1 jumbo marshmallow=28 birthday candles

Yesterday we had an awesome birthday bash. I like to do something different every year on my birthday, and this year I wanted to have a campfire (if you know me at all, you know that I am somewhat of a pyromaniac). The torrential rain ceased just in time to set up my new firepit on the patio and roast marshmallows with friends. We had a blast! I had friends come from all walks of life, friends from home, from college, from work, neighbors in the ward...It is so nice to be loved by so many people! Thank you all for making my birthday so wonderful and memorable!


We all know that marshmallows + chocolate + graham crackers= yummy deliciousness. Let the record show that s'mores made with dark chocolate is pure heaven!

All in a day's weekend's work

This weekend we put together this:
















While the kids did this:

And resultantly fell asleep before dinner:

There was another one of Samuel reposing stark naked on the hall floor, but alas, it was inappropriate for Blogger.

I must say, experience has taught us much about working together peacefully. We worked for 5 hours in the hot sun and got most of the shed put together, stopping only to referee the kids. After dinner and putting kids to bed, we went back outside to work a little more in the daylight we had left. By then it was windy and chilly and buggy, and the pieces we were putting together got tricky. By 9:30, we were running the car headlights to see in the dark, and by 10:30 we were jump-starting said car by light of iPod. iPod doubling as access to jump-start instructions and flashlight. (What did we ever do before WiFi and portable devices?)

In a former life, this comedy of errors would have made us frustrated and contentious. As it was, we were really quite amused and cooperative. And spending all say in the hot sun doing manual labor makes one sleep like the dead, indeed.

To-Do List

Ugly Fence, meet Stain.

Assuming that we will start having nice days soon, do you think I will be able to put all five gallons of stain on the fence before having a baby?

Before you answer, here is what I did this week:

• Made a quadruple batch of banana bread and delivered loaves to friends,


• Took apart the drawers in the kids dresser and replaced the bottom wooden boards that were broken and tightened all the screws,


• Jury-rigged the bassinet with wooden dowels on the bottom because two out of four were missing (that one only took 1/2 hour!),


• Installed wooden-slat blinds in our bedroom (without instructions, and with two helpers),


• Washed all the bedroom curtains,


• Sewed black-out fabric onto the kids curtains,


• Moved the dresser and set up a baby changing station,


• And I'm still working until the semester is over!

(Phew! I'm tired!)

I have six weeks left, and I would go nuts if I sat around rubbing lotion on my belly and timing contractions waiting for Baby Sister to be born, so I made a to-do list. It includes things like organizing baby clothes, fixing the mailbox, putting together a shed, painting the trim on the back door and restaining the fence, making matching summer dresses for Leah and Baby Sister, organizing and dejunking our closet...and a few more. I'm not even going to bother planning my garden until after she's born, because its been known to snow here in late May. Who knows if the garden will even happen at all this year.

When I was at this point before Samuel was born, I scrubbed the couches and had Chris bring me every light fixture in the house so I could throw away the bugs and scrub away the dust. Maybe that should be on my list, too.

So, which do you think will come first? Five gallons of wood stain? Or Baby Sister? The race is on...

New Installation

Check this out! We have these two gymnast kids and IKEA has these awesome play rings for $10!!!! Add 30 minutes of joist-finding and drilling, and we have two happy kids and the awesomest basement on the block!

One week at a time

Every week, I turn to a new page in my calendar. My life is measured by Fridays in the lab at work, by laundry day, by preschool days, by story time at the library every Thursday, by Sundays at Church when my dresses are a little tighter than the week before.

Every week the ticker on my blog moves ahead. My belly gets a little bigger. I get a little more tired and have to slow down a little more.

Every week, the sunlight lasts a little longer, it gets a little warmer and the sunny, nice days become more commonplace. Every week, the promise of spring gets a little bit closer. (And with that, the promise of meeting our new baby).

