Last weekend, Paul and I (and Savannah) drove up to North Carolina to watch my sister get her diploma! I can’t believe she’s a college graduate now! I’m so proud of her, and I hope she’s able to find a job soon doing what she loves. Her major was outdoor education, so she’s looking at camps and other outdoorsy type jobs. I hope she ends up close enough that we still get to see her frequently! I’ve enjoyed her being only 4 hours away in NC.

I think Amy is one of the coolest people in the world, so I was excited to see her again. :-) My parents and grandparents and us shared a cottage near Amy’s college campus, which was nice. I enjoyed being with them! My brother and his wife also drove up from Florida for the graduation, which marked the first time ever my whole family made it to a graduation! (Amy missed my high school, I missed AJ & Amy’s high school, my dad missed my college, and everyone missed AJ’s college)

Some pictures!

Amy and Savannah

Amy and my parents

The three siblings

What Savannah did during the entire graduation

I didn’t get a picture of Amy accepting her diploma because I was videotaping. It was a really nice ceremony, though. It reminded me of Taylor – small Christian college graduation. :-) After the graduation, we went back to the cottage and two of my aunts came and threw a graduation party for Amy. It was fun to sit back and visit with my family! I hope Amy enjoyed it too. A good weekend all in all.

We put the first coat of sealer on the floor in the den yesterday, and today I went to check how it turned out. In the corner, I found a wet spot – cat pee. Argh!

My cats are driving me nuts right now. They are constantly peeing in the den, and we are nervous about how to get them to stop. We don’t want them peeing on our new carpet!

I think they are peeing in other areas of the house, too. I just haven’t found out where yet.

Everything has changed since Savannah was born. Before, they were my everything. Now I just don’t have the time or interest to take dote over them like I used to. However, getting rid of them is not an option. When I adopted them, I committed to taking care of them for their entire lives. They are only 5 years old, so they are not old and sickly.

I have been considering letting my cats outside. They desperately want to go. They stand at the door and cry. They will jump out of 2nd story windows to get outside. I wonder if that will help with the whole peeing thing. Maybe if they are bored being inside all the time? We’ve always had a porch for them and we don’t have one anymore.

I don’t know. They are driving me nuts, though.

I’ll start my story when we left off in the last paragraph of a previous post. We were supposed to get our carpet installed in our den today. So on Thursday, we mopped the whole room with a heavy-duty cleaner and degreaser. There was carpet down when we bought the house, but it smelled bad so we ripped it up last September. Underneath we found floor tiles on top of cement. Not only were the tiles all dirty, but my cats had peed down there multiple times and so the whole place really stank. (More about them later. Grrr!)

We were hoping the cleaner that we used on Thursday would get rid of the cat smell. On Friday, after everything was dry, I walked down there and realized that you could still smell it. I didn’t know what to do, and didn’t have any way to do it before we left Friday afternoon for my sister’s college graduation in North Carolina. (I will write a post about that trip later, too.) While we were up there, we asked my relatives what they would suggest to fix the smell before the carpet guys came Monday afternoon. Molly suggested we install a sort of vapor barrier – like they put underneath hardwood or laminate flooring. We thought that was a pretty good idea, and stopped at Lowe’s before we left Asheville to pick up the necessary ingredients.

We got back to Atlanta around 5 on Sunday (yesterday). We didn’t even unload the car – we immediately set to work. Paul pulled up one of the tiles and brought it up to me. It was absolutely soaked in cat pee. He started pulling up the tiles to find it pooled underneath. We ended up pulling up all the tiles in the 270+ square foot room. That took several hours. In the meantime, I went to Subway to get dinner. We took a short break for dinner, and then I went downstairs to finish the tiles. The ones in the middle of the room were not too hard, but the ones along the edge were impossible to get up without breaking them up into small pieces. We realized that the worst of the smell was around the perimeter of the room. So, we decided to get rid of all the baseboards and hope that the smell hadn’t gotten into the walls. (Though I would LOVE to gut the room and replace all the paneling with drywall… BUT… that’s not exactly a project you tackle by yourself on Sunday night…)

One of the baseboards had a date written behind it: “Installed Nov. 1968″. We had wondered when they finished the downstairs – we could tell that it was finished later, and this confirms that it was 8 years after the house was built.

As I was hacking away at the tiles, I had a sudden thought. Then a sinking feeling. Um, aren’t floor tiles one of the things that are often full of asbestos? I did a quick Google search and then called my dad. He said he guessed there was a 50 percent chance that the floor tiles were asbestos. Since we were almost done, we decided to just finish. I found a face mask and tried to be more careful about smashing the tiles to smithereens. After I got them all off the floor, I carefully swept the entire room, and then we mopped everywhere to make sure all the dust was gone.

So hopefully this brief exposure doesn’t spell an early death for either of us! According to some helpful internet forums, we’re probably okay.

