Our cute baby boy! Read from bottom of post to top.

He's been our earliest to try crawling. He's just almost ready to take off. A few more days of rocking back and forth on hands and knees, and then he'll be figuring out moving forward without the flop. And then, stairs are next! Watch out world!
Good Job!
Then flop back on the floor, a few inches further than where you started!
Teeter for a moment or two. . .
This is how it works: You push up onto your hands and knees. . .
Lizzy loves her brother, too.

My what big Eyes you have!!
What a grin! He's pretty sure he's adorable!
Learning to roll has it's drawbacks. He got stuck against the wall at Grandma's house! Mom, put down that camera and rescue me!!!
Before, and after he falls asleep, for one of the last times in his moses basket.

Lovin' the bouncer.

Oh, come on! It's not that bad!

He is such a happy baby!

AWWWW!!

That's right! I'm a cutie!

Super Baby, to the rescue! (He did that all on his own!)
Now they've got him surrounded!
A moment free from the tyranny of big sisters. Ope! there's another one!



This is a long overdue look at Taggart Morgan, in no particular order, and largely sans captioning. I don't know why that is underlined.

I just found out you can't rotate them once they are on the post. Oh well. This is just so cute of Ally and Tag together. He's always been a little koala baby.
Crazy Eyes Lily has him now!! That's a rather ineffectual punch, little brother!
I so love snuggling with a new baby. Maybe a week old here.

This was his first Day. April 3rd 2010, almost six months ago. He's sitting with Grandpa Morgan, while mommy and daddy sleep, and the siblings mill around. Lily had to be restrained from the very beginning so she'd be gentle with him.

It does seem that the youngest pictures are at the bottom, and the most recent are at the top of the post.

And so it begins...

...er, well, continues.

"Help me Robert, Help, help me Robert"

Thanks for looking at this:

For our first phase of the Kitchen Remodel Project, we are going to convert a front hall closet into a kitchen pantry. The picture below is an artist's rendition of what the final project may look like. We're not really in love with the blue and the green parts, but we're certain that we really don't like what they are drawn over. Except for the picture of Christ, that we really like. . . er, love. Of course.

The perspective is a bit skewed, but it conveys the basic idea. The stove will move over to where the dark brown cupboard is, and the pantry will take about a foot more on either side of the closet. The cupboard that is over the stove will have to be removed. We'll change the door from the hallway side to drywall and framing, and put a 45-degree angle door in, that faces the kitchen. Shelves and organizers, and all the miscellaneous nonsense on my counters will be tucked into the new pantry and Marie will cartwheel across the yard for joy!

The next project will entail creating a new traffic pattern for the kitchen. As it is right now, our kitchen is just a glorified hallway from the front part of the house to the sun-room and basement. We want to close off the current door, and pass-thru and make a new access in the far right side of the living room that is four feet wide. The new entry would also require cutting back counter-top and removing some currently almost useless drawers and an upper cabinet. I'll have to relocate my fridge as well, probably putting it over next to the new pantry. Framing in the open spaces seems pretty straight-forward, but this is a load-bearing wall, and we are understandably wary of knocking parts of it out without some help. Let me know what you think, and thanks again for looking this over.

Ty basically figures he can handle the pantry project, but I think we'd benefit from some guidance. And your help would be invaluable with the new entrance to the kitchen.

I'm thinking that there are some great deals on cabinets from newspaper classifieds and craig's list, so that's probably what we'll be replacing our crap ones with if we can find something suitable. We are not going to spend fifty thou doing this, but we do want to pay for your help, and not sparingly. If we can get good help, we can make do with second-hand cabinets.

There's a new baby at our house!!

Literally!

Taggart Ray Morgan was born on April 3, 2010 at 11:45 am after a stinking-hard, eighteen-hour-long labor, and the worst pushing EVER!!! He was born at home, surrounded by family and friends and weighed 10 pounds, 2 ounces, and was 22 inches long. His hands are about three inches across.

He's enormous. But still little, anyway. I'm well aware that Mom has me beat here and there's no way I'm going after that championship title. No thank you.

He is such a cutie though and we love him so very much. He has dark, shiny, soft short hair, and velvety, albeit peeling skin, dark baby blue eyes and the sweetest little lips and busy baby tongue!! From this side of things it is easy to forget that he was 13 and a half days overdue!

Tyler is elated. The siblings are delighted.

Lily is ULTRA-possessive. ("My baby! My turn!")

And Marie is exhausted--but she didn't tear, even a little bit! YAY!!

Hugs and kisses to all! Thank you for your love and prayers!

Now we just need a collective fast to end this perpetual winter weather!!! This is the view from our back door, right now. No kidding. It's obscene! We're supposed to get 12 inches. . . grrrr!

Before Pictures. . .

Not sure why this is underlined.  This is the south side of our garage, notice the garage door in the front, fence in the back, and the brown trim and broken gutter.

This is the front of our home, from the street, still the brown trim and gutters, but this pic shows the improvements we made to the front garden beds, but it's from earlier this year, when none of the plants had come to life yet.

South side of the Garage, just dirt. It was weeds and garbage, mainly cigarette butts.

This is the front garden bed closest to the garage.  Very weedy, and full of garbage.  It did have tulips, sedum, an orange daisy and iris that have done well, with a bit of dividing.  The concrete bricks along the front of it are put in wrong, and they're just in front of the sidewalk.  We took them from here and put them on the other side of the door to build up that bed.  Also, they had black plastic edging along the edge of the concrete driveway.  Go figure.

These three pictures are of the south end of the back yard.  There was a cruddy old fence and gate around an even cruddier old rodent-infested woodpile.  Also a lovely chain-link fence spanned the entire depth of the yard from the gate to the back of the lawn.  The area on the other side of the fence had been a junk yard and car lot, and was still full of bit and pieces of garbage.

Haven't you always wanted a totally random lamp post growing out of your back patio?

In this one, you can see how deep that back corner is, way out there. We really do have 

a large lawn, which is wonderful of course. The white irrigation riser was inconvenient here, 

so this year Ty moved it, which impressed me greatly!

This was what the front garden bed looked like before we did anything with it.  There weren't gutters along the front of the house on the north side, so all the water just pounded into the ground where it fell from the roof.  The edging bricks are put in with the front side up, instead of forward, and there were only weeds in this area.  Neighbors tell us there were beautiful hedges and an amazing flower garden here before the previous owners tore it all out.