my parents and brother came up for Labor Day weekend to close up the cabin. We stayed all week and through Labor Day and then headed home on Tuesday after Labor Day, so we were gone about a week and a half! It was a nice break to get away and enjoy the end of the summer up at the lake.

We had pretty nice weather while we were at the lake. The first day we were there, the temps were in the 90s. Then the next couple days the temps were in the 70s and 80s. Thursday it was about 70 and raining. Also, by the end of the week, the lows were in the 40s! We almost had to turn on the heat! :) We had a great time with the Reisetter family. We hung out on the beach the first day and Mason and Matt rode in the tube. The next couple days, Matt, Mason, Erik, and Jillian went fishing several times a day. I don't think they caught a whole lot, at least nothing that they kept. Wednesday was so nice, the lake was really calm, and so Mason went in the tube by himself, he had a great time! Kyler, Jillian, and I had a great time riding in the boat while we watched Mason tube. On Thursday we decided to go up to Itasca State Park, which is about 30 min away. This is where the Mississippi River begins, so we went and walked across the start of the Mississippi! We were there about 10 minutes, then it started pouring rain, so we went and looked at the gift shop and had awesome malts in the lodge. The Reisetters headed home on Friday. It was sad to see them go, Kyler didn't know what to do without his friends there! Hopefully we'll get to do this again, we all had a great time together!

My parents got there late Friday night, so we just spent the day hanging out, it was too cool and windy to be out on the lake. Saturday and Sunday we just hung out and did various projects around the cabin. Sunday night we went out to eat to celebrate Erik's birthday at the Ranch House. While we were there, our waitress saw a bear in the yard while she was taking our order! We kept watching for it all throughout dinner, but never saw it again. Then on Labor Day we had our annual "breakfast at the pot" at the neighbor's cabin. As soon as breakfast was over though, it was time to go to work! Erik helped my parents and brother take out both boats, take out the dock and put stuff away for the winter. It was kind of sad to see the beach so empty and everything put away, but we will look forward to next summer! Here are some pictures from our week!

Kyler, Jillian, and I on the boat!

Matt and Mason in the tube!

Erik with Mason and Jillian on the paddle boat

Double point with sticks! :)

Erik hanging out with all the kids :)

Matt and Mason in the kayak

Our family in the beginning of the Mississippi River!

Kyler eating dinner with his bat...

Thinking about going in the lake...

And we're in!

I don't want my picture taken in this chair!

One of the better picts I got of our man on the move!

A beautiful night on the lake

Our Family!

Our family with my parents and brother

Two Smaller House Projects

When we decided to redo our siding last fall, we also decided to build new front steps. We had already replaced a couple of the boards because they were so rotted, so we thought since we were doing the siding, we might as well do the steps too...(one thing ALWAYS leads to another with house projects right? :) Plus, we wanted to make the landing part as wide as the front of our house, so we needed to put up a new board and put siding around that. Well, it got too cold last fall for Erik to finish the front steps, so we had to wait through the winter, and he finished them this summer! They look so nice and really complete the front of our house!!

Our other project we did this summer was get a new screen door. Our other one was one of those really cheap ones and water had gotten inside of it causing it to expand and flake off. I wouldn't even leave the inside door open because Kyler would go up to the spots on the screen door and rub them so all the stuff would flake off inside the house....yuck! :) So I finally had Erik just take it off, and then we got a new one, which I love! It has glass on the whole thing and a screen that rolls away from the top down. Kyler loves to go and look out the door at all the things that are outside!

Working on the trusses.

Time for the deck boards!

Steps done! (This is about all the farther Erik got last fall)

Our finished front steps with railing and our new screen door!

This is what the front of our house looked like when we bought it...

This is what it looks like now! We still have to paint the trim on the windows white, but that might have to wait until next summer...ahhh, it's never ending isn't it?!? :)

