My Emeralds

Another day of kitchen demolition, another day of dirty diapers, yardwork, a loose dog, crazy kids, dusty floors, piles of junk, and blessings upon blessings.

I went over to my mom's tonight to drop off some artwork (and my dirty laundry, but artwork sounds so cultured, and laundry sounds, well, stinky), and while we were there, the girls got on the topic of birthdays, and that led to birthstones, which led to who in our family "gets" whichever birthstone. April's stone is the diamond, May is the emerald (woot, woot, give it up for the emerald, y'all!), and November is citrine.

Mom got out some of her jewels, which the girls oohed and aahed over, then my mom read through the meaning of each stone, or the supposed dominant trait of the person born in that month. The month of April is virtue, September is clarity, December is strength, and May is wealth. So my month is wealth. Great, so I'm a greedy person, I can never have enough money; what does this mean? Not that birthstone traits are the be all and end all of deciding who I am, but still. So, my dad immediately gestured to the girls and said, "See your wealth?" And he was so right.

What a blessed girl I am. Even on a day of demolition and mayhem, the wealth stares me in the face.

I looked back at the pictures from today, and thought about every moment a little differently.

Our twins are goofy. The boy-girl element is always fun to observe. And that's usually what I do, observe, and try not to get involved too much, it's too entertaining. J.D. is SUCH a boy, and G is SUCH a girl.

J.D. likes to wield things that look like swords, in this case, a bright yellow noodle will have to suffice. G will have none of this, so she pushes it away and heads for the cottage.

The chase is on! Actually, they're both just walking, because they are hot and tired, but J.D. is still chasing her, and she knows it. They've just agreed they're both not going to go all out. All he wants is to whack her on the head. Is that so wrong?

She made it to the cottage. Now they play a hilarious game like at the fair when those little toy gophers jump out of the hole, and you try to hit them with a bat. She sticks her head out one window, and he tries to swat her, but she just pokes her head back in, and fakes him out. This goes on for a good 15 minutes.

Then J.D. gives up and goes into the age-old game of trying to imitate Dad. I mean, this IS how Dad wears his helmet.

Then, because of the HUGE amount of waste created by this kitchen demo, a new dumpster was dropped off today. Since I've always been interested in how they do this since those things look so darn heavy, I took about a thousand pictures. I only show a few here, but the whole thing was pretty awesome. And no, I don't get out much.

See, Cubby gets it.

Then it rolls down slowly off the ramp and plops into our yard.

The girls love it.

The lawn doesn't.

Have I mentioned that we decided to remodel our garage at the same time as our kitchen? Yeah, we thought it would be pretty cool to totally change our two most heavily used, heavily loaded with junk rooms on our property at the exact same time. Pretty sweet, right?!

Men at work!

Here's an example of a neat and tidy pile of things we removed from the garage.

Bet you'd never heard of "modle airplanes" before. They're quite rare.

This was one of the cutest things. Danny and I were busy moving furniture, and we walked in to the family room to find E sitting smack dab in the middle of the couch, glued to the Olympic couples' figure skating. That a girl, E!

Pretty adorable.

Dinner at our house. All paper and plastic. No dishes being done over here because....

our sink took the long, long road to the dump.

Here's a before picture of our dining room. And, no that's not an outline of a future window, we just thought it looked cool. Just kidding.

Bye dining room.

Hello, more square footage.

We are lucky enough to have a really smart, able contractor working for us right now, who also really likes our kids. And our kids really like him. So we invited him in for lunch occasionally. It's a good time for all.

Ok, this totally makes sense to them.

Meanwhile, J.D., always interested in what Dad is doing, helped push the fridge into place. Should I mention that Luke, G, and I were enjoying our lunch at this moment? They clearly had it all under control.

"Dad, why do I feel like I'm doing all the work?"