The Piano Project

Well, about three weeks ago I got a crazy hair and decided to strip my piano and refinish it. I was definately crazy!! The piano is at least 55 years old. I found a signature inside it that had the date 12-4-52 so that is why I am guessing how old it is. It was given to us by Ben's mom and dad. It had been painted brown so the paint and the stain needed to be striped off. At first I was doing it by hand. Holy Cow! That took so long so then I borrowed some tools from my parents including a power disk sander. Ben got an attachment for his drill that worked really good too. He wasn't so happy that I dragged him into this project. Once we had striped and sanded the whole thing it we needed to stain it. My whole house was covered in dust. I filled my vacuum full! I am still cleaning up piano dust. The staining was the fun part. The hardest part was doing the legs and the music stand. The legs just took a long time because they had a lot of grooves in them. When I was doing the music stand I had to do most of it with a chisel. I missed and scrapped my hand really good. I have about a 3 inch scrap across the bottom of my thumb to my wrist. All for the beauty of the piano right! Well, I got the piano done, all except replacing the keys. Hopefully in the next few weeks I will get to that as well. Then it is on to making a piano bench to match it. ( We are using a chair right now.)

Well, the rest of the fam is doing good. We started potty training Max this week. It is going pretty well. He is kind of getting the hang of it. We have to use a lot of bribes though. His newest thing is he can make himself burp. The other day he was trying to burp and he couldn't so he said, "oh, lost it" then he finally burped and said, "got it". He is such a boy! He really likes Nemo. We have a book of fish and he looks at it all the time. He can name all kinds of fish. I think we might have to break down and get him a fish. If any of you know me, you know that is a big deal because I still have my fish phobia. We are going to Las Vegas in March and we are planning on going to the aquarium. I think he is really going to like it.

Isaac is still crying a lot. He is only happy when he is being held or sitting in his bumbo chair. He just doesn't like to lay down. He does like the tub. When he is really crabby we stick him in the tub and it calms him down. At least he sleeps good. He goes to bed around 8 and wakes up around 7. I am really lucky that way.

We had the opportunity to go to the Draper Temple open house. It was so beautiful! We had such a great time. The next day my family went to the Salt Lake Temple and went on the session that my grandpa and grandpa were apart of. It was so great to be in the temple with them. It was only my second time in the Salt Lake temple and it is so beautiful. It made me want to find out more about it like what it looked like inside when it was built and what changes they have made throughout the years and stuff. I am sure that there have been amazing things that happened in the temple. I hope that someday I will be able to ask Heavenly Father. I did find some really cool pictures of the inside of the temple that were in James E. Talmage's book that was published in 1912. They were all in black and white, but still very cool. I will have to do more studying. Maybe someday I could be part of the cleaning crew and clean the whole temple so I can see everything! That would be awesome.