KaPow!

We had quite an interesting week at our house. Here's a recap:
After almost two months of living in chaos with torn-up floors and stairs, tools everywhere, closets emptied and jammed into living spaces, garage and kitchen filled with lumber and tools, and a half inch of sawdust on Every.Single.Surface in the house - - I believe the end of construction may be in sight. May be. I don't want to jinx anything. But we are planning to lay the final pieces tonight on the stairs. After that, we need our contractor to come install some rails for us. Then we'll have some finishing work, like reinstalling the baseboards and spackling and painting, but that is it. Why does every home improvement project take ten times longer than you think? And how do messy people live like that?!? Our house is far from perfectly ordered and clean. At any given moment there are toys littering floors, mail and magazines on tables, closets disorganized and too full, clean clothes in baskets in our room....but living in the mess we have completely throws everything in my life off. It makes me stress-y, grumpy, snappish and lazy to boot. I cook less. I exercise less. I don't really clean even the things that I could clean. Its terrible. So, needless to say, I am soooooo ready to get things back to normal and enjoy our beautiful 'new' house! The floors do look amazing, by the way. The stress will be a small price to pay when its all done.
Hattie has been wonderful through the whole process. Kids are so resilient. Her play space has been cramped and littered with tools and closet junk, and it doesn't even affect her. She's awesome (have I mentioned that before?). We went last week to tour a preschool that was recommended to us by a couple of our neighbors. Brian and I both had minor reservations about it - mostly just that it is a 10 minute drive away and we know there are one or two preschools within walking distance. However, as soon as we walked in the door and met the director we were completely sold. The classrooms were great, class sizes small, the cirriculum is well-organized, and the director was the sweetest lady who was wonderful with Hattie. We spent almost an hour walking around and looking at rooms and speaking with the director. I think Hattie will love it there! She will miss the cut-off to start kindergarten next year, and this school has a Pre-K class, so she will be attending for two years if all goes according to plan. We're all very excited!
Lastly, and on a CRAZY-strange note, we experienced an explosion at our house on Saturday night. A large explosion. We had been gone all night at a birthday party for my father-in-law, and Brian and I were laying in bed when we heard a HUGE noise. I thought someone had thrown a brick or put a shotgun blast through our front plate glass window, but there was a weird pressure-change that occurred with it too. We raced down the stairs (I seriously don't think either one of us touched the floor or the stairs) to find that a 4-Liter glass jug of homemade dandelion wine* had exploded on our countertop. And this was no small explosion. It sent glass almost 30 feet up into our family room, embedded shards of glass a half inch into the drywall and left several good size dents in the side of our fridge. There is an indentation in our ceiliing, and the window 8 feet across broke. There was a layer of fine glass on every surface in our kitchen. And stinky, sticky dandelion wine everywhere. We spent an hour sweeping, cleaning and bleaching before calling it a night (it was 1am at this point). Yesterday we spent another couple hours cleaning and mopping before we felt comfortable enough to go barefoot again. I am sooooooo incredibly thankful that we were upstairs when it happened. I shudder to think of the outcome had we been downstairs. Can't even go there. But, we're fine and that is all I'm focusing on. We ate our breakfast out on the porch and watched a great rainstorm while the house aired out. And our kitchen is cleaner than it has been in two months, so there is a nice side to every story.
* Sidenote: My friend recently made us a yummy batch of beer and we had a cocktail party to share it. He brought the jug of wine with him that night. No one drank much of it, and there wasn't enough alcohol in it to keep mold from growing inside it. I had meant to pour it out a couple days before when I saw it had gone bad, but then I put some other bottles in front of it to return to him and forgot all about it. The mold must've been a huge gas-producer and the pressure caused the explosion. KaPow! Ah, the power of microbes...