First tooth!

At 5 months and 6 days old, Ava has cut her first tooth. It's the bottom front left one, and it came in without too much of a problem. We dealt with daily fussiness and discomfort with her gas, and this tooth hasn't been much worse than that.

Well, we're on our way out the door... Headed down to the Bay Area again for another wedding. I'll have more to post when we get back, I'm sure.
:)

a fresh new look

This is my new haircut. Andy says it reminds him of my hair when we first started dating.

You may notice the blog has a new look, too. I felt that the old look was hard to read and it was difficult to tell when one post ended and the next began. I hope it doesn't throw you off too much. :)

We applied for our loan yesterday. (sob sob)

If we had been able to build this house 2 years ago, it probably would have cost $100,000 less. Since we started the whole process, materials costs have gone way up and property values have dropped; not a good combination when building a house.

As the bank lady was looking through all of our numbers, she didn't have a really positive look on her face. I knew that the number that we gave her for the estimated cost of building the house was higher than we expected (much higher, in fact) but she said she'd have the people upstairs look at it and see if they'd recommend it for approval. Thank goodness we have "premium" credit scores and hardly any debt... if we had any debt besides the home loan, we'd be over the 55% debt to income ratio, and they wouldn't approve the loan. Then we'd really be back at square one.

As it is, we're looking at areas to cut back our estimated construction costs. We can't really cut back the major costs, such as all the work for the foundation, septic and water systems and I'm not willing to sacrifice the radiant heating system. It looks like we'll have to tighten our belts in places like cabinetry, tile, trim and appliances.

We'll figure it out even if we have to live in an unpainted (but warm and dry) shell of a house for awhile.

On turning 30...

About 2 years ago, it seemed to me that just about every milestone birthday had some traditional event that went with it:
16= sweet sixteen party
18= buy yourself a lottery ticket
21= go out drinking
25= rent a car without paying extra fees
...but 30 was totally lacking. I figure that's mostly due to the fact that by the time most people turn 30 they are married with kids and partying is kind of out of the question. Last week I thought about how different my 30th birthday celebration was going to be from some of my other friends. They had adult dinners at fancy restaurants and I had friends over for a casual kid-friendly barbecue. Not that either party is better than the other, they're just different. (Ha. If our regular gang of friends were to go out for an adult dinner at a nice restaurant, we'd employ just about every babysitter in Humboldt County.)

I needed some sort of rite of passage activity, so I decided to chop my hair off and donate it. I've done it before, and I'm not particularly attached to my hair, so I think I'll do it every 10 years on my birthday. I don't have any pics of the new 'do yet, but I'll post one soon.

30's not so bad. I've decided to start wearing makeup. (We'll see how long that lasts!)

Our trip to the Mad River Fish Hatchery in Blue Lake.

These pics are from our trip to the Mad River Fish Hatchery in Blue Lake. I guess it wasn't the right time of year for little fishies to be in the long "tanks" they've got out there because not only were there no fish, but there was hardly any water in them either. No matter, it was a beautiful day and we were pretty much there to enjoy the sunshine and the river anyway. By "we" I mean myself, Ava, Marina and her two kids, Owen and Ruby.
The weather was ideal... we found a warm spot in the shade on a gravel bar and just hung out. Owen played with his lizards and caught a strange bug in the water and Ruby ate any rocks, leaves and twigs within grabbing distance. Ava enjoyed the fresh air and didn't mind standing in the river with my help.

lots of posts coming your way!

I have a few different things to post about, and I'm going to try to get them all done this evening. They'll probably all be short and sweet. Here's a link to more pics of Ava on our flickr site.