Sliding into summer

May is always a lot of little events as summer comes into view.

Kaitlyn had her usual gymnastics show.

She was excited about getting a trophy instead of a medal this year.  

Jasmine went on a field trip with her preschool class to Red Lobster.  She wasn't sure about that creature, but I think she liked it.

We went on a hike with Tyler's friend Austin.

We went to a crawfish boil at a local restaurant.  

Don't let Kaitlyn's goofy face fool you.  She didn't eat a lot of them, but she took one home and kept in the fridge with grand plans to prank and scare all of her friends.

They even had fun games to play outside.

We had a yard sale.  We've never actually done that before.  Usually I just take things to the thrift store, a box at a time.  But it was time to do a really big purge.

Kaitlyn had an orchestra concert for the end of the year.

Jasmine "graduated" from  . . . the first year of preschool.  It was essentially just all of us getting together in the park and singing some songs.

Over Memorial Day, we spent a night at a campground with all of Christopher's family.  And . . . I forgot my camera.  Christopher took a picture of Tyler's new favorite moth friend on his phone, though.

And then, as the summer began, we started the most epic home improvement project ever.

My kitchen has always been very functional, but we knew early on that someday we were going to replace the whole thing.  We could have fixed things, but there were too many things we wanted to fix.  By the time we replaced the counters that were peeling on the sides and drawer slides that stick and everything else, we still wouldn't be happy because we wanted that drop ceiling out.

So we took it out.

 I started talking to cabinet makers over Spring Break.  We thought about doing an IKEA kitchen, and I even had it all laid out in their computer program.  But I just didn't like any of their door fronts.  We ended up using the same company for cabinets that many of Christopher's family has, and they were awesome.  They were 30% more than getting the IKEA kitchen I was trying to talk myself into liking, and it was fully custom to everything we wanted, and fully installed instead of spending weeks assembling cabinets.

The only problem was timing.  Our cabinet maker told us as we were making changes and perfecting the layout that he expected the build to take 4-6 weeks.  If we got closer to summer, it could run longer.  That was fine with us.  We hadn't demolished the old kitchen yet, and it would take a lot of work to get it ready for the new cabinets.  We needed that time.

When we put the money down, though, our cabinet salesman came back with a date 3 weeks and 2 days out.  And Christopher had a work trip scheduled for one whole week of that.  He ended up spending all of Memorial Day helping his mother move out of her house and into a condo.  So we had two weeks and one day, essentially.  Christopher took out the old cabinets, took down the old ceiling, rewired half the house (the wires ran diagonally across the drop ceiling and didn't have enough slack to get tucked up in the raised ceiling), moved the outlets for the fridge, microwave and oven, took out the flooring and leveled some parts of the floor,and probably a lot of other things I'm forgetting.  He hired someone to do the drywall work for us, but that was it.

In the meantime, the kids finished school for the year.  We tried to keep things working normally around here, which was a challenge sometimes.  I think Christopher was up until 2 am for a week or two straight.

Jasmine got to go to Itty Bitty Ball.

She loved it.  She especially loved that the other kids were jealous and didn't get to play.

Kaitlyn became obsessed with running lemonade stands.  We even added cotton candy one day.

 But mostly, we just kept plugging away on the kitchen until the cabinets came in on June 9.