My pet named Peeve.

A fellow blogger once posed the questions, "What annoys you? What are your pet peeves??"
Hooray! I wanted to post four pet peeves when I was tagged several posts back, but I was afraid I would sound too pessimistic. (btw, this fellow blogger is not a pessimistic person at all!)
I will limit my peeve's to just four...
One thing I love about having a home in Fairfield is the recycling program. It's great to set my recyclables in a separate bin next to my garbage can on garbage day. When I have gone walking on garbage day though, I always find something that just gets me. Ragu/Prego type bottles that are still red with sauce & milk jugs with a few ounces of rotting milk in the jug. C'mon people - rinse the stuff out or just throw it in the trash can.
Now I could be wrong here...maybe the recycling companies don't care if they get garbage in the recycling bin. Maybe they are able to clean it and still recycle it. Let me know if I am wrong.
Number two. I hate sitting in my car at a traffic light with my children strapped in behind me and then have that smell of cigarette smoke drift into my vehicle. I really hope that I don't offend any readers that do smoke or used to. (Maybe this is the reason I didn't post my pet peeve's before now.) I just don't care to smell that when I'm sitting in my own vehicle with the windows rolled up, trying to stay cool with my AC on. Anyhow, moving on...
Speaking of traffic. That leads me to numero tres. I call this peeve, "half-a-left-turn." I inherited this peeve from my dad. (He also gave it the special name.) Let me explain what this is exactly. Using the middle/turning lane to pull out into before actually entering their direction of traffic. The reason I hate this is because I'll be going down the road, see a car start to pull out, and not know if they are going to stop in the middle (hence the "half") or just pull on out. So I have to slow right down anyway until I figure out what they are going to do.
If you think I struggle with road rage from reading the last two peeves, I can assure you that I really don't.
Last and probably least too (because I have taken care of this problem by not shopping at this store since). Stores that stock their shelves on Saturday afternoon. I'm talking about A LOT of boxes in the middle of the aisles during a very busy shopping day and time. When you have kids, you have to hurry in and out, the window of good behavior is not long when you are grocery shopping. So when big stocking boxes are blocking the aisle, I take my business somewhere else. Somebody let me know when Meijer gets a night crew.

There you have it. Four of my pet's. Feel free to share yours.

Alright, I have to post something positive to balance this out...

Olivia and her very good friend!

LOVEland

I love Loveland bike trail. Since the temperatures dropped on Saturday, Aaron and I decided it was time to enjoy a Saturday (even though we still have so much to get done in the yard). We met some friends for a lovely bike ride...

Aaron was using his clipless pedals for the first time outdoors and so I pulled the trailer. We didn't want any wrecks caused from the new biking shoes. I enjoyed being able to pull the trailer. I could hardly tell it was there except for when I had a head wind. Oh, and of course when I could hear Carter crying right behind me. I snapped this picture while we were pedaling down the road.

Aaron probably could have pulled the trailer though because he did great with the clipless stuff. No wrecks yet! My friend, Karen, is next to Aaron and in front of Aaron is Ken & their children.

Karen found this great park to stop and eat lunch at.

Carter loved being out of the trailer (he wasn't real happy while he was in there).

Weeee!

Carter in the helmet...which he HATED!

Can you tell?

I finally threw all safety precautions to the wind and took the helmet off. He's a bit happier, but still wants out of the trailer.

Aaron was sporting new gear that he got for his birthday...new bike shoes, clipless pedals & a new cycle computer. Whit Woo!

We tried to fit our bikes in the back of the van, but it didn't work. So, we all squeezed into the old green car and put the bike hitch on to haul the bikes to Loveland. While it's fun to occasionally squeeze into the car, I'm grateful to be a Minivan Mom!
More biking pics here!

The bottom half and then some

Well, I planned to take pictures of the entire house before I posted, but I can't get the main level of the house to look the way I want and then remember to take pictures at the same time. That's okay, the main level has all our same old furniture and no pictures on the walls yet. So it wouldn't be anything new or exciting.

So let's get this party started with a tour of our basement. I know, you can hardly contain yourself.

Downstairs bathroom...Aaron put new lighting and mirror in here. It was pretty dungeony before. Now it's visitor friendly.

We have a wood burning stove in the basement. I don't want Carter to get used to climbing on it and so my play yard has come in very handy.

Our craigslist entertainment center with no tv (we have since improved this picture with a yard sale tv and two lounger camping chairs ;)

Olivia and Carter just love to play house and store in the basement.

Toy corner is underneath the stairs.

Storage room until we get some of it up in the attic.

Aaron did a great job improving this view. He painted the stairwell going down to the basement and put a new light fixture up.

Moving outside:

Some previous owners of the house put up a shed in the middle of the yard. They also had a compost pile behind it.

(I have missed our green grass & weeds...everything is dry and crispy now)

Moving the shed to the back corner of the yard was a big check mark on Aaron's to-do list. He enlisted the help of our neighbor, Gary (in picture) and another neighbor, Mark (behind the shed). Luckily we had two engineers thinking about how to get the job done inexpensively for three months and along with some prayers (by myself ;), it worked!

So now we have two big dirt spots in our back yard. One from the compost pile and one from where the shed was.

Front of the house.

Moving on to more precious things:

Olivia loves to "feed" Lucky through the fence. She feeds him leaves and then he just spits it out. Lucky actually used to live on our side of the fence.

Carter has seen Olivia up on this stool a lot. He now always has to have a turn too.

Such a big boy.

I do actually put shoes on him...sometimes.

We borrowed our neighbors wagon to move rocks from our dirt piles, and Olivia fell in love with it.

She is getting pretty good at riding her $2 bike! It's been fun to see Olivia get more comfortable on it and enjoy riding it.

Another thing we have to take care of...dirt and weeds. I would love for this to be grass next year. We'll see though. (like I said...everything is dry & crispy) In the mean time, Olivia and Carter love sprinking dirt on each other.

I wanted to have this post done earlier, but Aaron and I got looking around this website...I think I know what I'm getting people for Christmas this year!