Bathroom

So...we've been working on our bathroom. More specifically, I've done some demolition and a construction guy has been doing some...construction work.

We started with a bathtub and a shower stall

From demolition & construction

There was also a wall between the single sink vanity and the shower stall (on the left)

From demolition & construction

I ripped out the shower stall and the wall

From demolition & construction

We kept the bathroom with a sink for quite a while so we could still use it

From demolition & construction

On Valentine's Day Mitzi and I then took out the vanity

From demolition & construction

Construction finally started, with drywall going up first including 2 ledges that would flank the new vanity

From demolition & construction

He put some new pipes in for the new sinks (and in the process made our main water turn-off switch to the whole house leak in our basement...)

From demolition & construction

He put in some new floor tiles...

From demolition & construction

...some shower tiles

From demolition & construction

and finally the vanity cover and sinks

From demolition & construction

We still have to prime and paint the room (we got a light gray for the walls). It's super bright in there with all the vanity lights on. After we paint, the construction guy will come back to grout the shower tiles, put in the baseboards and install the actual shower in the tub. We are so close! Unfortunately I have our residency inservice test this week, so can't work on painting until Saturday.

Lent has started; we're trying to get the girls to do something. Mary Ann (for now) has agreed to only have sweets on Sunday; Rose didn't want to give up anything. We watch the Olympics occasionally, and try to get most of the KU games watched too.

Christmas Voyage

We're back! We made it, over 1500 miles and 10 days. Whew!

We started off on Dec 28th, driving to St Louis. We spent the night with the St Louis Keels (Rocky, Jane, Hannah and Abby). The girls had a great time dressing up in the costumes. We really liked the laid-back tone of the night.

We left the morning of the 29th. We met up with the Oklahoma Keels (Fritz, Kelly, Jesse and Wiley) en route to Jefferson City where we spent lunch with Oma.

From Christmas

We even got to go to the local HyVee to get her groceries, though she did forget she needed milk. After lunch we stopped in California, MO to see the grave of Katie's grandma. We then drove through KC rush hour to make it to Lawrence. Everyone else was already there. We designated Dec 29th as "Christmas Eve" for the family. We had a good first night and got the kids to bed fairly early.

From Christmas

December 30th was Christmas. There were tons of presents from Santa as you can see--we almost lost Mitzi. See our Picasa page for pics of the kids opening presents. We had a nice Christmas dinner that Nana made--even though we had to excuse the Buschelmans since they had a baptism party.

From Christmas

On Dec 31st we went to Free State for lunch. L'Opa reserved the upstairs private room for our group. There are still a few extra seats at the table, so only a few more kids allowed. Afterwards we toured the campus in the car and saw the Chi-O fountain look like it was crystalized but really they just used lots of plastic bottles to make it look neat. We saw the new Oread hotel that they are constructing on the north end of campus. Future spot for the Keel-Clan to stay?

From Christmas

We then went to Jaybowl with our friends Matt, Jen, Luke and Faith. We used the bumpers. They have a great deal--one lane of bowling, including shoes, up to 8 people per lane, for just $18 per hour. Not bad entertainment for 4 kids!

From Christmas

We then went back to the Keel house for New Year's Eve. The kids got cool glasses and glowing bracelets. The kids had their countdown at 10pm. Dominic was conked out as was Rose. The adults then counted down at midnight after a night of drinking and games. It was a pretty fun night. Some games (like "Things") are a lot more fun with people drinking. On Jan 1st Katie, Mitzi and I went to Mass since Katie and I couldn't go the night before. We had leftover Christmas dinner for our last meal in Lawrence.

From Christmas

On Jan 2 we went to Salina for one night. We opened presents and found that one of the dogs there ate most of our presents that we had shipped to Salina. The girls were really excited that their "friends" / cousins were able to make it over to play that night.

From Christmas

We drove to KC on the 3rd. We opened presents that night. On the 4th we had a great day. We went to Crown Center to do a little shopping. Then we went to Quiznos for a quick lunch. We then went to see the movie "The Princess and the Frog." The girls loved it, though there were a few scary parts. The most exciting part was when my dad spilled his coke on him and partly on Rose. Luckily she survived, though it was touch and go for a while. We went to 119th street to do a little shopping, then off to Sweet Tomatoes for dinner. It was nice to have a big salad after days of heavy foods.

