Animals are for Watching

We went to the zoo today to have something to do that wasn't sitting around our cottage waiting for our house to be ready........Despite the look on Henry's face here, the boys really did have a lot of fun and are both napping peacefully now--it's the first time I've gotten a double nap in the past two weeks!

Ships are for Painting......

Since we've been homeless and staying with grandma David has been going pirate crazy...Jake and the Neverland Pirates crazy to be exact......oh yes, unlike his poor deprived self, grandma has cable, complete with the Playhouse Disney channel.......He's already announced that he wants to live in North Carolina forever........

Well, with his birthday coming up grandma took him birthday shopping and he had his little heart set on a giant plastic singing Jake and the Neverland Pirate ship playset......hmmmm.....I think we all know how I felt about that.......don't worry he ended up leaving the store with even more Thomas trains in hand so he wasn't completely devastated :)

Grandma came through though, and after a trip to the craft store produced a magnificent wooden pirate ship (okay, birdhouse) out of her shopping bag.  After a mere three hours of painting after the boys had gone to bed I turned it into a passable replica of Bucky the pirate ship......well, it has blue striped sails anyway...... Grandma added a rope and anchor for even more fun and of course a tube-o-pirates.  I added a yellow rope to the back with a big knot on the end after David was scandalized by the lack of a bell.

Grandma also made a treasure chest full of treasure (i.e. a matchbox full of pennies), a box mountain island and a treasure map to find it.

And of course a giant green octopus :)

The giant green octopus has been a real hit.........

I love when the kids use their imaginations...........and when I escape really loud plastic toy sets :)

It's a.......

It seems that we are well on our way to being that family....you know, the ones with the half dozen rowdy boys running amuck in the woods.......well, if you want a priest in the family you need to have a whole troop of boys, right?  :)

....And if we ever do have another little girl she'll have enough brothers to form a safety perimeter around her.......you know, just in case.........

Moves Are For Ignoring....

Well, there are probably a thousand things I should be doing right now to prepare for our upcoming move--cleaning out the pantry or the fridge or organizing things in general.....but alas, I have been doing none of those things.  I'd rather just pretend that this whole thing isn't going to happen next week so this is what I've been working on instead....

David's birthday is coming up--as I'm sure he's told you if you've been around him for more than five minutes anytime in the past three months.  I've been trying to do something handmade for birthdays and holidays and for this particular birthday David's been asking for a giant cardboard train--apparently I set the bar a little high last year :)  

He's been really into super heroes as of late, and Spiderman in particular so I made him a mask based on this tutorial (I used her pattern but changed it up a bit and just hand embroidered the whole thing because I couldn't muster up the energy to drag my sewing machine out).  He's been putting his hooded lion towel on over his face and wrapping a sheet around his neck like a cape for his current Spiderman costume and while I applaud his creativity it isn't very practical to fight super villains with your eyes covered so I think this will be a step up from that!  I also got him a can of silly string for some web-slinging fun and I made him a little Spiderman peg doll to add to his collection.  Hopefully this will lesson the blow of finding out there is no giant train surprise......we'll see..........

Our Old House

...well really it's our current house but for the past two months David's been referring to it as the "old house" as in, "I want to live in our old house" and "I want to bring our old house with us to Florida".......

You'll just have to forgive me for the gratuitous house pictures you are about to be subjected to but I like to use this blog as a place to document our lives so that I can look back through old posts and get nostalgic for how little everyone used to be and I'm feeling more than a little nostalgic and weepy at the thought of leaving this home.  It's the first real home we've had as a family--it's hard to count a less than a year stint in an apartment when David was born as a home--we've made real adult friends here, we've had and lost babies here, we've grown here and we are not the same people leaving it as we were when we arrived.....Yes, I've loved the time we've spent at this "old house".......

PS I don't normally go around randomly photographing the house--I took these for our landlord so she could get new tenants--which she did after approximately three days of posting the ad--I think it's because we changed all of the wall colors from circus extraordinaire to neutral, neutral, neutral.....I'd show you the befores but I'd hate to damage your retinas......

I'm going to miss this old place--all 1300 square feet of it, including the master bedroom which for some reason doesn't have any heat or air vents and the thin walls and of course all the character and charm that comes with sixty year old homes.....but compared to our new place this house is a spring chicken :)  

I know, it's not incredibly impressive and this is pretty much it, minus one tiny bathroom and landing at the top of the stairs.  I think my decorating style could be described as part cottage and part hand-me-down with a sprinkling of I-found-it-on-the-side-of-the-road-and-spray-painted-it for good measure.  Mostly I try to keep the house looking tidy, uncluttered, and most of all cozy so it has that homey feel we love so much :)