Olga and I picked as many ripe strawberries as we could find today. You can see the plants in the bed against the garage behind her head. They don’t get a whole lot of sunlight, but it stays nice and warm next to the wall, and I think they like that.

Of course, greedy as we are, we gobbled them up while Gavin was napping. (Sorry, Gav.)

Upon waking from his nap, Gavin did his Harry Potter impersonation all over the yard with an old broom.

This rose bush has behaved very badly all season, and finally it is starting to bloom properly. It was making these massive buds that would swell and start to bloom, then suddenly get so heavy that the stem would bend over and the entire mass of petals would drop right off onto the patio in a globe of pink, then rot. Now it looks like it’s going to explode into a bouquet right on the bush, and the stems seem to be supporting the blooms. Anyone have any idea what is going on with this bush?

I want to remember this day forever.

After ripping out the carpets and associated hardware, my back begged for a bit of recovery. So I went outside and pulled weeds in our berry patch. And lo, we discovered berries.

And my goodness, they are perhaps the sweetest strawberries I’ve ever tasted (and I grew up amidst miles and miles of strawberry fields, mind you). They are tiny and strangely shaped, but sweet and juicy.

After gorging ourselves on as many ripe berries as we could find (I think we got two each… I might have sneaked a third and not told anyone about it…) the kids took a nap at the same time. (By the way, that is Olga’s new rug from Ikea, a trip of which I shall tell in detail later, as it deserves its own post.)

I come from a long line of wall-to-wall carpet-haters. Last weekend I put my newly-graduated-from-highschool brother, Jacob, to work helping me rip all the carpet out of my house. It took us two days to get the carpet out, the tack strips pried up, and all the staples pulled out (of which there were thousands). It was absolutely backbreaking work, but it didn’t even compare to how hard it was to scrub the original linoleum tile floor underneath. Getting rid of the carpets has also gotten rid of that stale, closed-up old house smell. Our allergies are a lot better now, too.

I’m going to put in a brand new, totally rockin’ bamboo floor this summer.

I really should be editing furiously, then packing for my trip to Wisconsin, but I’ve gotten so many requests for photos of our new house (okay, Mom, you can stop, now!) that I’ve put together a little tour. We are wasting no time with the renovations, so these photos are from a couple weeks ago. I’ll show you some progress photos soon.