Too Cool [be]for[e] School

When I got home from work Friday and let myself into our building's main stairwell, I found an infestation of more than a dozen horseflies!

When I got inside and Kevin greeted me, I told him to go check it out. But all he said was, "Oh. Is that where they're coming from?"

(We had planned to make stromboli for dinner, and it turns out he spent an hour chopping veggies and cooking up some sausage earlier. And also killing four flies inside our actual apartment in that time.)

But he did go out and preemptively swat about a dozen more in the stairs.

Our primary suspect? Who else but the downstairs neighbors who have had their windows open with no screens in place the past few nights!

I got to work constructing the stromboli, although it ended up not being our best work, because Kevin didn't tell me that the excess of vegetables he cut was in case I wanted to save half for another stromboli later in the week.

I put all of them into one, and it came out a tad on the soggy side but still delicious.

Then after dinner, Kevin looked at Riley and asked her,

If I were to have bought you a present for going back to school on Monday, would you rather have it now or—

NOW, Riley readily assured him.

So Kevin disappeared and returned with a gift bag. He launched into an explanation of the "really cool mirror spirit animal" he found, and started to explain how it works:

So, when I look at it, it's a groundhog. Or, when your mom looks at it, it's a kitten. So, I mean, I don't know what it'll be when you look at it.

Riley saw where this was going and rolled her eyes as she reluctantly pulled out a miniature molerat plushie, but also an enormous bag of Pez candy that she's been bugging us for recently :)

We had made Saturday plans for my cousin Danny and his family to come swim with us at Kevin's parents' house.

But Kevin wanted to load up the car with some of our now-empty and unused furniture, and also get there a bit early so we could harvest whatever the garden might have for us.

So, we headed over mid afternoon and grabbed some prepared meals for a light lunch at Weis. Then we visited with Kevin's parents until Danny, Magdalena, Cody, and Maya got there.

The water was freezing. (Kevin has demanded that I state for the record that it was 76 degrees, which is technically more than double the temperature of freezing.)

But it was way too cold for Magda and me, so we sat on the side of the pool and caught up while Kevin, Danny, and the kids got some good swim time in. (After all, we haven't seen them since Thanksgiving!)

We meant to get a few good pictures of all of us, but we lost track of time and these two are the only ones I ended up taking.

We ordered pizza for dinner and Danny brought brownies for dessert. We had a great afternoon and evening together, and then we sent them home with all the tomatoes they could carry :)

We headed right back to Catherine and Ron's house on Sunday for another pool day and dinner with some of Kevin's mom's family. (Catherine and Ron; Kelly, Steve, Olivia, and Hannah; Kevin's Uncle Roy and Aunt Sue; and his cousin's Dave's wife Angie and their three daughters Alexis, Natalie, and Kayla.)

We all had a blast in the pool (or at least around the pool, for those of us who didn't actually get in). It was especially fun when Steve brought Liv in and she was jumping in over and over again with no fear at all!

Then Ron made barbecue chicken for everyone, and we all had a lovely dinner together...

"Pop" is pretty much the best at getting smiles out of Hannah:

For dessert, we had crumb cake and brownies to celebrate Angie and Alexis's birthdays:

And while we were at Kevin's parents' house, I took the opportunity to smuggle home a new chair I had bought and stored there for Riley for Christmas. She recently mentioned how bad her current chair has become, so I decided to give her the new one now as she starts school instead.

The chair was still in the box, but there was a giant picture of it emblazoned on the outside. Luckily, Kevin's cousin Pete had dropped off half a dozen boxes for us, and Kevin was able to camouflage the chair among them when we carried everything up to the apartment back at home.

I distracted Riley in her room while Kevin assembled the chair in our room. Then we called Riley in and surprised her:

Kevin laughed at my "Mr. Burns" impression, but Riley was unimpressed.

Finally, we dusted off Riley's laptop and fired it up to make sure she wouldn't have any issues logging in tomorrow for her first day of school.

But this is K12, so of course everything had to be a nightmare, nothing worked correctly, and even Kevin couldn't make sense of the cryptic error message the school's website was giving us.

I decided to trust my gut and just texted my boss right then and there that I wouldn't be coming in tomorrow.

And boy, was that the right play!

I probably spent a total of four hours on the phone, trying to get access to the parent/guardian portal, trying to change my last name in their system, and trying to change Riley's shipping address from my mom's house to Kevin's parents' house.

(Luckily, everyone I actually spoke with was super friendly and extraordinarily helpful, except for one mega-b*tch from tech support who gave me the old "we can only talk to the birth mother" routine because my last name differs from Riley's. She also called me "Ms." even after I told her I was married, because that's the special kind of person she is.)

At least everything went well for Riley this year (unlike last year's first-day nightmare). She was able to access her orientation class without an issue, and Kevin managed to snap this picture of her a few minutes into her first day:

Tuesday evening, Kevin received an email from Brody with the long-awaited full quote for entire house build!

Kevin had estimated $60k-$70k for total delivery, development, and installation costs, and in a perfect world, those things would've come out to... $63,000.

But...

Brody noted that stormwater management can come in as high as $22,000 at the township's whim, and the USDA might demand that we drill a new well that's 100 feet away from the septic system, which would cost another $10,000.

So, we have to operate under the assumption that we'll be nearly $30,000 over budget if both of those cases go south, which is unfortunate but not the end of the world since we still have some options.

For starters, Brody's plan is to try to sneak the build permit through as a sort of "rebuild" of the mobile home that used to be on the property, in the hopes that the township approves it without question. (We also have our realtor working on pulling the current permits to see what information we can glean from those.)

I also told Kevin I don't need an office as badly as he does, so we can downsize to a 3 bedroom house if we have to as well. Riley won't be living with us forever, and I can turn her room into my office someday after she's moved out.

So, I'm confident we'll figure something out :)

And finally, today was the last day of the month. And since I've been working ten hour days to make up for having missed work Monday, and Kevin went to his parents' for the day to work on the garden and turn the compost pile, we didn't have anything close to a dinner plan for the evening.

So we caved and went to the Qdoba by the Neshaminy Mall. Then weswung back to the Morrisville McDonalds to grab something for Riley.

Please enjoy Kevin's photography of four people not doing what they were supposed to be doing:

We managed to make it home alive and dug into our respective dinners.

Kevin asked me why McDonalds is under the impression that their containers need to come with a resumé:

And of course it wouldn't be the end of the month without some pics of the kitties!

See you in September! Goodnight for now :)