From Christmas

From Christmas

The next day the girls went to get their hair cut, hopefully to cut down on tangles. Afterwards we had a combination of Yello Sub (ok, really Planet Sub) and Gates BBQ for lunch. We then went to Wonderscope for a few hours. It's a really cool place--take your kids if you go to KC! The girls tested balls rolling, played doctor, went in a Lego submarine, dressed up as astronauts, and pretended to go shopping. For dinner we went to one of the best places in KC--Gojo Japanese Steak House. We all had leftovers.

We drove back on Wednesday the 6th. We left early to miss the big snow storm that was hitting Iowa in the early afternoon. We were lucky and only had a few very light snow showers.

I'm on vacation until next Monday. Plan for me for this week: demolition of our upstairs bathroom!

Christmas

From Collages

We had a great Christmas. I had to work Christmas Eve until about 4:30 and have had to carry my pager around since then since I am on home backup call, but have able to stay home and enjoy the last few days with everyone. We spent a immediate-family only Christmas. On Christmas Eve Katie braved the crowds of kids and took our kids (without me) to Mass at 4pm. There was bedlam from what I heard. Kids everywhere. We weren't able to make it to practice so our kids weren't in the procession, which drove our kids to tears. Then they really didn't do well with the crowd. But, they made it home with no casualties. We had a nice supper and the kids went to sleep in record time after being placed in bed. Santa came by and put together a nice wooden crib for the girls' dolls. He was rewarded with hand-picked cookies and milk.
On Christmas morning the girls actually slept in a bit. Once they got up they were amazed at the presents under the tree. The big unwrapped presents included the crib and a new 2-3 person sled. They both opened their stockings and enjoyed a flashlight, tape measure, balloons to make balloon animals and a snow-globe each. They were allowed to open Santa's gifts, then we had breakfast (homemade cinnamon rolls!) and then we had to go to church since I didn't make it on the 24th. It was much less crowded. When we got home, they were eager to open all the rest of the presents, including one each from grandma and grandpa. They really like their G&G presents (weaving thing for Mary Ann, doll for Rose, water mat for Peter). They also liked the other gits, most notably big (2' x 3') floor puzzles, Disney princess find-things books, fishing game, and Ice Age Meltdown movie from Deacon Scott.
Yesterday (Saturday) we went to Costco and Michaels. When we got back I took the girls sledding after the sun went down. We had a blast on the new sled. It was pretty bumpy with packed snow. So much so that the front of our new sled now had a baseball sized hole in it...
Today we went to to church and then went to a new restaurant for breakfast. Katie took a 2.5 hour nap and we then kept on working trying to get ready for our big vacation. We head to St Louis to see those St Louis Keels. On Tuesday we meet up with the Oklahoma Keels to go visit Oma en route to going to Lawrence. Tuesday will be the Keel Christmas Eve, with Wednesday being Christmas day. We'll see the Thomas-Vogrins on New Years Eve after having lunch at Free State (reserved upper room for the big clan). Then on the 2nd we head to Salina, then on the 3rd back to Kansas City for a few days.
We'll get more pictures up, but we do have some up to mid-December on Picasa. Don't forget to check out our YouTube page too!

Tooth!

We found Peter's first tooth today. It finally poked through the gums. Of course now he seems more fussy. The girls are very excited and join in the congrats we lavish on the little guy.

Back on blog

Life here's going well. Work is going well--I just am finishing up an elective month in neuro-pathology and next month have an elective in headache/pain. So, elective months are easier so stress level low. Being the chief is getting hard at times, yelling at the troops to do things. They don't like being told things.

Katie is about to kill the girls some days. Even though Rose turned 3 yesterday and we cut her some slack, she was still not acting good enough. Katie almost cancelled the birthday. But when she's acting good she's doing great. For some reason her favorite color is purple (I hope she outgrows that!) and is learning things with Katie. She, Katie and Peter go to "little church" on Tuesdays when Mary Ann is in school and I hear she does great there.