Two Big Summer Projects

There were two big projects we had to get done this summer. One was re-siding the north side of our house. If you remember back to this post last fall, we put new, vinyl siding on our house ourselves. Well, a couple weeks after we had finished, we went out to look at in and noticed a ripple on one of the "laps" of our siding, it looked like someone had taken a candle or something hot and drug it along the one lap and melted it. We couldn't figure out what it was. So we kept watching and going out to see if we could figure out what it was. The funny thing was this "melting" kept moving up the side of the house, so as the weeks went on, it wasn't just one lap that was melted it was two, then three, and on and on. Needless to say, we weren't happy. We kept going inside and feeling the wall thinking maybe some wire or something was on fire in the wall, but nothing on the inside ever was hot. We finally went out at the right time and noticed these four beams of light on the side of the house (see photo below). Erik would try and touch it and it was so hot that he couldn't even keep his hand there. So, we assumed that those were the cause of the melting. But where were they coming from? Well, you see, in the fall, as the sun gets lower in the sky, we believe that it was reflecting off of our neighbor's second story window and on to our siding. The lower the sun got, the smaller the angle and thus why it was moving up the side of the wall. As the sun got higher in the sky with spring and then summer, the beams of light disappeared and no melting was occurring. In fact, we haven't even seen them yet this summer/fall. So what do you do? Well, obviously you can't put new vinyl siding up because it would happen again. So we decided to replace it with fiber cement siding...hopefully the sun won't melt cement...we will see in the next couple of months! :) Fiber cement comes in individual pieces that are primed and then you paint it when you are done. The paint is to last the life of the siding. Did I mention when we called the siding company they said that they wouldn't do anything about it and don't guarantee their product against anything that has to do with the sun? Real quality product we've got here... :) Anyways, we are so thankful that we instead had a hail storm and got hail damage on where else, but the north side of our house!! So we were able to get insurance money from the hail storm and use that to replace the siding!! Yay!!! Anyways, here are some photos from project number 1! :)

The beams of light...

The melted siding...

Melted siding all gone!

Cement board going up!

Erik and my AWESOME Uncle Nick who came back to help us fix this side.

All done!! Just needs paint...

Painted and finished!! Can you even tell it's not the same stuff?

Project #2, tearing down the garage!! If you also remember from that house post last fall, the same letter we got from the city telling us we had to scrape and re-paint or re-side our house also said that we had to re-roof and scrape and re-paint or re-side our garage too! Well, our garage was not worth putting the money that it would cost for a new roof and new siding. So, we decided to tear it down and be without garage for right now. We didn't keep a car in there, all we were using for was storage. So we tore it down with the help of our wonderful neighbors, the Nielsen's, and Erik's parents and sister and my brother one Saturday at the end of July. We started at 9:00 am tearing off the siding and anything that was "in the way" inside. They then started swinging at the sides and pushing and by noon, the roof was on our back patio! We took a break for lunch and then after lunch they cut up the roof, cleaned up, hauled everything away, and we were all done by 3:00 that afternoon! Talk about efficient! Then a week or so later we got a metal shed kit and Erik put it together and that's where we are storing the things that were in the garage. The foundation of the garage is in good shape, so we just put the shed up where the garage was. Here are some pictures of the demolition!

Our poor garage...

All ready for demo!

Taking off the siding!

Janet and Ben swinging away! (Did I mention we had AWESOME help!?)

All the sides are gone!

Roof is down! Ben and Erik savoring their victory :)

Roof flattened!

All gone!

Iowa State Fair

So, I really need to do some updating on our blog! In August, we took a day and headed down to the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines. It was one of those days that was really hot, probably about 90 degrees, but we managed pretty well! On the way down we stopped in Dows to visit Erik's grandpa and grandma. We hadn't seen them since Kyler's birthday in April, so it was nice to stop and say hi to them. Kyler was a bit shy while we were there and it was right during his morning nap, so he was tired too, but once we got in the car to head to the fair he was out the whole rest of the way.

When we got to the fair we stopped and had lunch first at the Iowa Pork Producer's tent, which is always really good. Then we headed to the DNR building to look at the fish. After the fish, we went and found Matt Reisetter who was working a booth under the Grandstand. Reisetter then went with us over to see the horses and to show us the new horse pavilion building that was just built and air conditioned! We hung out in there for a while and watched the horses trot to different types of music, it was really cool. After the horses, Reisetter went back to his booth, and we headed over to the sheep, pigs, and cows. Kyler wasn't quite sure what to think of all those four-legged things making weird noises at him. :) We then went to the Varied Industries Building to get out of the heat and see all the booths there. After we cooled off, we went to look at the birthing building and the photography. By then, it was time for dinner, so we ate at the Cattleman's Quarter's, which was also really good. I had a hot beef Sunday, which I would definitely have again next year! After dinner, it was about 6:00, so we decided to head home.

We had a great time at the fair and Kyler loved seeing all the animals. We hadn't been for a couple of years, so it was fun to go back and take our little guy. We will definitely be going back next year, I'm sure he will enjoy it even more!

Checking out the BIG bull

"Look Dad, there's a BIG bull!!"

Petting the horse with Dad and Reisetter

"Ooooooh, horsey..."

I'm not so sure about those sheep...

"Hmmmm, those are interesting creatures..."

Out before we were even out of Des Moines! He didn't nap at all at the fair, just the way down and home. :)

This is a little "blast from the past" of the last time we were at the fair, which was 2007. Think all three of these families look a little different now?!? :)