And she walks!

18 months and 1 day.  That's a long time to wait.  But last night, whilst visiting our neighbors and good friends up the street, Simone decided to start walking!
Of course, who has a camera on them when talking a family walk up the street, just in case "the baby" takes her first steps?  Not I!  But here are the photos from this morning, as she continued to work on her mad skills.

Kitchen Remodel- Day 25

25 days of construction on our house.  16 days since I have had a kitchen.  Some days I am in awe that we are living through it so well and that time is flying by.  Other days I want to lay on the floor and kick and scream until I get my kitchen back.  Finally, there are the days when I think about all that still has to be done to be "finished" and I start to hyperventilate.  It is overwhelming, but the beautiful thing about letting others do the work is that I can just walk away from it and come home to see the progress.  Having the kids and work as my distraction is a good thing.
I have spent many days running around town, finding places to hang out with the kids and places to let them nap (LOTS of time at grandparents' houses).  We've been blessed by food and beds at our parents' houses numerous times.  We did a picnic at Lake Harriet one evening.  We've dined out plenty of times thus far.  And I've found that Kowalski's has the best salads for when I need to grab something to bring into work.  We've used our makeshift kitchen (i.e. the laundry room and Charlie's workbench) to an extent, but what we didn't count on was the sheer amount of debris falling from the kitchen, through the cracks, and into my rack of drying dishes on top of the washing machine.  Ew.  And a rodent made it in during the remodel and somehow, seeing that critter running through the laundry room makes me a little less excited to eat/prep food in that space.  (Of note, we think it got back outside again, as we've seen no other evidence of it) Thus far, we've made it work.  It's getting old, but we're too far in to turn back now.  And so we press on, as there is no other way to go!

The "bump out" 

And you know what we found underneath that ugly yellow siding that we've always hated?  Beautiful original cedar siding (the white siding in this photo).  And now we will be ripping off all of the yellow siding and painting the cedar siding.  (In all of our spare time, of course!)

Last night in the old kitchen (sob)

Last batch of chocolate chip cookies in the old gal.  That was our specialty together.  Something about that oven produced the most amazing cookies (and a lot of disasters with other foods!)

After the first demo day (will post later about the amazing "relics" found when the layers were peeled back)

And after a few more days of demo- gone is the wall!  The kitchen and dining room are now one large open space.  Laila got a kick out of walking through the space that used to be the wall.