Finding Eli: Week 1 of Real Life

Its easy to forget the state of your home when you have been away from it for 3 weeks. But let me back-up a little for those of you who don't already know. On June 1st we became first time home owners. That gave us a month and 6 days to get the new house ready before our 3 week trip to Thailand and return with a baby. During that time I was working a full time job, and Jon was off from work for the summer. We had ambitious goals on how to modify the house before we moved in. Jon was working on the house himself with a hired handyman, Jeremy and some help from his buddy Nick. Jon was able to replace the sliding glass doors with french doors, he was able to replace rotting floors all the way to the foundation in the dinning room, he was able to install stained glass lights, recessed lights, ceiling fans, and a bathroom light/fan combo and have it vent to the outside of the house (that meant cutting a hole in the roof), he even laid hard wood floors in the living room and dinning room and widened a doorway. A week before we were to leave for Thailand Jon began working on the lower level of our house. He ripped out all of the ceilings. They looked like the top of a lemon meringue pie, they were pretty gross. He and Jeremy hung the dry wall and began the puttying process. It was at this time that my parents came up to help us move. With the lower level of the house still under construction we had to stuff everything into the garage and in the main living areas of the house. Two days before we left (4th of July night) our dishwasher failed and flooded the kitchen. Fortunately Jon was home and the water mostly went into a vent that spouted into the basement (which was a mess anyway). The dishwasher was covered under the home warranty (sort of). The the following day as Jon began to pack his clothes for our 3 week adventure; he started laundry. As if on command both the washer and dryer broke. We had an extra set that was ours before the move. Jon had to physically move them without a dolly all by himself and re-hook up the other set before he could do his laundry so he could pack... Then he found that the hose leading from the dryer to the outside of the house was leaking water into the ceiling and walls. Needless to say the lower level is still a dusty dirty construction zone, and there is a lot of work needed to be done.
We returned from Thailand to the house in this state... Its been a long week. Eli has been a trooper. He just goes with the flow as long as he is with Jon. When we returned to a huge stack of mail we got a couple surprises. 1st our home owners insurance inspected our house while we were gone and said if we didnt make some changes soon our coverage was going to be dropped. We were still working on the house so of course it looked like a construction zone, now we have to speed it up to meet their deadline. The other was a court date set for Monday morning to appeal our home assessment/tax increase based on the too high assessment. As if that wasn't enough on Monday night I was paying bills and decided to check our lease for the rental house we still had. We still had un-moved furniture, kitchen ware, and stuff in storage over there. I thought we had the house until August 19th. Turns out our lease ended on July 31st! That gave us 2 days to completely move out and clean it and take care of the yard work (which was growing for 3 weeks). We didnt want to have to pay August's rent if we didnt have to. We hustled and got it done.

Aunt Barb got Eli this fun water toy, but I dont think this is the way it was meant to be played with.

In between all the chaos we tried to do some fun little things with Eli. We were happy to find that while we were gone a Menchie's Fro Yo place moved into Erie. At first Eli wasnt too sure about it, but then he couldnt get enough. We also took him to a playground. He wasnt too sure what to do there, he seemed to have more fun pushing his own stroller around.