I felt like I need a week to recover from last week 🙂

He said

After our last week of vacation at the trailer, this week was full of our regular routine of work, Emelia’s sports, and the regular weekly life that dominates our schedule. Initially the thought was we would get up to the trailer last night to stay there for today but with my shift being 11:00am to 8:00pm yesterday it would mean we wouldn’t get up to the trailer until almost 10:00pm so we decided just to stay home. It meant we could get some stuff done around the house that we needed to, and as much as we’d love to be up at the trailer, the whirlwind trips are never as good when you get up their late. Next weekend the schedule works out much better for us so we will have the night there next Saturday.

The big thing we were able to get back to was mudding and taping the drywall wall that we put for Emelia’s bedroom. We have been sidetracked for a good month now obviously with all the life events we have been focused on—most notably the work settling Mom & Dad’s estates. But, things have started to settle down, we’re done our vacation, so we’re in the place now where we can get back to work on finishing this project. Today after I got done my club bike ride with LCC, Danielle & I got properly got down to business with the mudding and taping. No one I know that had done any form of renovation loves this part of the job, but it had to be done, so we finally got rid of the procrastination and got to it. It’s going to be tedious and a pain, but hopefully this time, next week we will be ready for Emelia and her crew of buds to start on painting!

Last week the other thing I forgot to mention in all of our Jeep talk was I was in the next bike race of my season, the BIG Gravel Grind, a 40km gravel race out of Thedford (near Grand Bend). All season long so far my results this year have been better than my results last year. My times have been faster and I have finished higher in the standings which has felt pretty great. But, this was the first time I had done this race so I had no comparable so it was just a race to see how I would do. Well, imagine my delight when about 15 km into the race I was able to get to the front of the group. I managed to keep myself there for a good 10km before a few people overtook me, But I managed to hold off for the rest of the race and rode in to the finish in 7th place and inside a top ten result. I was quite happy with that result given the extreme heat we were plugging through and tough climbs into a headwind their were on the course.

This week, we got out to see Emelia’s softball game on Monday. We were disappointed in the game that we missed while we were up at the trailer, Emelia got a double, a triple, and stole home. She had a phenomenal game that heard about as it was happening from our friends, parents of one of Emelia’s teammates for the last couple of seasons. This game on Monday was a really exciting one against the other team from North London which had some teammates that Emelia has played with past seasons as well – most notable Chelsea her high school friend and work buddy. At any rate Emelia’s team won a one-run nail-biter that went right to the last inning. But the highlight of the night was seeing Emelia catch a fly ball that made its way out to her in centre field. The irony was that the ball was hit by Chelsea who came over after the inning to tell us she was “excited for Emelia for catching it, but bummed for herself that it was caught.”

This week, we’re really going to double down on the work to wrap up Emelia’s room so she can finally get to the painting stage and made even finally call it done. She has been super patient with us through all the upheaval of our last couple of months, but both Danielle & I now want to get this done for her, so she can feel like it’s finally, fully her space and get on to enjoying it rather than living through the renovation. With any luck and good progress this week, we should be a lot closer to that space. And able to get back up to the trailer next weekend… Fingers crossed.

She said

This week has felt like we were able to get back into a more normal routine. We were both back at work, John’s lunches, breaks and after work have been tied up with phone calls dealing with more details around Helen and Doug’s estates. There has been a bit of headway in that regard and hopefully this week there will be more in place so we can have the big to do items done and let the lawyers do their work. It is a lot of work, especially for John but with Matthew and Shawn’s support we have gotten a lot done.

Back to work and back to regular routines for all of us this week. Emelia spent a fair bit of the first few days of the week was getting Emelia’s sleep caught up. You spend essentially your first week of the summer partying with your friends you don’t get a lot of sleep, eat garbage food and shockingly enough you need a crapload of sleep to get caught up. Emelia did spent much of the first days sleeping her days away. Monday she slept most of the day, once we pulled her out of bed we made our way over to celebrate our neice Abi’s 5th birthday. It was a night full of family time and laughs. The last 5 years have gone by in a flash and we have loved seeing our sweet girl grow up in front of us.

After Abi’s birthday we had to run over to Emelia’s softball game, as John mentioned we missed the best game of Emelia’s time in softball so we were excited to meet up and see her play. She has finally got the confidence and come into her own. Again she got on base, got a solid hit and caught an incredible pop up. She was busy and covering centre field really well and had an absolute blast! We have made great friends through Emelia’s time in softball and love cheering their daughter along and they are great giving us an update any game we cannot be at. It was a perfect summer night.

The rest of the week for Emelia was mainly work, sleep, work, sleep, cheer, work and finally on the weekend time with friends. For Emelia cheer has kept her pretty busy most of the weekend. This weekend was her teams choegroaphy weekend. Emelia has sort of struggled this season, her role the team has changed and she has been a bit frustrated. She came home on Saturday again frustrated, we are proud of how she is handling this, she is going into training with a very positive attitude and working really hard to be the best in whatever role the coaches want her to do. Today she came home and said she was happy to be being utilized a bit more and is determined to give it her all, to do the best job no matter what she is doing and seems pretty excited with the high level pyramid the team is doing. I am excited to see how this comes together in the next few weeks, see where she lands in the routine and know that she will give it her all and full dedication.

For John and I today was shifting our focus getting things moving in the right direction in the renovations in Emelia’s room. With everything that has happened over the last few months in our lives Emelia’s room has been done when we could and right now we are behind where we thought we would be. Our plan originally was to have the drywalling done in time so that we could have Emelia’s friend Carter do the taping and mudding. Life got really busy, not only for John and I but for Emelia and Carter trying to wrap up high school. Well Carter is now off for the summer to Bon Echo for his job, so John and I are taking on the taping and mudding. Today we got the first coat on and will keep working on that this week. Our hope is to have it all done this week so we can hand the room over to Emelia and her friends to get the painting done. Emelia is excited to have this room done and painted so we can do the fun stuff, decorate and make it her dream mini apartment. John and I know she is missing out on the dorm experience so we want to make sure this room is exactly what she hoped it would be.