Abby, Zoë and Enzo

Zoë, Abby, and Enzo would like to welcome their new cousins Lila and Macy to the world!  Uncle Matt emailed a couple of photos of the new cutie pies and Enzo wouldn't let me turn off the computer monitor, he kept wanting me to switch back and forth between the pictures of Lila and Macy, whose names he can say better than his own sisters!  Zoë and Abby agree that both the new baby girls are, "SO cute!".  We're all looking forward to meeting the newest Muro's and congratulating Uncle Matt and Aunt Caitlin in person, once they get settled in back at home.

We've had another hot surge and it looks like this hot weather - low 90's - will continue for a good week or so.  We waited to go out to the playground until after Enzo's nap, even then the heat got to the kids, especially Zoë.  Chris dropped me at the City Hall and took the kids to the playground and I walked to meet them when I was finished.  After giving Enzo a little snack and some drink, he and I walked to the library to pick up a book I had on hold, and then back.  I think this was the longest that Enzo has walked himself, and he did a great job!  There were a couple of times that he wanted to let go of my hand, but didn't protest when I told him he had to hold.  We saw a couple of dog in the dog park on the way back, one was splashing and nipping at water in a little pool, which Enzo thought was pretty funny.

I had Enzo go to the shade, where Chris was sitting, as he was sweating and had drank almost all of his water on our walk.  Zoë and Abby were playing tag with some kids - 5 year old twins and their 6 year old brother - and Zoë ran up to me with a super red, blotchy face.  I instantly thought of her heat exhaustion spell in Brazil and decided to pack it up.  Abby's face was red too, but Zoë's was concerning so Chris got the car cooled off while I pottied Enzo and then we set Zoë and Abby up with a Muzzy in our room with the A.C. on.  Once they were sufficiently cooled off, we had a nice hot weather dinner of various crackers, broccoli, baby yellow carrots, and cherry tomoatoes, with red pepper hummus and pesto (both homemade) and ranch dip.

Enzo has just noticed people's shadows and he thinks they're so funny.  He also notices who's shadows belong to whom.  Seeing them on the wall he'll point and wave to them.  He likes to stand on the floor where the sun is shining in and move his body to watch his shadow do the same.

We were lucky to be over at Lowe's this morning for the build as the traffic in and around town was a mess.  So after the Lowe's building project, Laura and the girls walked to Target for our normal weekend browse while I moved the car to a strategic location deep in the parking lot near some shade and grass.  The parking lot was just starting to fill up with tailgaters and the roads were still packed, this was around 11am.  So I ran back into the store to do some lunch time shopping and get prepared for the air show.  The girls each picked out a special drink and I picked up a loaf of bread, peanut butter and a squeeze bottle of jelly for impromptu lunch.  We carry utensils in the car for just these occasions.  Add in a bag of chips and a coffee for mommy and we had a great lunch and snack while we watched the air show from a nice shaded, breezy, grassy spot.  Enzo only managed a 20 minute nap today, but Zoë slept for a good 45 minutes between shows, trying to recoup some of that sleep over missed sleep time.  Abby didn't nap and was in a generally good mood the whole time.  We enjoyed seeing the show and the planes.  It was a good location, but as we were exiting, we saw many people parked off the highway at the end of the run way.  Which would have been a much better spot to see the planes showing off on the "flight line", although the kids could not be down on the ground as the traffic and cars would have made it too dangerous and there wasn't any grass or shade.  It was difficult enough keeping the kids entertained between demonstrations as it was, and we had a very nice spot set up.  We also met a few nice people as well.  Enzo managed to befriend someone who parked at Target and rode their bike to the air show.  He came back right before the Blue Angels final demonstration and he and Enzo became fast friends.  Enzo is so personable.  After the show, we packed up and headed home for dinner, we managed to beat the traffic out.

The traffic on the way to Lowe's was very thick, being in the proximity to the air show event, so it was about 30 minutes after 10:00 when we arrived at Lowe's for the build.  Enzo brought his toy hammer and was ready to do his first build.  Zoë and Abby got right to work and were zooming along.  Enzo told me that he had to poop just after starting to build, so I scooped him up and we ran to the toilet.  He was successful in telling me in time.  He managed to keep his underwear dry the whole day.  We walked back to the project just as Abby and Zoë were finishing up.  Enzo's favorite part was putting the nails in the wholes.  Chris helped Enzo finish up the project so we could head on over to Target for our weekly browse.

On our walk to town this morning, we stopped into the post office.  We had three postcards waiting for us, one from China, Lithuania and Switzerland.  It was a pleasure surprise in the morning.

After the tie dye party, Zoë and Abby returned home with a special request for their Daddy.  They really wanted Sara to have a sleep-over.  Sara's mom had agreed, and Daddy was fine with it so the girls made sure their room was in order, they got into some pj's and waited for their friend to arrive.  Once Kim arrived with Sara, Zoë and Abby eagerly showed them around and we set up the sleeping bags on the floor so that everyone could sleep next to each other.  Chris set the three girls up with a movie and made them ice cream sundaes for snack.  After the movie we brushed teeth and they were off to bed... or so I thought.  It was already close to 9:30 when they settled in.  I reminded Zoë and Abby to keep their chitter chatter quiet, which of course didn't happen.  I ended up going in to lay in Zoë's bed at about 10:00 pm to help keep things calm and with less giggles.  Yeah, you can tell we're novices in the 'sleep' over department.  Zoë and Abby were starting to settle down, but I could tell Sara was having a hard time being ready to sleep somewhere new.  I offered for her to sleep in Zoë's bed, which she eagerly accepted, so I sat on the floor and gave my girls some pats to help send them off to sleep.  I finally left the room somewhere in the 11:00pm range.  I checked on them a few hours later when I got up to use the bathroom and everyone was sleeping soundly, this was at 2:00 am.  Despite Sara telling me earlier that she usually wakes up at 2 in the morning to read, she was deep in sleep.  A few hours later, however, Sara showed up at our bedroom door telling us that Zoë had a bad dream and had woken Sara up crying.  I went to see what was going on, and Zoë was sitting up on the floor, telling me that she couldn't sleep on the hard floor.  I scooped her and put her in Abby's top bunk and checked on Abby, who was moving around a bit.  I adjusted her sleeping bag and never heard a peep from her.  That is until about 6:00 this morning, when all three girls were downstairs and had started a movie.  I reluctantly got up, while Chris slept in with Enzo.  After making myself a large cup of coffee, I sat with the girls for a few minutes and then made them blueberry pancake breakfast with strawberry almond milk.