Every week Samuel makes a new discovery about his body, resulting in a new stage of what can finally be termed "potty training." One week I was simply setting a timer. The next week, he figured out how to go. The week after that, he figured out how to tell us when he had to go. This week, he is protesting a diaper at night time and challenging himself to stay dry at night. (Yes! This kid a month ago would have rather gone in a diaper his whole life!)

Every week, the idea of our tax return falling into our laps gets a little more real. We are that much closer to a new dishwasher, or new insulation in the attic, or a shed. And that much closer to a little lower balance on our credit cards.

Every week Leah learns to sight-read a couple more words.

Every week my house gets a little messier.

Every week the Christmas lights on the outside of my house look that much more out of place.

Every week, the crack in the car windshield creeps another half a centimeter, and the registration renewal date gets a little closer.

Every week, my roots grow in a little further and I remind myself to get that taken care of.

Every week I pick up a couple new books from the library.

Every week, two month old baby Zeke gets a little stronger and that much closer to heart surgery. I thought I was melancholy, but I'm not going through anything like this family.

And that is how I measure my life. One monotonous week at a time, waiting for Spring.

I earned my title today, thank you very much

For a self-proclaimed "supermom," I don't have that many days that demonstrate my supermom-ness. Except for maybe today.

Today I....

• Gave the kids baths
• Cleaned up vomit several times (which is why they got baths)
• Camped in a tent in the back yard with the kids
• Swept and mopped the kitchen and hallway
• Scrubbed and bleached all the garbage cans in the house
• Cleaned the kitchen counters and ran the dishwasher twice
• Washed and put away more than four loads of laundry.
• Organized our bedroom closet, picking out the things to go to DI (and those blue capris that I thought were goners actually fit me instead!)
• Rounded up all the winter gloves and hats and scarves and put them in their own bin. (Okay, I know it's July....)
• Got out the sewing machine and did all the mending that has been on my to-mend list forever, including make Leah a pair of cut-offs (and with a double needle, ooh, la, la!)
• Made cookies (with two preschoolers helping, mind you)
• Cleaned up after the cookies
• Had a steak and potato dinner ready when my husband came home at 6:00

Okay, so I guess if I delivered the cookies to my visiting teachees with a hand made card, I would get a few more points. I did pull one weed tyring to find the garden hose, but theres a lot more I didn't pull. And Samuel is still not potty trained....

Wait, I'm trying to make my case for Supermom.

Well, the night is young, maybe I'll still manage to get to the gym!

Responsibility Sucks

Literally. Sucks like a vacuum.

Alternate titles for this post:
A: That's what I get for _____.
B. Another case for baldness.

Pictured is my to-do list for this week. They are semi-big projects, the idea being I would plan to do 2 or 3 of these items each day and by the end of the week have the house in perfect shape for Chris and Leah's return. Really, I wanted to take the week off, too, and visit with friends, watch movies all night, and improve my guitar hero skilz in the privacy of my basement.

I'm thinking Disney World or Las Vegas would have been a lot more fun than what I ended up with. Responsibility. Choosing to stay home and make money instead of spend it. Choosing to clean the car, mop the kitchen floor, cut the grass (ugh!), and heaven forbid change the lightbulbs without anyone telling me it was the right thing to do. (For the record, I refuse to change lightbulbs when Chris is home.) So that's what I've done all week. I spent all day Saturday in the yard. I put away laundry and did the dishes (but those ones keep re-appearing on my checklist). I actually prepared my Sunday lesson the day before instead of during Sunday School. It is amazing how much of a difference it makes to take 24 hours to prepare instead of 45 minutes!

But alas, my comedy of errors began on Tuesday.

1. I cleaned out the fridge. I mean, take out all the food and wash the shelves and scrub the walls inside and out. I moved the whole thing and retrieved half of the alphabet from underneath it. Then as I was washing a shelf it spontaneously shattered into a million pieces. In the sink and the drain. That took an extra 20 minutes to clean up. That's what I get for cleaning out the fridge (see alternate blog title A). Cleaning the fridge wasn't even on my to do list. (PS--do you ever write stuff on your to-do list that you have already done just so that you can cross it out?)

