Vernon Volumes text

Vernon Volumes text

Sunday, July 29, 2012

Pool Progress - Concrete!


This past Friday, the pool guys poured the concrete for the pool. It took four and a half trucks of concrete to get it done and took quite a while. The really tough part of the pool is done at this point, and hopefully the rest won't take too long!




Daytona Beach with the Longs

This weekend we drove down to Daytona Beach for the weekend. On Saturday morning, Andrea thought it'd be fun to go miniature golfing with the kids. 


Connor had a lot of fun, but Paige lost interest in the golfing within the first couple holes. She mostly ran around the golf course, climbing on things and getting herself filthy.



For lunch, we went to Inlet Harbor with the Longs and had a yummy lunch. 


After lunch we went to the beach for a while and then to the pool. The kids all had a really good time and the weather was perfect for it.

Paige took a nap on Mommy.


Gail and Clay relaxed by the pool.


The kids all enjoyed doing "Ninja Warrior" obstacles. They all tried climbing up the steel hand rail. I got a few pictures of Connor looking very determined as he made his way up.



We ate pizza for dinner and then the Longs had to say farewell. Gail asked Paige if she'd like to come home with them and Paige thought she was serious. She grabbed her stuffed animals and her shoes and ran out to the elevator with them. She was very cute about it, and was sad to see them go.


Final Tennis Practice



Connor had his last tennis practice this last week. He's enjoyed it, and it's been fun, but I think we're all happy it's done with for now. It was not super close, and it was always pretty stinking hot out when we took him. He did a good job with it, and improved quite a bit. They mostly did drills and games, and Connor had a lot of fun.




Connor got to be at the front of the tennis ball line game, he was pretty cute about it, definitely enjoyed it.



Paige talking and playing


Paige has been talking up a storm lately. Full sentences and all kinds of vocabulary. It's pretty neat to see. The other night we were doing some story time before bedtime and I decided to take a quick video of her talking to me and playing. She has such a cute personality and it's fun to see it come out. In our story, we were giving the babies drinks and then they were going potty. Paige kept running back and forth from the "Choo Choo" room (the big play room) to get drinks and between one of her trips I took the video below.

Wednesday, July 25, 2012

Connor's Stop-Motion Car movie


Connor's favorite activity is to race his cars around the track and simulate exciting crashes. The only thing that makes this more fun is to pull up videos on Youtube and watch them while he plays. He loves to find videos of the movie "Cars", and recently he came across a bunch of videos that were put together by kids. Some of the videos are pretty simple with a parent filming the child pushing around the cars, but his favorite videos are the ones "without hands" in them moving the cars.

Tonight, during our typical story time, I explained the process of how the videos were made and right away he wanted to do a very complex one. I talked about how hard the process was, and did a very small example and it only made him want to dive right in. I took a few series of pictures and them flipped through them on my phone to show him how it would look.


I was blown away by how quickly he picked it up. He would sometimes move some of the cars more than he should, but he understood the concept and we put together three sequences of pictures. I put them together on the computer. He loved it, but was disappointed there wasn't music, so I added a flashy soundtrack. Also, he LOVES it when someone is talking about the action, it definitely makes it more exciting. I had him do a voiceover and although he repeats the words "Oh Man" about one hundred times, it's pretty cute.

We really enjoyed making the video, and will definitely be doing some more. Next time, I'll probably use a better camera that doesn't lose focus.

Sunday, July 22, 2012

Bingo at the clubhouse


Today, our neighborhood had a Bingo game at the clubhouse. There were quite a few people that attended and it was very family friendly and a great time with the kids. Jenk's Pizza donated a bunch of Pizzas and "Peace Love Bootcamp" (Sonya, the personal trainer that lives in the neighborhood) donated drinks.






The kids had fun, and Connor was very excited to win one of the games and got a Donald Duck book as a prize. Paige was excited about the food and fact that the bingo chips were actually fruit loops. I took a short video, hoping to catch Paige gobbling up the fruit loops, but she did a pretty good job of being sneaky about it.

Paige Potty Pee Pee

This Saturday morning I was downstairs and heard Andrea shrieking for me to come quick, and I could also hear Paige shrieking with laughter. I wasn't sure what kind of crazy emergency was at hand, but I sprinted up the stairs to find Paige sitting on the potty.

Apparently, this Saturday, Andrea got Paige up in the morning and noticed her diaper was still dry. Paige has been sporadically practicing sitting on the potty, but we haven't really had any concerted effort towards potty training her. Andrea asked Paige if she wanted to try sitting on the potty and Paige decided to give it a shot. Paige sat for a moment and suddenly squeezed out a tiny bit of pee pee. Andrea's shriek of surprise and happiness made her laugh and she stopped, and then a second later she started again. By the time I got upstairs, Paige was laughing like crazy and every few seconds would squeeze out a little bit of pee pee. It was pretty funny and cute, but not the kind of thing we would put on the blog.

