Catching up on March

March is the main reason that I am behind on my blogging.  During March, it was once again time to renovate an entire condo as fast as we could.

It was hideous.  It was so bad that I didn't want Jasmine to touch any surface in there.  The walls were covered in stains, the freezer had meat in a frozen, nasty mush, the carpet had stains every few inches . . . it was just disgusting.  Thankfully, new paint and flooring always does wonders.  This time I tried out gel stain on the cabinets, and I am totally in love with that product.  It was so much easier than the painting was last time!

So most of our spare time in March was spent there.  When you are trying to finish everything in the entire place, there is always one last project, it seems.  I am very grateful we have good renters in there now, because my husband breathed a sigh of relief getting the last lady out.

In the meantime, March 14th was the "Pi Day of the Century!"  The date was 3.14.15, so at 9:26 am and pm we had little parties in our house.

I may be a math nerd, but I don't actually like pie.  I don't know why people like that crust.  So we had breakfast casserole Pi-e on Pi-rate Pi-zza plates.

I also used ribbon to show Kaitlyn how the circumference is "3 and a bit" diameters.  It turns out, however, that 1st graders don't know how to divide, and division is kinda key in the whole thing.  We'll try again in a year or two.

Since my father-in-law was a math professor at BYU for 40 years, my mother-in-law hosted a Pi day party that night for the family.  Everyone else brought pies, and I made a nerdy fruit Pi-zza.  With Pi-napple.

Let's see, what else did we do in March?  Oh, we went to a Rock show.  It passed off a belt loop for Tyler in scouts, and was free, so I decided to bring the kids down.

Thankfully, they loved it.  This guy wandering around with a dinosaur skeleton was a big hit.  And for $1, they got a grab bag of rocks, and got to have one polished for them.

A busy month of work, unfortunately, but I'm just glad it is done!  We own three rentals, and we have now renovated all three.  From here, it should just be minor things as we go instead of top-to-bottom renovations.

So behind!

I have known that I was a bit behind with my blog.  I have always tried to get things up here quickly so that I don't get backlogged and so that I remember it all, but I knew that lately I have been slipping.  Yesterday I went through all of my SD cards and emptied them, and all of my pictures on the computer.  It turns out that I am even more behind than I thought!  I forgot to post a lot of stuff.

So here goes . . .

February.

Kaitlyn had a gymnastics show.  I know why I didn't put the pictures up right away- I was mad at myself.  I took tons of pictures, and when I zoomed in with my new camera they looked good at a slower shutter speed than I thought I would need.  I thought that was strange, but great, so I went with it.  But when I got home I found out that my intuition was right, and all the pictures are blurry because I didn't just bump up the speed anyway.  Grr.

Anyway, Kaitlyn did great.  She isn't the most driven at gymnastics, but she is improving all the time and she loves it.  What more could we ask for?

Her cartwheel is improving, for sure!

And I think she got the splits all the way down a few weeks after this. (She's on the far right.)

She even had a little solo in the dance they did.  It was cute.

As part of the theme that night, they had each team come and pick up fake trophies.  Kaitlyn decided it was entirely hers.

She wanted to pose with it for quite a while, actually.  Silly girl.

Also in February, she competed in her school's "Storytelling Festival".  I wasn't sure what sort of story she should tell, so I showed her a poem that I memorized when I was her age.  "Eletelephony" is a bit lost on this generation, since it is all about an elephant that gets tangled up in a telephone cord.  But she still loved it, memorized it, and then insisted that she should dress up for the part.

There she is, in grey, elephant ears on a homemade headband, and wrapped in telephone cord that I found buried in a box of old cords.  She did a great job!  Apparently our poem didn't really work, since it didn't have a "beginning, middle and end" layout, but we both learned what it was like.