2. While vacuuming a bedroom, I accidentally sucked up a sock. That took 30 minutes and some disassembling of the vacuum to undo. That's what I get for vacuuming.

3. Speaking of vacuuming, I moved all the furniture out of the living room and the family room to do the job right and realized that we already have traffic patterns after only living here a year. So I decided while all the couches are in the kitchen, I might as well go rent a carpet shampooer.

4. When I took out the garbage, some of the broken glass spilled out onto the stairs (see bullet number 1). I guess was I going to vacuum the stairs anyways.

5. Pour the dirty water from the rental carpet cleaner into the sink. Sink is clogged. Disposal is frozen. It's because it has glass in there. (Refer to bullet # 1) Tomorrow I have to take apart the disposal and get the glass out. That wasn't on my to-do list either.

6. Pour the dirty water from the rental carpet cleaner into the bathtub. Now I have to clean the bathtub.

7. Rental carpet cleaner stops working because the spinning brushes are caked in hair. My hair. (See alternate title B)

8. Laugh out loud and write a blog post about it. That's not on my to-do list, but I'm willing to make sacrifices.

I'm tired.

A little red

Project: Paint one half-wall of the bathroom.

Cost: $13 for 1 quart of paint

Supplies: Paint brushes, tape, drop cloths

Time: 4 hours start to finish

End result: Totally awesome! I don't know why it took me a year to get around to this. We wanted that wall to be red since the day we moved in. It's the curved wall in the hall bathroom, tiled on the lower half. It makes the little room defined, enclosed, comfortable.

The pictures don't do justice to my 1-afternoon project, since it is too small of a room and I don't have a wide-angle camera. You'll just have to make a potty stop to get the full effect!

Supermom meets Storage Closet

Before

During

After

What this means is that I desperately needed to put away Christmas but didn't have anywhere to put it all!

Description: Installation of wire shelving, including 2 horizontal hangtracks, 5 vertical shelf tracks, 4 shelves 16"wide and 47" long(and room for another), plus a 35" shelf, and 12 shelf brackets. This project essentially doubled the storage capacity of my under-stairs storage closet, and magnified its accessibility immeasurably.

Project planning: 1 hour

Installation: 2 hours (That's it!)

Cost: it's not important (okay, it was twice what I thought it would be, but sooo worth it!)

Tools needed: Stud finder, pencil, drill, level, measuring tape, screws. (I would recommend a stud-finder that is a little better than the $8 kind, especially if you have loathful textured walls)

Helps: a half-dozen guys at Home Depot (not all at once...) and this 5-minute YouTube video.

Difficulty level: This was surprisingly simple! It was very important that I measured and mapped the wall first so that I knew exactly what kind of space I was working with and how many shelves I would get and where they would go. Then once I got the stuff, it was seriously easy to install!

Ta-Da!

Merry Christmas "Cheese"

In the air there's the feeling of Christmas...

Happy Harvest Cheese

I finally put up some decorations!

I like Halloween, but I don't necessarily want to have a ghost, witch, graveyard scene. Plus, I like the idea of decorating for the fall season, not necessarily for the Halloween day, and this way I can leave the decorations up through November. The inspiration for this was the $5 corn stalk at the grocery store, which seemed to sum up the whole season. Then Leah helped me pick out the baskets, which we spray painted green and red. I elected to get real pumpkins and colorful squash, which were actually cheaper than fake, plastic ones (And I guess if we got really hungry, we could eat them). The baskets, paint, and chalkboard were only about $25, and those things I will be able to reuse every year!

Now the kids are playing with chalk on a little chalkboard in the house. That $.79 box of chalk will go a long way, I think. I plan to carve the big pumpkin on the left soon--it's at least 30 pounds.

Here is our new and improved front door. The kids wouldn't get out of the way, so I figured they could just be in the picture. Leah "helped" me right Happy Harvest on the little chalkboard, so when I told her to say cheese, she said "Happy Harvest Cheese."

