Magrilless

A great week. We just played and went to the pool and hung out with friends and cooked and read and generally had just a good low-key week. She was in time-out 3 times before lunch one day, but that was for infractions like “If you do that one more time, you have to go to time out. Understand? Okay then, time out.” So she’s testing what boundaries are real and so forth. But all in all she’s paying attention and listening and all that good sort of stuff. Oh yeah, and there was the one time when she got bored in the car and gagged herself for giggles. She was surprised by the result, I think. And didn’t much appreciate being hosed down in the shower. Hopefully that will teach the lesson itself.

I love this video for several reasons: 1)It demonstrates how incredibly well Maggie knows her US geography. She can do this with almost all 50 states, by the way. I look at the “ages 5 and up” scrawled across the top of the puzzle and wonder what we’re going to be doing when she’s in kindergarten. Electrical circuits and simple machines? 2)She loves this dress. It’s her favorite. She asks to wear it every day. Laundry twice a week plus using clothes two days in a row equals wearing this dress half the week. 3)How quickly can we change gears? Puzzle puzzle states states states I have to poop. Go go go!

As promised, here is the story of our house becoming stable. Here’s the deal: our house is on the side of a mountain and the mountain is made of shale (slippery stuff) and on top of the shale is lovely clay soil (which absorbs water like nobody’s business). So a lot of the houses in this part of town are moving around a lot, and ours was no exception. As a result, there are cracks in a lot of the walls, the doors were cut to funny shapes so they’d actually close or some doors didn’t close at all, and the foundation of the house had some cracks and splits. You can be sure we had a structural engineer come and look around above and below ground before we bought the place, to make sure we weren’t going to wake up one morning with half our house in the front yard. He made some recommendations, we verified his ideas and added some, and this is the project that resulted.

First things first — stop water from seeping down the mountain to the soil under our house. This was the biggest factor in the house moving every year; soil gets wet and swells, house goes up; soil dries out and sinks, house goes down; crick; crack; crick; crack. The solution was to dig a perimeter foundation drain around the house. That’s a fancy way of saying you dig a ditch, lay down some gravel and porous plastic pipe, cover it up, and forget it’s there. Then all the moisture takes the path of least resistance (our pipe path around the house, not under it) and drains out another non-porous pipe to the street.

Next thing we had to address was the amount the front of the house had sunk due to shale slippage. The middle of the house was a good 3 inches taller than the front door, which is fun for rolling little trucks and getting rid of unwanted guests, but not so great for door frames and window frames and hanging pictures (which wall do you square corners to?), not to mention you feel drunk walking around even stone cold sober. Solution: drill helical piers down until they hit bedrock and then prop the house’s foundation on those at the correct level. Which isn’t quite as much work as it sounds. But you do have to have the correct kind of (dry) weather for a while, and all the laborers available, and all the parts in one place. So our house looked like this (yes, with the bobcat too) for about a month. “Thanks for letting us join the neighborhood. Now we’re building a huge moat around our house to keep everyone out and letting large pieces of equipment rust in the front yard. Got a problem with that?”

Eventually everything fell into place and six of these babies were inserted around the south front and east side of the house. Down 27 feet, in case anyone is wondering. They also put in a couple of steel plates (like at the top left of the picture) to keep the foundation together where the cracks had formed over the last 55 years.

Now we’re ready for leveling day! Project Manager Mr. Mark came in with his surveyors’ equipment and measured all over the house. And then the outside team started cranking their jacks in coordinated fashion (“We’re gonna do 5! Ready? Crank. Crank. Crank. Crank. Crank. Stop!”) and the house popped and creaked and Mark measured and remeasured and they cranked some more and Mark measured some more and the house groaned itself into alignment. Ta da! A level house! And miraculously all the doors in the house all of a sudden shut (except the front door — oops) and no windows burst and no pipes were ripped apart.

Waiting for perfect weather again, we were ready for the last phase: relaying concrete. They had to replace the top part of the driveway, the front stoop, the back stoop, and we added a little patio under the front window while they were at it. Six guys, running up our steep driveway with wheelbarrows full of wet cement and furiously shoveling and smoothing and barricading us in the house for a day. And then it was done and we have our house ready for living in for the next 55 years.

It was a bit frustrating at times (seeing that bobcat and moat at your house really gets to you after awhile). It took a lot longer than we thought (advertised time: 3 days; actual time: 5 weeks and 1 day) and was almost twice as expensive as we hoped (27 feet is a long way down). But adding this cost to what we paid to purchase the house — it’s still significantly under the asking price and way below what other people are selling their houses for in this neighborhood. And way worth it for crazy reasons like not having to repaint inside every year as cracks reappear, and being able to add a second story if we wanted to, and not having doors shaped like trapezoids that don’t shut anyway.

Now on to fun projects. Like kitchen remodeling and bathroom renovating and floor touch ups and fireplace refacing and . . .

Yes, that’s right. Maggie is now out of her crib! For a couple weeks we’ve had her bed set up in the guest room (since it was the guest bed) and have been talking about moving it into her room. She was bringing toys to climb up with and pretended to sleep on it and asked me several times last week to put it in her room. So on Saturday we undertook The Change and she slept better for both naptime and overnight than she has been doing in her crib. Astonishing! Both Bill and I were ready for some fights over staying in bed or staying in her room, but she’s just fallen right asleep. Well, okay, on Sunday nap I did have to go in and remove the fifty states puzzle and trade her for lots of stuffed animals. But then right asleep right away. Woo hoo!

Maggie’s New Year resolution: to sleep in a big girl bed. We bought a railing for our current guest bed and Maggie and I put it together in preparation for moving the whole thing into her room. That’s her trying to hang parts of the safety railing on the tree like candy canes. So far she’s been playing on her new bed every day and we talk about how it will become hers pretty soon. She likes to pretend to sleep on it and have me cover her up with blankets. So we’re on our way I think.

Things Maggie is beginning to master: pronouns (“no, I can’t” and “picture of you, Mama”); peeing on the toilet (she’s beginning to tell me at least once a day when she needs to go); taking off and putting on shirts and jackets (she’s not interested in trying pants or shoes or anything else below the equator); whining (I try to stay unemotional to downplay its effectiveness but gosh darn it if it doesn’t grate on me). Things Maggie still needs plenty of practice at: pooping on the toilet (still only the one successful venture last week); smiling when told (it still just looks like a painful grimace when she tries to smile on purpose — like in the bottom picture from a birthday party last week); eating green things (this has persisted from sub-one-year-oldness — her only green foods are sometimes peas and sometimes bell peppers unless I go to great lengths to hide spinach or something else easily disguised).