Miata repair and paint job

My car was hit twice while parked outside and no amount of wax would buff this dent out. Luck would have it so it was the same front fender being hit each time but I think the attachment points underneath was moved a millimeter or two.. 

The worst part was how the fender made cuts into my tire as I drove, and it was a terrible sound! Also since the paint on this car is so bad after many years in the hyper bright California sun and parking on San Francisco streets I decided to give it new paint also. 

Here is the new front fender, in black primer which is very thin so I decided to give it an extra layer of primer before mounting it.

Front lamps was damaged by flying debris or a rock at some point and was full of water and dust.

Front bumper assembly had to be loosened in order to access the last bolt holding the front fender in place.

Front fender is off!

New fender is on!

Mattias came out to help me with the doors. He helped me remove the mirrors and the door handles, but first he had to remove the inside door panels. Not pain free! He also helped me remove lights and was kind to collect all parts in labeled plastic bags. He is pretty awesome!

You may also notice in this picture that the lower part of the car is white-ish. Thats because while the replacement fender is completely smooth, the car's original paint has a very bumpy orange peel looking paint on the lower part. I always hated the look of this so I decided to remove it by sanding it down. Now the whole car will be smooth when it is finished.
While initially expected to be a one weekend job, this job is has blown into a big one, it has now ballooned into its 4th or 5th week, and Im still looking at another 4-5 full days of work. Which in reality means another 3-4 weeks before it is done.
The reasons for taking so long are many. More than a few problems came up during the fender repair due to the damage to the car, so instead of taking 30-40 minutes to do the swap it took something like 6-7 hours over several days.
Going over the car more closely also revealed more problems with small dents that had to be filled and sanded as well as problems with the front bumper cover which had rotten paint that had to be completely removed. Im not sure if I was misinformed or missed an important part of the information I was given but you cant just use any type of paint remover on painted plastic parts and my result was swelling plastic..
I solved these problems but it all adds up and slows me down. This last week has also been incredibly cold (for California) and has further slowed down the process because the body filler takes much longer to cure, paint takes longer to dry, and it is just plain uncomfortable, but you can work really hard without breaking a sweat!

Holding it himself

He was very hungry, cried and had no patience. He grabbed the bottle from me and started drinking. 

Macklermore concert

Rockin It!

I had long dreaded Lucia's first parent-teacher conference, largely because I was under the (false) impression that Lucia's personality was still clashing with her teacher's. I was wrong. We went on Monday and bottom line: she's doing GREAT. She's reading and writing and right where she needs to be. Her teacher said she was like a "different kid," and whatever we did to get her to behave, keep doing it. We were thrilled to say we didn't do much, Lucia figured it out on her own. I don't think we've posted about it here, but her teacher is highly, highly organized and runs the classroom like a German watch factory. For behavior, and presumably to corral 27 kids daily, she institutes a card system, where you start out on green, and if you act up, it progresses to yellow, orange and red. Lucia has come home with probably about 6 red cards. She was having a really hard time delineating play vs. learning time, and she'd act out to test the teacher. We had a meeting with her teacher about 6 weeks ago, and after that we gave Lucia little things to look forward to on the weekends if she got 5 green cards. We did that for maybe 2 weeks, then we dropped it to see if she would get it on her own. And she did. She comes home with green cards pretty much every day; I think she got a yellow card a few weeks ago for a minor offense. 

It's pretty awesome that she figured it out on her own. And a HUGE RELIEF for us that she's rockin this kindergarten thing. So proud of her. 

Little coder

Lucias class recently took part in the national event called "Hour of Code" and was given this cool diploma.
However, the coding on kindergarten level looks nothing like this:

if (InputRegAddr8 == MaX1385::rd_FIFO)
my.device.ReadWord_HiLo(InputRegAddr8, &DeviceDataBuf16); 

But actually looks like this:

The "coding" is done by clicking and dragging the little arrows into the squares on the right in the right order for the little hair ball to reach its target.

Eight!!!!

Eight months today!! 

Espen has made a lot of big developmental leaps this month. Most importantly of course, he said his first word: mama (heart bursts). It started with him making the sound mam mam mam mam, but then when I left the room, he said mama. Pete heard it too! It was on Thanksgiving so I was super thankful. :) 

He's eating an enormous amount of food, with at least 2 meals of oatmeal and fruit/veg a day. He's getting closer to crawling? Maybe? He gets on all fours and rocks now. It's so funny how different he is from Lucia: she was standing at this age! Like unassisted standing. We looked at old pictures to prove it. But he will get there when he gets there. He's sleeping more and more thank god, and has a crop of new teeth coming in so he likes to get up early to chat and chew, ideally around 5 a.m. He's getting chubbier and chubbier, which is really cute. He's still nursing 7x a day (or having breastmilk in a bottle) but he's getting wiggled and easy to distract, which makes some sessions tough. He's gotten on a great schedule with two fairly long naps a day. And he has more hair. We can't believe how fast time is progressing. But man we are in love with this little man. 

Delicious floor

Teething makes everything susceptible to gnawing. Even the hardwood floor.

Seating not quite that comfy

"Adventures" were had at Target last night when I discovered the seats weren't quite accommodating to our little nugget.  It was "fun" trying to keep him from falling out while ticking through my insane list. Gulp.