New Baby, New House, and a Wedding

Obviously it's been forever since I've posted anything. I had every intention of doing one nice long post with a few pictures of the last year, but blogger keeps freezing on me and I'm about to give up altogether, so as a final attempt I am going to split up the year, hoping that maybe a post with less pictures has a better chance at survival. This is a quick overview of our Spring/Summer of 2010.

Our biggest news since our last post is of course our NEW BABY!!!

Alexander Clark Garcia. Born May 19th 2010

A more current picture of our sweet boy.

Being the third child, life did not slow down much for him . . .

Emma turned two shortly after he was born.

Here she is sporting her gifts. Can you get any more girly than that?

We continued going to parks for playgroup

Having water fights at home.

Going to Uncle David's Wedding in Utah

(Yes, we survived the 24 hr, 29 min drive each way)
I dragged Clark all over town house hunting. I am embarrassed to admit that in the process, I think I took more pictures of houses than I did of my ever patient newborn. But after offers on three houses, Sergio conceded to let me have my way and we bought this one.

Despite all the house pictures I took I didn't get around to taking one after we bought the house until the fall.

My Favorite Room!

Sergio kept complaining I would get blindsighted by sunrooms. Our breakfast room is not exactly a sunroom, but it's pretty close.

We quickly discovered that owning a home is far more time consuming (and economically consuming) than renting an apartment. No more calling maintenance because the garbage disposal is clogged or the air filter needs to be changed, or the light fixtures I can reach burnt out. . . Our biggest dilemma was the "dog room". The basement had an unfinished room where the previous owners kept the dogs. It had plywood drilled onto the frame of the wall on the unfinished side where the dogs had clawed into it. The room smelled quite strongly of dog, but we mistakenly assumed that if we got rid of the wood and cleaned a bit, our problems would be over. Unfortunately we found the dogs also had clawed on the dry wall before the plywood had been put up and we found their favorite spot for doing their business. We ended up tearing down the wall, which in and of itself was quite fun. I'm sure Sergito and Emma would have enjoyed it, but we decided to do it after they were asleep on the off chance they might try it on a different wall later on. We also discovered that Sergio can easily punch through dyrwall and that Adriana is quite a weakling, not that that was suprising. . . So for now we have a hole were the wall was which is temporarly patched up with plastic.
The first real project we took on was our porch:

Here it is "BEFORE"

And here it is "AFTER" our expert cleaning, sanding and staining.