A festival and a debacle

15 more days... until pitchers and catchers report to spring training! To kick off the upcoming baseball season, on Sunday we went to Twinsfest for the first time. Yep, even Scott was a rookie.

It was an interesting mix of fun for the kids and serious baseball memorabilia-type stuff for the die-hard fans. We saw a few players as they sat at their autograph tables, but that's not really our thing, especially when it requires a long wait in line, and maybe even some money if you want one of the big names. I got a mild kick out of seeing a Brewer I remember well from my childhood - Rollie Fingers. He still had a mustache, but it wasn't quite the same. We also saw a former Twin who has special meaning to our family - Corey Koskie! Zach was rather confused when we tried to explain that's who we named our dog after.

Zach had a great time, shockingly enough, in the bounce houses! Normally he won't go near those, since he wants to be the only one jumping. No such concerns this time, although he insisted he wanted to stand in line for the one shaped like TC (the Twins mascot), and then ended up with three kids who were almost twice his size. Poor kid couldn't even stand up... that didn't last long. He was willing to get his picture taken with TC as long as his dad sat with him, and got to stretch his arm throwing some pitches too.

^ See if you can find Zach in the team picture! :)

And the debacle... sadly enough, I'm referring to our carpet installation. I have been pretty darn excited to get new carpet in our upstairs and on the stairs; besides the simple fact that I hated the existing carpet and its oddly-colored stains (see Zach helpfully pointing out but one of the stains), I was looking forward to taking yet another step in making this house ours.

We had the installation scheduled for Monday intentionally, since Zach was at school and would be able to nap and not be disturbed by the commotion. So for the last couple weeks I've been slowly packing things up and finding places to put them throughout the house, and yesterday Scott spent hours moving furniture and tearing up the carpet and pad. (See below - Zach enjoying the room to run in our empty guest room.) We were shocked by the amount of dirt under the carpet - the dust and general grime was amazing. Apparently when they built this house they just put the carpet down without worrying about the mud and plaster on the plywood. 10 years later... yuck.

I'll try to speed this up a little: after all our prep work, the installers showed up with... the wrong color carpet. No, it's not a significant difference, but it's not what we wanted!!! While we wait for the correct carpet to be ordered, shipped, and cut, we now have at least a week to live on plywood floors with carpet tacks running alongside the walls. Not exactly ideal with an active three-year old. We pulled the bigger rugs from our old house out of the basement and put those down, along with some random throw rugs, to try to make the floor a little softer and the rooms a little less echo-y. We've moved back the minimum of furniture, and are dodging the remaining furniture stacked in our bathrooms. Sound fun?

And sadly enough, since our plan was to debut Zach's big boy bed last night (so Scott would have to disassemble the crib and assemble the new bed once), he is now sleeping on his big-boy mattress... on the plywood floor. Less than ideal, but hopefully a good transition from crib to actual bed! More on that later...