What you can accomplish on a rainy day

Leah likes to be a fairy, prefers to sleep in a nest of blankets next to her bed, continues to recite movie lines, has had great potty success lately, and reasons her way out of perplexing conundrums like "We're all out of popsicles" and "It's too rainy to go outside." ("I know, an umbrella can help us!"). She has absolutely no concept of "patience."

Samuel has had18 poopy diapers (and counting) in the last 52 hours, and consequently used an entire tub of wipes and half a tube of Desitin. Sir Poops a Lot can climb onto the kitchen counter and halfway up Leah's ladder. He can say two dozen words and hams it up when the camera comes out. He has learned that climbing into the dishwasher and playing in the garbage can will earn him a spank. (Oh, the tears!)

The air conditioning is up and running, the sprinklers are sprinkling, (the weeds are growing), my compost is composting (I hope). We are enjoying season 4 of House (although I am lost without LOST). Chris got a calling teaching Elders' Quorum, I had a Discovery toys party yesterday and made new friends (hence, the cleaning of the house...), decided its just not worth it to take two kids to the water park by myself, and am working on matching dresses for Leah and cousin Jessica. Prototype L:

And the living room and kitchen have not been this clean since we moved in! Here are the final views of projects completed. Notice the new chic paint and completed curtains, new microwave in the kitchen (I guess 6 years was enough for the $40 one to call it quits...) and yes, that is freshly baked bread on the counter :)

Stay tuned for an accounting of our trip to San Francisco, the zoo, the carnival, bike rides, and everything else we've done in the last month.

Invisible progress

This week was productive, but you probably wouldn't notice. This week, I:

• Paid nearly-due bills(including accidentally paying the gas bill twice).
• Applied for several rebates and mailed them in.
• Removed existing curtain rod brackets and replaced them again, this time with drywall anchors.
• Touched up the paint in the living room.
• Instituted the Quicken program for keeping track of our finances. (In an unprecedented turn of events, I called my technologically challenged mother for tips on how to use the software)
• Transitioned the kids clothes from an ineffective dresser system to a closet hanger system.
• Instituted a bin system for the toy cabinet--one bin at a time.
• Installed cabinet locks in the kitchen, something only the children will notice.
• Pulled ten square feet worth of weeds in the backyard--it only represents 5% of the weeds that remain undisturbed.
• Identified nine sprinkler zones in the backyard and programmed them to water automatically.
• Started taking care of my skin with Mary Kay miracle set.

See? What'd I tell ya.

Finished Project #1

The Kids' Room: The Final Product. Here's the work in progress.

This means that Leah constantly wants to be a princess now. You know those McDonald's commercial where the little girl is at the restaurant in a Tutu? That's my kid in a Princess dress. Everywhere we go. Man, I thought we could avoid this phase, but how wrong I was.

I took some of these photos to submit them to a magazine for publishing, so no, the room is never that clean, the bed is never made, the decorations would never get left undisturbed for more than 10 seconds, the books are usually pulled off the shelves, but I thought it would be worth it for the picture.

I am kind of getting sick of project mode. I have several underway, and none of them are actually done. Project #2: The Playground (meaning the tools are still out and there are still some assorted boards all over the grass waiting to be installed). Project #3: Painting the living room (meaning that right now, all the furniture is in the middle of the room and their are dropcloths everywhere, paintbrushes in the sink, china on the kitchen counter). Project #4: the living room curtains (completion of which is contingent upon the completion of the painting project and the arrangement of the curtains before I know how long to make them). Project #5: the bushes on the kitchen counter that need to be planted in the backyard. Okay, so, why did I start so many projects before finishing the first ones? Because it was raining one day and I couldn't keep working on the playground? Because it was raining and the kids were awake so I couldn't paint? The list goes on...

And of course, once those projects are done, I am seriously going to crack down and ORGANIZE! I need to finally get into a system of cleaning the kitchen, scrubbing toilets regularly, putting away laundry, getting rid of clutter, having a routine for dinner and bedtime and showering, going to the gym and to work and on errands, paying bills on time, taking care of my kids and taking care of myself. AHH! I am so sick of limbo!

