Building and Remodeling

Greetings family,

The controlled chaos at the Casa de Webb continues as we slowly make progress on the home remodel.  At any given moment you can see what I call the "Pigpen dust cloud" effect where Kendra and I look like Pigpen from Charlie Brown.  On some days entire rooms look that way.  Here's a kitchen a few days ago.  We laugh about it and have grown way too comfortable with this disaster area.  and our microwave broke.  still laughing about it...  nothing gets us down and we know our functional house is just a few short weeks away from becoming a maintainable reality.

One of our guiding principles for the home remodel was to get Easton and Layla's room settled as a top priority.  Kids need to have stability more than adults.  Easton is happy to have his room, but he's super excited about having his toys back.  It's Lego city in his room again.  He's already reassembled every star wars and jurrasic world lego set.  now, if he just had shelves big enough to display them...

Layla's room is more of an aqua than Easton's light blue.  Her new bedding and accessories, i mean stuffed animals, are neatly organized in her space.  She has new paint and new flooring to go along with her new bedding so it's like a whole new world for her.

The other adventure we had was the pinewood derby with Easton's cub scouts. This was our first try at building any wood craft like a slot car.  We went to a "build clinic", which was just a guy's garage full of wood working equipment who allowed Easton's group of cub scouts to work on their cars.   The bonus of the adventure was the "sibling" category where Layla built her own car and raced against other cub scout sisters.  Here she is sanding her car body in the wood shop full of boys and men.

Easton chose his car design from a stack of papers and I used the band saw to cut out something that resembled a car.

Not exactly a master piece, but as you can tell he didn't even notice.

The worked for an hour here at the wood shop and then we put in another couple of hours at home building and painting the coolest cars we could think up.

Layla gladly used the power tools including the dremel sander tool. Girls and boys should both know how to create with their hands and I'm glad Layla was able to join in the fun.

This is the scene on race day where 75 kids and cars ran down the track 4 times each.  Do the math and you get an idea of the long, enthusiastic day we enjoyed.

Layla was so busy being social with the other cub sisters that she didn't even care to take a picture with her car.  Easton was considerate enough to pose with his after the event was over.  Neither of them won even a single race, but that is because we didn't put in the time to polish the nails, buy graphite for the wheels, or spend hours getting the weight perfect.  We weren't there for the winner's circle anyway so I consider it a great experience for all of us.

Our house-mate, Alaysha doesn't make it on the blog much because she's busy working and volunteering so we don't see her as much as we would like, but I still get to have regular conversations in the evening about life and God and her future.  She met some new friends at church who invited her to a formal evening event.  Kendra jumped right in to help her pick out a dress, do her hair, and get ready for the special event.  I especially like how Layla is seeing what it means to be a modest, classy young adult who is developing her character and integrity.

The finish line for our insanely full schedules is just a few weeks away...  i can't wait...