boys, baseball, and beautiful wood

Okay, so I haven't updated the blog in a while because we were busy doing this:

And then we went and did this:

and while we gone, my Tretter did this:

Yes, that is a nine-year-old, doing homework on a laptop, in a vehicle. Hello, 2010, where were you when I was in 3rd grade? Oh, yeah, it was 1980. 

So eventually, the floor progressed like this:

and finally, it looks kind of like this:

Only it is completely finished now in the downstairs and we have enough left over to do the hallway upstairs (yippee!) and then we will be done for a while. In all of that hullabaloo, we removed the wood floor from the dining room, ground off the nails, carried it upstairs, removed the carpet from the boys' room, laid the old dining room wood floor in the boys' room, and laid our new Acacia Brazilian Cherry floors in the dining room and family room. It's gorgeous if I do say so myself.

In the meantime, since that whole process took about 3 and a half weeks, we had baseball

If you have a magnifying glass you will see Whitaker on second base, Tretter up to bat, and John as the third base coach. If you don't have a magnifying glass, you'll just have to take my word for it.

We also had Mother's Day, and this is my present:

They cleaned, vacuumed, and washed my vehicle for me, which was adorable, and a very nice gift. It was much-needed and much-appreciated. Until they vacuumed up my charger-cover.....and John had to fish it out of the new shop-vac.

and I, of course, thought this was hilarious.

We also had a rainstorm that prompted large trash bags for a slip and slide,

and a triathlon at the boys' elementary school.

How cute is that? All those little healthy kids warming up!

Finally, we also had an MRI on Whitaker that lasted an hour and 15 minutes (followed by barbecue ribs at Outback Steakhouse) and met with the neurosurgeon again. His scans had not changed - no improvement, but no increase in severity either - in the four months that he has been taking growth hormone treatments, so it seems he will need to have his Chiari I Malformation surgically "repaired." That seems like quite a euphemism to me, but I am the mom. The surgeon told us all this other info too, that I will post later. maybe. if I feel like it.