Halloween and Seventeen Months

Here we are again at the end of the month finally posting a blog :)  Happy Halloween, everyone!  The cutest little ladybug lives at our house, although we didn't make it safely to Halloween without an incident.  On Saturday Grace was carrying a toy and tripped over another one on the floor and fell face-first onto the lip of her bucket, scraping both her eyes and leaving some road-rash on the side of her face.  I'm just glad that she didn't end up with a black eye (it was pretty puffed up Sunday morning) and that the bucket didn't crack and cut her. 

Grace has started doing so many new things in the last month.  It's so fun to play with her and interact with her - she's already showing a great imagination and she LOVES reading books together.  She'll crawl in your lap and read book after book after book.  One of the books she likes teaches sign language so she now signs for milk and dog.  It just amazes me how quickly she can pick up on things and how much she learns when we don't even realize we're teaching her things (it definitely makes me more careful of the things I say and do around her!).  The other day she was playing with her toy kitchen and she pulled the lid off one of the pots and shook the salt shaker over the pot just like she was really cooking!  She also loves to walk around with the little bowls and spoons and "feed" everyone and her dolls.  She even does an eating sound effect!  I've also started to let her feed herself her oatmeal in the morning and she's getting pretty good at it but gets sick of it after awhile and hands me the spoon back :) 

Grace's first Red Wings game

She's also started saying more words - "uppie" for both up and down, "all done" (which she also says in church when everyone says amen!), "puh-puh" for pumpkin, "uh-oh" and she also fake-cries whenever you say baby - it's pretty hilarious. 

Let's see, what else...she has started dancing - she's really good at the twist :)  She also comes in and waves to the toilet whenever you flush it (my days of going to the bathroom with the door shut are long gone unless I want to listen to her throw a fit) and she also waves bye-bye to the water in the tub as it's draining.  She "counts" her fingers by touching each one and saying "dah" as she touches them - this was another one of those surprise things that she just started randomly doing one day.  She is also getting really good at stacking blocks and has stacked at least eight of them at one time.  It's just hard to hold her attention for that long!

I have one more week of cross country practice and then I will finally have my afternoons back!  Next Saturday is the state meet at MIS and I had one guy and one girl qualify for the state meet as individuals.  The regional meet was this past Saturday at Lake Erie Metropark pretty much where the Detroit River and Lake Erie meet and it was a total mud-fest.  The kids' backs were covered in mud from their shoulders to their feet by the time they finished the race.  It was a pretty disappointing day - we had expected the girls' team to qualify as a team and they came in 4th by three points (the top 3 teams go to state) and the boys' team had a small chance of going and they ended up coming in 8th.  I'm not really sure what went wrong - the course was slow because of the mud but that affected everyone equally.  It really makes me question what I've had the kids do the last few weeks that all these other teams did really well and we didn't.  It's so frustrating - if nothing else, I figure I will be an expert on teenagers by the time Grace is one!

Modeling daddy's alma mater

Modeling mommy's alma mater -
look how much happier she is :)

Jeff and I have been going through roof leak hell the last three weeks.  Back in May we had gotten almost 7 inches of rain in less than 2 days and a few days after this happened we noticed a water stain appear on the ceiling in our dining room.  Jeff went up to the attic and couldn't really see or find anything, so we just attributed it to the crazy amount of rain we had gotten and didn't think anything of it.  We primed and re-painted the area and kind of forgot about it.  Well, over the summer everytime we would have a heavy rain the spot would appear again and get bigger and bigger and actually started growing black mold.  Jeff would always go up in the attic afterward but could never find anything.  We finally had 2 roofers come out in September and they told us there wasn't anything wrong with the roof, but our chimney had a lot of cracks that could let water in, so we had someone come out and rebuild the chimney where it comes out at the roof.  I was a little doubtful this was the real cause because the spot in the ceiling was over 5 feet away from the ceiling but figured the roofing guys would have told us if we needed a new roof.  After we had the chimney fixed we lined up a drywall guy to come out and replace the drywall.  He came out three weeks ago and was here for three days putting up the new drywall and mudding.  He was scheduled to come out two weeks ago to do the knock-down spray (NOT popcorn!) on the ceiling but we noticed a new spot on the drywall over the weekend that looked like water.  When he showed up that day I pointed it out to him and he thought it was water and cut a hole in the brand-new drywall and a ton of water came gushing out.  I was ready to cry at that point because we still had the stupid leak and the drywall work that had been done was all ruined. Jeff went back up in the attic and finally found a spot where the water was coming through between the original roof and where we had added on 3 years ago.  So now we have a roofer who is hopefully going to come out this week and fix that area of the roof and then we can have the drywall guy back out to re-do what he already did.  I just know this all better get done before Thanksgiving because we are having 30 people over and I can't have my house looking like this!!