To celebrate, we snapped a few cute pictures of Paige this morning after she got dressed.

Unfortunately, Paige didn't really feel like cooperating. The only half decent smile I captured was one where she wasn't looking at the camera.



Friday, July 20, 2012

Connor's car track


Connor's back in to his cars lately. Not sure exactly what sparked it, probably playing with the slot racer cars after we moved in. He's been building a bunch of tracks out of different toys, but he hasn't been very satisfied with any of them and really wanted to drive his cars around on the wood floor downstairs. Our hardwood floor in our KC house didn't fare well with a lot of little cars crashing and scratching it, so we looked online for a car track that would work. There weren't a lot of good options, but we eventually found a really neat car track mat. It has a great track that allows his cars to fit perfectly 2-wide and it's a great size too. It took about 4 days to arrive, and Connor wasn't too patient about the wait, but he absolutely loves it.

Recently, he likes to watch Youtube videos of other kids talking about their cars and showing their tracks, so I took a little video of him doing the same.

Pool Progress!


The pool is coming along S-L-O-W-L-Y. The company we're using was delayed due to some problems they had while finishing up another pool, so they haven't been out at our house consistently for a while. They'll come for a few hours per day and then leave because they're missing a part or a tool or something. In the last week they've spent probably 10 hours on the pool total. That said, today they made some visible progress. They framed out a lot of the exterior portion and dug out the inside.

It's really possible to see what it's going to look like when it's done. You can see how big the sunshelf is going to be and where all the steps are and the shape. I took a few pictures from different angles. The workers, and I, are very impressed with the pool that Andrea designed. I am the one that drew it up, but Andrea was very picky about the shape and wanted something different and interesting. She came up with all of it herself and the workers have commented on how neat it is a number of times.


Built in wall unit and sofa table

Our Family Room is not quite complete, but we did get our built in wall unit and sofa table finished.

It was a big decision on what to put on our big wall in the family room and we splurged a bit to make it nice since it would be a focal point in the house. We'd looked at a bunch of options, but nothing out of the box really fit the space well and we went with a custom built in. Andrea talked to a couple different carpenters in the area, but Rich Warchol won us over with his portfolio and his ability to sketch out his vision on paper within just a couple of minutes. It's almost impossible to convey the size of the built in, but it's pretty enormous and very well put together. It has granite counter tops and lots of storage drawers and cabinets.

We got a 70" TV for it, which seemed big until I mounted it. It's a great size and you can see it easily all the way in the kitchen. We also set up a monitor as a picture frame on the left side that cycles through all of our photos. I hooked it up to the big TV too and it's fun to see our pictures on the big screen.


We were worried the built in would almost be too big at 9 feet tall, but in the space it works very well. If you see it with the tall ceilings, it almost looks small!


For scale purposes, and because it was a cute picture, we put Connor and Paige on the wall unit for a quick pic.
 

Rich also built a custom table for us. Andrea found a picture online of a neat sofa table with a "Greek Key" design. It went really well with the geometric prints Andrea's used to decorate with and she looked everywhere for it. Unfortunately it's no longer made, and it wasn't ideal anyways with the shiny silver material it was made from.



Andrea sent the picture to Rich and he built us one, painted to match the built in wall unit. It turned out beautifully.



Dining Room

As we complete more and more rooms, we finally have some additional pictures to post of the inside of the house.

The dining room is the first of the rooms we got done. Andrea put this together with the help of our designer, but picked a lot of it out on her own. It was hard to get everything in one picture, but I got a pretty nice composite photo that captures how great the room looks.

You can't see the neat chairs very well in the picture above, so we scooted out the table to get this picture of the back wall.




Sunday, July 15, 2012

Connor's new room


We're posting some pics of different rooms as we get them completed and this week is Connor's turn. Mommy had been planning his room for a while and right as we were moving in the work started. Our painter constructed the trim work at the headboard and also painted the neat zig-zag "chevron" print all the way up and around the room. Mommy decorated with orange and blue colors and it's obviously a surfer and shark themed room.

I took a short video of Connor showing his room. I started the video right after I asked him what was in his room.

It turned out pretty neat and Connor definitely likes it. 




Monday, July 9, 2012

Ponytail!


Paige's hair is getting longer, but it still doesn't look much different because the hair in the back is so curly it all seems like it stays the same length. Andrea just realized this past week that it's finally long enough to pull back in to a ponytail and Paige likes it pretty well since it keeps it all out of her eyes.


It's hard to believe it's still so short! When Connor was the same age, he'd had at least a dozen haircuts. We've still never cut Paige's hair.


Saturday, July 7, 2012

Pool construction started!

This Friday, the pool company started our pool. The first thing they did was dig up all our grass in the back yard and then they put down lines to indicate where the forms, and eventually the pool, will go. We're glad they talked it through with us beforehand. We ended up pushing the whole pool back an extra foot since we were worried it'd end up a little too close to the covered portion of the lanai.

It's exciting to see it all starting to come together!