Note: We found out later in the day that it was Abby who had woken up crying with a bad dream, but quickly settled herself.  With Sara having told me that it was Zoë who was awake and crying I thought I had grabbed the right girl to console and put back to sleep.  It turns out it was a case of mistaken identity.

After breakfast I herded the cats helped the girls clean up and had them get dressed for the day.  They had a little time to play with the groovy girls and Barbie's before we walked into town through the park, and returned Sara home.

As we were all outside working on the house, Kim and Sara drove by.  Kim said that they were having a little gathering at 3:00 to do some tie dye.  I had to run out while Enzo was napping, so I didn't have time to pick out things for them to dye.  Once I got home, Enzo was up so we grabbed a couple of the girls undershirt t's and I grabbed a pair of white socks and white undies for Enzo.  Zoë and Abby are naturals and their shirts came out super cute.  Socks and underwear turned out to be tricky items, but they still turned out cute.  We're hooked now and wished we would have brought some other stuff to dye, we'll definitely be looking for a bargain on kits to do this again.

Once everyone's clothes were hanging to dry, all of the kids began playing jump rope in the barn, and even a little double dutch.  Zoë and Abby need some practice, but they started to get the hang of it with a single rope.  Enzo was loving the attention of all of the older girls, and even found a doll stroller and doll to push around the yard.  Kim had planned a little picnic so all of the kids sat on blankets in the grass (Enzo got strapped into his stroller) and had some panko breaded chicken cutlets and veggies with dip.  It wasn't long before they were all done and were off and running again.

Our very old standard style refrigerator used 1600 Kw of electricity in a year (about 4.4 Kw/day), which was a total of 17.5% of our yearly household electricity consumption costing us around $260 / year.

I have run some tests on our new setup.  We bought 2 chest freezers, one to act as a freezer and one which we converted.  The standard chest freezer uses on average (over a 3 day period) 0.0509192 KwH, which would be 446 Kw/Year and cost $71.37 at current rates of $0.16 / KwH.

The converted fridge is using 0.0209302 - 0.0220 KwH on average (so far only 44 hours), at it's high end would be 193.08 Kw/Year and cost $30.89 year to run.  I think I can shave this down a dollar or two as we have the temperature probe on the roof of the lid, so when the lid is open, it triggers another cooling cycle.  This is partly by design to make sure everything keeps cool inside, but it most likely runs sooner than it normally would due to loss of cooling.  We have a thermometer inside the fridge that almost always reads 39F.  We set the temperature control device to trigger on at 40F and off at 38F.  It is a very tight range that could probably be expanded a bit to allow more fluctuation.  Also we might try a week of mounting the probe in the middle of the freezer to see if the temperature fluctuates much and what the energy savings might be.

So I am expecting to save 961 Kw ($153.76) a year with this new setup.  We will use only 639 Kw/Year for the freezer/fridge instead of 1600 Kw with the old fridge.  We spent $720 for both freezers and less than $80 for the cord + temperature controller.  In energy savings alone, we will see our return on investment ($800) in 5.2 years should electricity prices remain constant, sooner if the cost increases.  This doesn't take into account the spoilage from our old fridge.  With the constant temperature and minimized fluctuations, our food is keeping fresher longer, much, much longer than previously.

Enzo still doesn't say Zoë and Abby's names correctly, though he can say the separate syllables clearly, he just won't say the complete names clearly.  He loves to copy me when I call for the girls and after one of these times today he just took to calling Abby by her middle name.  She was standing in the kitchen and Enzo wanted her to play in the living room with him.  He hollered, "gacalyn!" and grabbed her hand to pull her into his toys.  It would figure that he can say her, longer, middle name better than her short first name.  For the rest of the day he's just been referring to her by her middle name, it's so funny.

The girls are really getting into the foreign languages.  They watched the second set of Muzzy dvds from the library already.  They are going to focus on German.  I checked out a few German picture dictionaries and books in the children's section of the library.  They did a few exercises today where Laura wrote down some English words for them to look up. They made a deal with me.  If they can get through the Pimsluer German I, II and III before their birthday I would take them to Germany.  They are really excited, but haven't realized, unless they study non stop from now until then, they won't make this goal.  They talk about it all the time though, as if they already have their airfare booked.

This morning the girls had their 6 months dental check up and teeth cleaning.  Abby and Zoë did a good job.  They took x-rays of their molars and checked for cavities.  No cavities for either of them.  Zoë picked cookie dough flavor for her cleaning while Abby chose mint.  They each got a flouride treatment and a new toothbrush.  Enzo got a toothbrush as well and a sticker.  He didn't even have an appointment.