Wonderful Autumn Weekend

This past weekend we went up to the lake from Thursday night through Sunday night. The weather was chilly but fabulous! We probably won't get to go too many times now before winter sets in, so this may have been one of our final getaways before next spring.

We worked part of the weekend remodeling the upstairs bathroom which was circa 1960's. Over the past few weeks we have ripped off the old mirror, repaired walls, re-painted, removed the glass shower doors, and used a fiberglass spray paint to paint over the old pinkish-brown bathtub. We'd never tried spray painting bathtubs before and were nervous about the results, but I think it turned out pretty well! This weekend we removed the old carpet and tried our hands at tiling. We've never tiled before, so we'll see how that goes. Ben cut the tiles with his new wet saw and spread the goo, and I laid the tiles and placed the spacers. Next time we go up we'll grout. After that, we have to hang a new medicine cabinet, paint the trim, re-hang the shower doors, hang the window curtain, install a new toilet, sink cabinet and top, remove the old light fixture and hang the new one. Whew! Maybe we'll be finished and ready to start on the basement and replacing our old rickety deck by sometime mid-summer.

I posted a bunch of pictures of Riley because I got so many good ones this time. He takes after me by not being very photogenic. These all turned out to be rare, relaxed poses. You can see just how tiny Ephraim is in the picture of Riley giving him a bottle. Ephraim is now 15 months old and Riley is 13 years old.

The kids got to spend the whole weekend playing hide-and-seek, playing in their tree house and jumping in piles of leaves. It looks like we had them busy raking leaves for us, but actually they were just raking so that they could turn right around and jump in the piles or hurl them at each other.