It's okay to ruin the grass

Here is a picture of the kids on the new swings this morning. You notice Leah is in a princess dress and Samuel is still in pajamas. You should hear him laugh on this thing!

More pictures of our new playground coming soon. Stay tuned!

Gone 'n done it

Okay, so I still really like my fireplace cluster and I went ahead and did it. I think you will find it doesn't take that much emphasis away from the fireplace, and in my opinion the colors of the pictures bring out more of the color of the brick. Sorry if I disappointed you. I do have limited wall space for this sort of thing...

I love the red curtain scarves which I have been working on this week, and when my mom was here, she made kitchen tab-top curtains with red and green and gold stripes, (why don't I have a picture yet?) so I think it is a good theme to continue. The major project I have been working on of late is to address the overly monochromatic nature of our house. Every wall is beige. Seriously. Therefore, second to curtains is paint. I am planning to do a very pale mossy green on both sides of the fireplace, the east wall where the windows are, and the half wall above the stairs. Then I will put creme colored curtains behind the red, and it will look really nice. Here is the living room so far, just pretend there aren't coats and toys and bags everywhere.

As far as painting goes, I started with the kids room because I wanted to get the railing painted and I have a neat idea for a fairy tale scene (from Stampin' Up! of course). Leah is a surprisingly good painter- helper. We hired our friend Tim to build the railing, and it turned out really nicely. Here's the progression from start to now. I'm not quite done yet.

I've also painted the wall to the left, which is above and on either side of the closet. It gives the room a two-toned "dreamy" look which I think will be appropriate for a kids room for many years to come. Its been fun but also exhausting and sooooo messy. I'm looking forward to putting the room back together and thereby being able to put kids to bed on time and in their own beds. On to the next project!

The Dust Settles (again)

Remember the last time we did this?

So we are successfully moved in. The first two weeks were plagued by half-finished projects (like breaking the drill bit so I couldn't finish installing brackets for curtains, or having lost a couple screws to put the crib together, etc). Now the chaos has died down a bit and I was able to actually finish something.

Samuel can climb the furniture and is starting to say a few words (uh-oh, cheese, shoes, mama, dada), can sign a bunch (milk, cheese, baby, bath, all done, etc) and looks longingly at the fruit basket at the mention of bananas. Leah walks around demanding taxes, reciting movie lines and singning like Ariel (Oh Eric, I have legs! Now we can be dagezer!). I am enjoying my job as the Culinary Arts Procurement Specialist. In other words, the food shopper. It is really quite fun, I love having a variety in what I do daily, and I just bought a new laptop with my earnings :) Oh, I forgot to mention--I think I lost five pounds! The first five. Ever. Since having two children. Or maybe my scale is broken, but that's okay with me. And Chris is working hard to support our family, exercising 6 days out of 7 and doing homework. He even makes dinner more often than I do. What a guy.

We just had a wonderful weekend with my parents, but I'm not sure if it was much of a vacation for them: we put them to work putting up shelves, hammering the fence, weeding and planting bushes (when it wasn't snowing), sewing curtains, and of course, playing with two cute grandkids. We got the basement (somewhat) organized--meaning you don't have to clear a path through the boxes to cross the room, and we unpacked my china cabinet. Unfortunately the guest accomodations at l'hôtel Fosdique are not ideal: the floor was more sleepable than the air mattress. Maybe we should retire the air matress?

We had a great weekend, including get togethers with both the Sorensons and the Benacs, watching Conference, and Chris and I even managed to get an hour in at a Mission Reunion. But now we're back to the daily grind, which includes going to work and paying a babysitter, washing our own dishes and laundry, and finishing the rest of the curtains on my own

My first item of business this week is to put up some pictures. I want to get an idea of where everything is going to go before I start making holes, which is proving to require lots of planning and switching and restarting.

Here is a mock-up of what I'd like to do on the fireplace, but some critics seem apalled at the idea of covering up the brick facade. So, here we are. I want you to tell me what you think of my fireplace cluster. I have a poll on the left for a vote, and you can also leave a comment with your input.

Figure 1:

Figure 2:

Figure 3: