Masters week at Grandma and Papa's

Dan and I rent out our house every year for Masters. Since my parents live in town it is very easy for us to do this. It takes a lot of work to get the house ready but I use this as my motivation to do some spring cleaning. Ever since we have had the boys we have had to start the clean up process earlier and earlier. The renters don't show up until Wednesday, but we move out on Sunday so that we have several days to clean before they come. It is really impossible to do unless the boys are gone, because they can very quickly undo everything that we have done. :)

So my mom offered to watch them Monday and Tuesday so that I could clean. To make matters even crazier I worked Saturday and Sunday night so that I could enjoy hanging out with my brother and his family when they arrived later in the week. After sleeping on Monday til about noon my wonderful sister and niece came over to help me clean. I couldn't have done it without them. I was really happy when I finished cleaning on Tuesday night- I was ready to relax at my parents for the rest of the week.
But things rarely work out the way we plan them in our heads. Tuesday evening a big storm came through knocking out my parent's power. The big problem about a power outage at my parents is that they have a well instead of city water. So when the power goes out it means no water and no electricity. Needless to say I was not very happy. It took two days for the power to come back on...Dan and I kept wondering why we were renting out the house with electricity and running water while we were roughing it out at the parents. But we survived, and according to my mother we "made some memories".
By the time Tim, Leia and Claire arrived the power had been restored and the fun began. Here are some pictures of that week.

Isaiah helping Grandma clean up after the storm

Nap time!

The boys found a caterpillar, this provided about 20 minutes of entertainment for them.

Apparently the only one concerned for his safety is Isaiah...Dan took them for rides down the hill

Ready for another trip down...

Isaiah and I

Aunt Leia blowing bubbles

Atticus and Isaiah, tree huggers

Atticus at the playground

Dan being a big kid....

Katherine

Isaiah

Thomas

Tim and Claire

Atticus hunting for eggs

Isaiah

Playing with Guys

One morning Atticus decided to set up all of his police guys. Isaiah was not around, so it was easy for him to accomplish this very quickly. He was very patient to stand them up one by one.

Isaiah came in the room. But we were able to convince him to play with the guys instead of smashing them.

This did not last very long. Isaiah asked Atticus if he could smash the guys. Atticus said yes and they both took out an entire police force in about 2 seconds. This is a very basic illustration of how these two "forces" are very quickly destroying our house.

Visiting Aunt Allie

Once again I have fallen behind on blogging. So I am going to do several quick posts to try to catch up. At the end of March we went to visit Dan's sister Allison, and had the pleasure of meeting her boyfriend Jason. He's a great guy and we enjoyed getting to know him better. We told him a few funny stories about Allison, so I think that he really enjoyed that. I am not sure if Allison will invite us back or not, we may have given away too many of her secrets.

We all went to dinner on Saturday night at Captain Woody's- one of Allison's favorite spots.

Here's a shot of Allison playing Miss Mary Mack with Isaiah while we waited for our food.

Allison and Atticus hanging out

Jason and the boys were all wearing green shirts with alligators on them. I really wanted to get a picture of them all in their shirts. Here is a shot of Jason trying to convince the boys to take a picture with him.

They were not buying it, so we tried to sneak a picture by putting Dan on the couch with the boys and having Jason sit down at the last minute....that didn't work so well either.

I think that Isaiah is actually saying "No picture mommy!" and Atticus is trying to get off the couch. Oh well. Jason was a good sport about it.

We went to church with Allison on Sunday and then to a taco lunch that her church was holding to raise money for a mission trip to Jamaica. Jason is going on the trip so he was there working. Here are a few pictures we took right before we said goodbye. It was a fun but short weekend. We will have to do it again soon.

Isaiah once again not cooperating for photos....

It is so challenging to get a good group photo!

Reasons to celebrate

Our reasons to celebrate this week:

1. Thursday we found out that we are having a little boy. He is healthy, and quite active for such a little guy. We are thankful for a good report and Dan is excited about adding another boy to the team. He is already dreaming about two on two basketball games, doubles tennis and more.

It's a boy!

2. Dan finally finished the updates to our room this weekend. He painted the trim and door leading out to our porch and hung the ceiling fan. I cleaned the carpet in our bedroom. While Atticus peed on later that day....but we are finally done.

Freshly painted doors

The proud fan installer

3. Despite the fact that I just said that Atticus peed on our carpet the other day, as of today I can offically say that he is potty trained. It took him longer than Isaiah, which is not a really big surprise since he is my more "strong-willed" child. But he has finally got the hang of it and we have been accident free for three days now. I feel like I have won the lottery. I can't even begin to tell you how freeing it is to have the twins out of diapers! And thankfully I will get a few months off before baby boy 3 makes his arrival.

