Saturday, October 31, 2009 ;
5:15 PM
I check on our reno about 3x a week..
Wed and Fri cos the kids have swimming nearby, and Sunday cos we go to church in the vicinity too.
This past week's update would be that the tiling works have commenced in the kitchen and 2 bathrooms.
I have pictures and paintings and an assortment of furniture (from in laws' place, mom's and from Utah/ Tianjin), so I decided to keep floor/ wall colour neutral. No false ceilings or wall features that are bold or too funky, cos then it'd be tough to match our different stuff with the background colour.
This is the master bedroom bathroom wall tiling (work in progress). But the common bathroom is similar and the kitchen wall is also off-white. We chose larger and longer tiles though, because our apartment is small, and larger longer tiles would make the rooms look more spacious.
The kids liked walking in and out the hacked out part between the study room and living room. I think it's refreshing for them to see such a large hole in the wall. :-) The workers had to remove our window grill to carry out some works. So that's one of the window grills you see.
Huge piles of sand to mix the cement. I caught ds1 in time just before he started using that broom to sweep and mix both piles together!
This is totally unrelated, but I only have this photo to show for the visit I made to my friend who had triplets.
Mary and I went to visit her cos she's due back to teach on Friday (so we had our gathering on Thursday!). She'd taken most of the year off.
She's hired 2 full-time helpers. One to cook and clean the big house, and the other to solely take care of her 5 kids. But even so, she says it is too much work, and she might have to hire yet another helper. Her mom comes once a week, and is unable to help any more than that because her mom helps take care of her sister's kids.
I watched as the helper fed one baby porridge, then the other, and then the third. By then, the 1st one needed some attention so he could fall asleep, then not all would sleep at the same time, and so she was busy all the time. Then one would need a diaper change, and so on and so forth. Really, it is triple the work and more!
Cos they can't sleep together, they would tend to knock each other's heads as they roll about, and they don't wake or sleep or eat at the same time. So it's really tough to get even a minute's rest. Then the helper still has to do the kids' laundry, etc. And the older kids were asking her to get Playdoh and other toys out.
Fortunately, they don't seem to fuss or cry a lot. If they were like my niece or my boys, then that'd be triple the noise as well. They seem to be happy, contented and smily babies. Here are 2 of them. The 3rd one was having his porridge at that time.
They don't look too alike because they're fraternal triplets, not identical. But of course they share similar features just like siblings do.
My friend looks like she has adjusted to a suddenly bigger household pretty well! I take my hat off to her! She's all set to return to work now.
It was such a good chat and great to catch up with each other. Her other helper cooks very well too, so we enjoyed some goodies she whipped up and a slice of the apple strudel that I brought.
We were joking that the next time we meet up, we could do so with all the rest of our families (I only brought ds2 that day and Mary went alone). We won't be able to dine in a normal restaurant for sure! For our 3 families alone, there'd be 6 adults and 10 kids.
rainbows every day, do not worry for the morrow
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The kids liked walking in and out the hacked out part between the study room and living room. I think it's refreshing for them to see such a large hole in the wall. :-) The workers had to remove our window grill to carry out some works. So that's one of the window grills you see.
Huge piles of sand to mix the cement. I caught ds1 in time just before he started using that broom to sweep and mix both piles together!