Mary Ann is doing great. Sometimes I don't believe Katie about what Mary Ann is doing. Supposedly the teacher can read a sentence out loud and Mary Ann can write it. She has done a project about mammals and wrote 6 things that mammals do/have, and even now can still recite them (which she often does). She's reading short words fairly well. I really can't believe it. We're worried that when she goes to Kindergarten next year she'll just be bored the whole time.

Peter is also doing well. He's rolling over and making cute sounds. He keeps growing. We (ok, actually Katie) started putting him in the bounce-a-roo and now his feet hit the ground and he likes to bounce. He used to sleep from ~9pm to 5am, but now wakes up at midnight. So, while that is still great compared to most kids, it's definitely not letting Katie get as much sleep as she was getting.

I recently went to San Diego for a conference which was great, except being alone really sucked. Katie took the kids to Dayton and I hear they had a great time. It's fun that our kids all play together so well. I hope we can all end up closer together in the future.

We also just went to the Wisconsin Dells last weekend for another conference. Mitzi went too and really was indispensible in helping us watch the kids at the water park, especially when I was in conference.

We're thinking about renovating our upstairs bathroom. The shower stall got another crack in it so we want to just pull out the shower. We want to convert the tub (which has no shower) to a regular shower/tub. We'd like to replace the tub. We will tear down the wall between teh sink and the current shower stall and convert the sink to a 2-basin sink by elongating it into the shower stall space. We've had one guy come look at it and don't have his bid, but some lady today came and gave us a $8000-$15,000 rough bid. Wow...how in the world can it be that much, and how can her estimate be so wide? If it will really cost that much...uh, anybody want to come up and help me renovate a bathroom? Really, if it costs that much I'll just rip out the shower stall myself, install one of those attachable shower heads to the current tub, and just rip out part of the wall and just get someone to install the new sink and cabinets. Crazy.

We've got some pics of my San Diego trip up, we'll get more up soon including Rose's birthday party. Don't forget to check out the youtube videos--we post videos there every so often.

July time

It's still great having Peter around. He's looking older and wiser every day--must be the constant torture from his sisters. He's doing all the baby things great. He might be in a growth spurt since he wants to eat all...the...time. Not that we don't want him to grow, but Katie could use a little more rest.

Mary Ann went to her first day of school today. She started at a Montessori preschool today. She's been really excited about it for several weeks. She really enjoyed it today, bringing home a sheet of practice letters: p, e and t. She does a pretty good job of writing.

Rose is loving being in an open-side crib at night. She seems to relish the freedom that Mary Ann has had for so long. It's tough to tell which kid is which now when one of them comes down the stairs at night. The hardest thing is trying to corral them at night so they don't just keep screaming and giggling and running around the whole upstairs.

We had a great holiday weekend. The Buschelmans came up Friday through Monday. We went boating, went to the Wollersheim winery, splash park, and farmer's market (well, everyone except me). The kids loved being around each other, even if Rose and Dominic took turns hitting each other. It was a lot of fun when the Beier's came over for supper on Saturday and we added yet another kid to the mix.

I'm working night float this month, so that means I'm at work all day Sunday through Monday morning, and Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday nights, 8pm-8am. If I get enough sleep it's great so I can play with the kids and get home-work done during the days, but if I need to sleep the kids aren't always happy that I'm home and not playing with them. I also moved into my new office with the new academic year--the chief resident gets his own office, but being a computer guy I wish the computer wasn't slower than any other computer in the hospital...

Peter--still here!

We are thoroughly enjoying Peter. He is a great baby. He eats very well. He's sleeping very well through the days and nights. He's making good diapers. And...well, that's about all he's doing. He looks really cute.
The girls came back to much appreciation. It's great to have the whole family together. The girls dote on Peter all the time, even if he's sleeping. They like to rock him and poke him in the face. They also like to tell us when he's crying, even if we're holding him.
It's been pretty hot around here. We put out our inflatable pool and the girls love being in it. Katie and I've been working on the garden and yard and we're getting a pretty good looking yard. We harvested some lettuce on Monday and it tasted great. We also had home-grown radishes on it.