J and AHG continue to grow up faster than the blink of an eye. AHG is on the verge of crawling at high speed. She can't quite crawl yet, she just gets up on her hands and knees and rocks back and forth. This does manage to somehow get her across the room without you noticing, but it isn't very efficient. She is very excited about the new things she can get to and explore, I hope she isn't a climber and we don't find her somehow on top of the curtain rod one day.
Here are some pictures of AHG sitting in her high chair playing with toys as I make lunch.
J is also growing up faster than I can keep track of. Like typical parents, we have lots of photos from when she was littler, but now that there are two and they have picked up speed, we don't take as many photos. This is a photo I took of J while we were eating lunch on the day she had to stay home from school due to a small fever. As you can tell from the photo, the fever didn't keep her down for long, she was feeling better after a few hours.
AHG and J are great sisters, J is very patient and AHG just adores her big sister as you can tell by the first two photos of Rebecca and the girls. We were hanging out in our home office playing with the toys we store there.
One of Rebecca's generous co-workers has been very kind to pass down toys that his daughter has outgrown. He gave us this oven that J is standing next to, and a matching fridge. Doesn't J look like a appliance spokesmodel here, pointing out the finer features of her new stove?
Speaking of new stoves, we now have an induction range. I don't have a picture of it, but will post one later.
Our poodle, Lance, has gone on to doggie heaven after many happy years. I am planning on collecting up a bunch of photos of Lance and posting them as a blog entry celebrating his life. Our black lab, Ruby, has really become great friends with AHG, hanging out under her high chair. AHG thinks it is really, really fun to give Ruby the Kix from the table on her highchair.
Now that AHG is getting a little older (i.e. sleeping through the night) and we are starting to have a little more energy, Rebecca and I are starting to discuss future plans for the house and garage. The first step will probably be to rebuild the falling down garage in our backyard. To help visualize what a new, bigger garage would look like, I built a cardboard model. Here is the current garage and house, which has about 20 feet between the back of the house and the front of the garage. Also, the garage is only 12' tall at its highest point.
This shows the current house with one idea for a new garage. The garage would be 15' tall to provide more storage and would be a little bit wider and deeper in order to fit a car bigger than a Miata. Unfortunately, by having the front of the garage closer to the back of the house, it makes it harder to make the joggle needed to go from the driveway along the side of the house to lining up to enter the garage door. Also, the higher garage will create more shadows in the backyard.
The current best plan for adding on to the house is to remove the single story section on the back of the house that used to be a porch but is now a laundry and bathroom, and add more length to the back of the house and make it two stories. To fake this with the model I had, I just moved the two story part of my model back to where the new back of the house would be. When this is combined with the new garage that is deeper, it makes it even harder to make the transition from the driveway on the side of the house to the garage, and even more of the backyard disappears. I am going back to the drawing board to see if maybe the garage could be moved in the backyard somewhere, or the new addition to the house could be a different layout.
