The rooster enters the scene... we finally got a rooster and it's a Polish rooster! Check out his cool feather "crown".

Here's picture of what the basement looks like at this time, waiting for concrete to be poured...

After almost 2 weeks since the house fire, we're finally back home at our rental house. All of the repairs haven't been finished yet but we can do without the upstairs space just fine. I have furniture and things piled everywhere from the carpets being cleaned by the fire restoration company. So while I dig out from this mess, I won't be updating as much as I'd like but I'll add construction pictures as I can, regardless.

The basement walls are in!

Now before you locals see it in the local papers, I wanted to tell you we had a small house fire today, upstairs. We're all safe and sound and there was little damage. There is a great deal of soot upstairs, however, where mainly Jacob's stuff resided. So we're counting our blessings that it wasn't worse but being in the middle of a small town that had a slow news day meant that two town's newspaper reporters showed up as well as an AM radio station. ;-/ It appears to have started with some kind of small appliance/radio or something, according to the fire marshall.

I'll share a little of my weekend with you. We had our church's annual children's Christmas program on Sunday afternoon, Epiphany. Vince is on nightshift so the whole day I was on my own with the kids: Mass, then Sun. school, lunch, Christmas program at 3 and then the junior youth group meeting at 5. Believe it or not, sometime between our lunch and 1:45 pm, I lost my keys. I looked for nearly an hour with the kids' helping (and grumbling). *Finally* I had to call my mom to rescue us and get us to the play on time. While she zoomed the 8 miles our way to get us, I called Fr. Ned to tell him to relay our delay to my cousin (the choir director) and to offer up a quick prayer to St. Anthony to help me find my keys. Thankfully, we were only 5 mins. late and there weren't a great deal of folks there, anyway. If my 4 hadn't been there, there would have been amost a quarter of the roles missing!

Well, it went well and was just a joy to see. A fellow in our parish is making DVDs of the performance (proceeds going to a church project) so we'll get to relive Lucas' 3-year old antics, Jacob and Grace's solos and all the giggles for years to come. Jacob was slightly nervous about singing the whole "Little Drummer Boy" song by himself but he was awesome! Afterwards we had snacks and lots of compliments and then went to my parents' house for an enjoyable quiet meal before heading home.

So then today the weather was just wonderful and I decided to enjoy it while we could. 65 degrees! We walked to McD's and then made a trip to the playground. Here's a picture of Grace holding Emma this afternoon in the yard.... Grace looks a little drunk with her eyes starting to blink!In the spirit of the Haiku-writing homeschoolers everywhere, I made up a little haiku while watching the kids play on the playground. Here goes:

Beautiful weather
Kids playing in the sandbox
God, I am grateful.

Oh, and I did finally find the keys... right beside the baby's carseat in the van...

The second day of digging

And here's near the end of the first day of digging.

It begins!

Here's Lucas on Christmas morning openning a John Deere toy tractor. Nothing better than a real "boy toy" for my little buddy. He's favorite toy of the day was a Playmobil pirate ship, however. He's absolutely thrilled with it. Argh-mattey!

Here are the Parente girls on Christmas morning (Mary, Emma and Grace). Emma's cheesy grin is just heart-warming... I love seeing those little teeth.

This is a recent picture of my oldest (Jacob) holding my youngest (Emma). Jacob looked pretty much JUST like Emma when he was her age but not quite as hefty by about 6 lbs. It's hard to believe he's already 12.

Here's a picture of the kids running down the hill from our home site to see the goats and chickens... you can really see the scenery from this photo. We'll have a great view from our back porch!