Creative Outlet

With patience and love kids will learn appropriate behavior. Do not write on the walls, couches, chairs, cars, bills and other mail, toys and the like. It makes your parents very unhappy. But how do channel such creative talent so you don't burst?! Well there are things like paper, coloring books, sidewalks with sidewalk chalk for starters. There is also the bottom/underneath side of your favorite little table. Apparently this is a work of art that has gone on for a long time, many many months at the very least. We may never know.
We are still working at not coloring on our skin (although that is slightly easier to clean).
And speaking of art, here is more of Allie's work. One of my favorites is the merman swimming with his arms behind him. How clever is that? It's my blog and I can brag if I want to. Again you have half the mer-people on the edges of the page.
And how is the house? Well, it looks the same basically. We are stuck in the muck and mire of permits and inspections. We have opened several cans of worms. If anyone wants to come over for left-overs we have plenty. I will even wash you a fresh bowl straight from the bathtub.

The electrical inspector came yesterday (they will come between 8am and 4pm and if you miss them.... oooh, you do not miss. This guy came at 3pm) he looked around at the work, said everything looked great and then went to put the green for go sticker on the the panel box. And that was where the trouble began. We need a bigger panel box. But you can't just change the smaller one for a bigger one. You have change the grounding wires connecting them. Those go through the meter which of course then you have to change that. Well the meter and the wires go to a shared box which is in the neighbors yard which means the city comes out and shuts the power down to at least 3 homes. We have to dig a trench to pull out the old and put in the new which means we will now be breaking up the side walk that runs along the side of our house as well as the red bud tree. The sprinklers are in the way as well but they haven't been working properly and the flag stone is breaking up as it is so we might as well pull up the rest of that. The flagstone lines the yard which is oddly sloped anyway and the apricot tree is so old it doesn't produce anymore. We will be digging under the back wall that we share with the neighbor that I have always wished was higher. So maybe we will just get the back hoe in here and go at it. Which of course that would only fit around the west side of the house which means through the front yard. I have always wished they had put in a drip system out front too and since it might get damaged under the weight of the back hoe....

I haven't even mentioned the plumbing issues. So we have decided to bulldoze the entire house.

And all we wanted was to take out one little wall!