So Saturday night we took the boys to Chili's to celebrate...and because I had a coupon. I am very proud to say that I am turning into my mother a little more every day. We enjoyed free chips and salsa while we waited for our food. Isaiah actually liked the salsa, so much that I moved the bowl closer to him. The boys did pretty well, despite all of the distractions. And I enjoyed not having to cook for the night. We are thankful for the big and small blessings that we have received this week.

Atticus making a silly face, Dan decided to copy him...

Big "smile" from Isaiah

A salsa lover

Sleeping Bags and Special Treats

The other day the boys found Dan's sleeping bag in the closet. So naturally we had to open it up and try it out. I tried to explain what camping was to the boys- no we have not tried to go camping with our two-year-old twins yet, we are not that brave. But they did have a blast playing in the sleeping bag.

Atticus

Isaiah joining in the fun

Sleeping bag made for two

Margie- my dear friend and Covenant roommate came to see us yesterday and brought the boys shamrock cookies. If you can't tell by the picture, they really enjoyed them. It was so sweet of her and very much appreciated by the boys. Sadly I did not take a picture with her when she came, but she got a couple to commemorate her afternoon with the Adams boys.

Enjoying their cookies from Miss Margie

Life for now

Dan has been renovating our bedroom- I only asked him to paint the walls, but this turned into a much bigger project very quickly. We have the dreaded popcorn ceilings throughout the entire house. In our bedroom the ceiling looked particularly bad because the previous owner had stepped through the ceiling (according to our current neighbors) and did a horrible job of patching the popcorn. These are the types of things that we noticed AFTER we bought our house....anyway Dan wanted to take down the popcorn ceiling. Another quirk about our bedroom was that there was a square 80's recessed lighting- that really should not have even been called a light because it gave of less light than a candle- seriously. But to make it worse there was an oddly placed fan (with no light) about two feet away from the recessed light. I am not sure if the oddly placed fan was part of the previous owners "improvements" but I wouldn't doubt it. So Dan wanted to remove the popcorn, he had already taken down the strange fan, and turn the recessed light into a light box for a normal, center of the room ceiling fan with light. This project has taken so long because Dan usually only has a few hours to work on it at night, and some time on Saturday afternoon when I am not sleeping. (I work almost every Friday night, and try to sleep until at least 12 on Saturdays.)

So we have been living in the guest room- surrounded by chaos, and we are both trying very hard to be okay with the mess. I am proud of my husband- I think he has done a great job- so here are a few pictures (I wish I had taken more along the way) of the soon to be finished room. He is painting trim tonight, so hopefully we will be moved in sometime next week. I will post pictures of the completed project when its all finished.

Taking down the popcorn ceiling- tedious and messy

The new color and new ceiling

Where the old recessed light used to be

Tucking me in on Saturday morning- They tell me "Go to bed mommy" and then give me a kiss. A very slobbery kiss.

And lastly this is a very random picture that doesn't really fit with this post, but I got a kick out of it.

This is how my nephew Thomas smiles- I promise that he is not normally this "happy". The boys wanted to try on my head bands today.

Warmer weather

We enjoyed the warm weather that came through a few weeks ago. We spent most of our waking hours outside playing in the sunshine. It has been a dreary cold winter, which has been hard on my outdoor boys. So thankful that Spring is finally here!

Isaiah jamming on the porch with his racket guitar.

Atticus going exploring

Our senior pastor, Jack, recently celebrated 25 years of ministry at our church- wow! We had an awesome time at the party that the church threw for him. The boys enjoyed the dessert the most. :)

More cake please!

A lot of mornings the boys wake up ready to go. The other morning they both were asking for their capes at 7 am, so we had two super heros for breakfast.

Isaiah and Atticus

Dan's parents came to see us at the end of February, which was wonderful! We even went out on a date and ate a meal at a really fabulous restaurant in Augusta that is owned by a friend from church. If you are ever visiting Augusta you should try Frog Hollow- it was awesome!

Atticus with Grandmother

Isaiah with Granddaddy

And finally this is the way the boys chose to end their day. Reading stories with their daddy- hats were a requirement for story time.

Little Dough Boys

The boys got an awesome 24 pack of play dough from their Aunt Allie for Christmas this year. This has really come in handy on cold, rainy days. Normally the boys would stare out the window on these days and beg to go outside. But now that we have play dough, these days are much more tolerable.

They like to make lots of different things with their play dough. Here is a picture of Isaiah making a car noise with his play dough steering wheel.

Here is the look that Atticus gets on his face when I tell him its time to play with the dough.
They have also enjoyed using the little balls of dough as mini bongo drums, here is Isaiah giving me a drum concert.
Lastly, this picture does not have anything to do with play dough, but this is a new things that we are doing. I am trying to let them have a little bit of an opinion in what they wear- so we have a lot of days that look like this:
I started doing this as an experiment, to see if they would want to dress like each other. They do not. But on Sundays, and usually when we go out in public I will still pick out their clothes. Its really fun to see their individual personalities shining through. They have different tastes and different favorite shirts, its always interesting to see what they will choose.