While we were working on the tiles, we realized that one part of the floor is just slightly raised. I don’t think we would have noticed it if we hadn’t been on the floor, but once we could see it, it seemed obvious. We brainstormed the possible causes. There is a HUGE magnolia tree right next to the house, and when we glanced out the window we realized that it was in the perfect position to have a root that is affecting the floor of our den. (This is the opposite side of the house with the foundation issues.) We’re actually a little sad – we like that tree, but it will need to come down sooner than later so that the problem doesn’t get worse.

We went over the cement with the same cleaner that we’d used on Thursday. Then we both took showers and went to bed around 3am. That means we worked 10 hours straight on that den!

It was sooo hard to drag myself out of bed when Savannah woke me up at 9 this morning. I got dressed and went downstairs to check out the den. The cat smell is almost completely gone. Yay! However, I noticed a trail of water near where the floor is slightly raised. (I sniffed it – it was definitely water!) I thought we had just missed a part when we were cleaning the floor last night, but Paul was more concerned.

After careful inspection, Paul noticed a small crack in the cement. He could tell that the water was coming in there. I knew this would take some time to fix so I called and cancelled the carpet installation – I hope we’ll be able to get it installed soon! We called my dad again this morning and the current plan is to get some crack sealer, and then put a cement sealer over the entire room. Then we’ll lay the plastic down, THEN we can get the carpet installed.

Also we need to find room in our budget to remove a tree.

Anyways, so that’s our adventure for today. We’re both exhausted. Stayed tuned for whatever happens next!

(I am glad to find the source of the dampness that I’ve always felt was present down in the den. Also, I’m glad all the asbestos tile is gone. If we hadn’t removed it, we would never noticed the crack. So I guess it’s a good thing.)

Dear Savannah,

Today you are 9 months old. Every day you continue to be more interactive, more sweet, and more loveable. As we celebrated my first Mother’s Day this past month, I truly delighted in the fact that I get to have you as a daughter!

This month you had your first camping trip, and you did great. We hope this is just the first of many. Since the weather is getting warmer, you are spending more time outside. You like to ride around in your umbrella stroller while we work on the yard or go for a walk.

You are moving around more, and reaching so far for toys that are beyond your grasp! You like to move and dance with music, and you love to wildly rock back and forth wherever you are sitting. You still hate being on your tummy but I notice when I sit you up, you will often scootch around a little bit. The other day you took your first big tumble – head first off the couch! You cried so loud, but were fine 5 minutes later even though there’s a nasty looking bruise on your forehead.

You are eating a lot more solids, including crackers or cheerios. You seem to recognize when we’re eating food and you complain until you get some too. You enjoy feeding yourself more than you like being fed, but you’ll eat the pureed fruits and vegetables I give you.

Now that it’s warm, you’re barefoot most of the time and you love playing with your feet. I often see you with your foot in your mouth as we’re driving in the car. It’s so very cute.

Your hair has been growing in thick and long. I got some little bands and put your hair in a little ponytail at the top of your head, which was so cute. I have been playing around with other hair accessories, now that your hair is so long I have to keep things in it!

My mother told me that I started crawling at nine months, so I’m interested to see what the next month brings us in that regard. :-)

Love, Mommy

I have a feeling that our yard looked awesome when the original owner lived in the house. Then she sold it in 2006 and it became a rental property. Thus began the next 4 years of nothing being done to the yard, except the grass being cut.

(Unrelated side note: Shortly after we moved in, a man rang the doorbell. He was with the mortgage company of the previous owner. He said that he was investigating, because apparently the previous owners did not disclose that the property was a rental. I thought that was interesting.)

As the weather has gotten warmer, I have desires and hopes for our yard. I want to make it a nice place to be – right now I spend as little time there as possible. Our yard is more weeds than grass. There is poison ivy and poison oak all along the fence in our backyard. There are lots of mosquitoes flying around – bug spray is essential when working outside. The yard is so unkempt and overgrown, but I have no idea how to start to fix it. I don’t know the first thing about plants. I’d *love* to pay someone to come, work their magic, and then teach me how to maintain it, but I know that would cost money that is better spent elsewhere.

There are some bushes along the house and along the street that were in desperate need of trimming. So today, I bought some hedge clippers and hacked away. I hope in my ignorance I didn’t do TOO much damage! They look much better, but not perfect. There were three bushes along the side of the house that I cut down to the stumps. I am excited because I think it looks a lot better.

I started raking up all the magnolia leaves in our side yard, but quit out of weariness. There are so many! They haven’t been raked up in years. I have visions in my head, but it takes so much work getting there. Hopefully day by day, I’ll be able to tackle things and get all the leaves raked up, bushes trimmed, weeds pulled, and maybe return the yard to its previous landscaped beauty. It doesn’t need to be this summer… I keep telling myself. :-)

When it is winter again and the weeds die down, we’ll tackle the backyard. There is a HUGE pile of sticks that need to be removed, as well as a bunch of junk and trash that the previous residents left. And of course there is the issue of the poison ivy. I think we’ll focus on the front yard this summer and the backyard in the winter.

In other house-related news, we are getting carpet installed in our den/playroom on Monday! I am so excited. I will take pictures and post them when it is installed. :-)