{pretty, happy, funny, real} The Books and Curses Edition

{pretty}

We've had some glorious sunshiny days this week.  After weeks and weeks of cold, gloomy, rain we've just been basking in this wonderful weather.  The children had been losing.their.minds being cooped up inside for so long.  And when the children lose their minds, they usually take mom down with them.  It's good to be outside again.

{happy}

This past weekend I really needed a break so Chris took the kids while I went to my favorite used book store armed with my Ambleside Online master book list.  I did pretty well staying focused on hunting down next year's books though I might have got a little sidetracked here and there.  The beauty of using the AO curriculum is that a lot of the books I want to read are on the list for the later years anyway, so I'm not splurging, I'm planning ahead.

During this trip I realized that I am a total sucker for these older bird and animal books.  They all have such beautiful illustrations and these two also have photographs of the animals, as well as bits of literature and poetry references and interesting stories about the different creatures.  One even gives the pros and cons of keeping skunks and racoons as pets although I think we'll pass on that.  

I spent three hours wandering around and nobody yelled at me or asked me how much longer it was going to take,  Not once.  A happy day indeed.

{funny}

I think I'm on my way to mastering fried chicken, which is good because I'm pretty much craving it all the time.  Up until recently making fried chicken seemed like something that was just too complicated to even attempt, something only an expert should try to accomplish--you know like a KFC employee.  And like most things I've found in this homemaking gig, it was not nearly as complicated as I was imagining.  I've tried a couple of recipes and finally found a winner--I'm thinking of making it our staple Sunday dinner for the foreseeable future.  There's no such thing as too much fried chicken, am I right?  

{real}

I'm calling this process quilting, since I've been more concerned with the therapeutic effect of hand piecing this together and less with the final product, which I admit I haven't given much thought to.  I mostly just gathered up all the scraps from John's quilt plus some new coordinating scraps and started sewing.  I might regret this later, but for now it's really relaxing to just sew them together by hand in the evenings and still be able to converse with my husband without being stuck to my sewing machine and all the noise that entails.  Plus, I'm much better at lining up my seams by hand than with a machine--so that's satisfying.

John is very excited about this quilt for his baby brother and is always pointing out which fabrics he has in his quilt too.  It's pretty adorable.  He says the baby is going to be his friend, not Margaret's, because he'll be a boy.  I suppose we'll see.  About the friendship part that is.

He's definitely a boy.

I'm hesitant to even post this because the past two of these link ups I've participated in have resulted in the immediate destruction of at least one of the things I pictured.  Literally within hours of posting each time a favorite lamp and then the washing machine went down.  The washing machine will be saved but the lamp was beyond repair.  If something tragic happens to this quilt I might be officially convinced of the pretty, happy, funny, real curse and never link up again.

Let's hope it doesn't come to that.



As always, pop over to Like Mother, Like Daughter to find some more captured contentment and hopefully less curses.

{p,h,f,r} The Laundry Room Reno Edition

{pretty, happy, funny & real}

I don't know if there's anything more in the spirit of this linkup than a mediocre laundry room renovation.  Sometimes you need to have a little imagination to see the beauty around you, or maybe just a lower threshold for what you consider beautiful.  

The renovation started with this little beauty that I spotted on the side of the (very busy) road.  I've been wanting a new deep sink for our sad laundry room ever since we moved in, but since we are renting I obviously didn't want to go out and buy a new deep sink.  I've just been making do with the sad one--putting a bucket into the sink and then putting the things I needed to clean into the bucket since cleaning things in a gross dirty sink seemed counter productive.  Well no more!  When I spotted my precious, I pulled over, checked it for cracks, and claimed it for my own--stuffing it into the front passenger seat of my van.

Well in order to install the sink we had to pull out the washer and dryer and if we were already pulling all of that out anyway we might as well paint, right?  Right.

The Before

This might be the complete opposite of pretty.  Most of our basement was this yellow color when we moved in and we've since painted everything but this laundry alcove which is located in the basement in one of our two bathrooms.  There are usually doors that close it off to hide its unsightliness from guests.

As you can see it's very fancy cinder block with I'm not sure what splotched all over it--or is that stuff coming from underneath the yellow?  It's hard to say.  Well, about the same time I found the sink, the support for the shelf over the washer and dryer detached itself from the wall.  Clearly it was a sign to get to work.

Chris, dutiful husband that he is, pulled everything out, scrubbed it all down and primed.  I took over the next day painting and trimming everything while he was at work so that I could have my laundry room back.  I can't function more than a couple of days without doing laundry.  The laundry mountain can get scary.

You know what's not fun?  Dabbing paint into cinder blocks to make sure you covered all the crevices.  It was worth it though.

The After

I don't know if I would be so bold as to call this pretty but it's certainly an improvement and definitely clean.  Not too shabby for some elbow grease and paint.  I painted the shelf and the supports white and since the shelf is a little warped, we flipped it over so it could eventually bend back the other way.  Hopefully.

I'd still like to hang my drying line inside the little alcove so I don't have to drape my diaper covers  over random things in the bathroom to dry.  And it would be nice to find some kind of wall mounted container for found objects/mostly legos.  And I need to hang the doors back up, but since I painted the trim we now need to paint the doors as well or they'll look super dingy.  It's funny how one project tends to spur so many, many more.  Well, not funny to my husband :)

And, since I was already standing in the shower attempting to photograph this tiny space I thought I'd go ahead and show you the whole bathroom in all it's glory.

I know, it's pretty exciting.

What I'd really like to find is a circular braided rug for the floor.  It's an awkward space and the rectangular rug looks off no matter how to lay it.  Plus someone's always got cold toes since it can't cover the toilet, shower and sink all at once--hence the late spring space heater.

I know it might seem silly to put so much work into a rental home, but since we are military and haven't managed to stay anywhere longer than three years in the past decade we've come to the conclusion that there's no point in waiting for some undetermined future home to make things pretty.  This is our life now and this is our home, so we may as well make it as nice as we are able.  

David especially will spend his entire childhood bouncing from one duty station to the next.  I don't want all of his memories to be of us living in ugliness.  Really I think we're setting a good example for him,  attempting to create beauty (or at least, less ugliness) and always leaving things a little better than they were wherever we go.

After all,

"...for the Christian who is consciously in communication with the Creator, surely his home should reflect something of the artistry, the beauty and order of the One whom he is representing, and in whose image he has been made!"

~Edith Schaeffer, The Hidden Art of Homemaking

What are your thoughts?



And as always, make sure to pop over to Like Mother, Like Daughter for even more captured contentment.  

{p,h,f,r} The Carpets, Dollhouses and Quilts Edition

{pretty}

In a hopefully not overly optimistic leap of faith, last weekend I decided to go ahead and begin this newest little one's baby quilt even though I haven't hit that twenty week sigh of relief mark yet.  And yes, there is an awful lot of blue and green in this pile.  I've never done any genetic testing before because I just didn't want to 80% know if something might be wrong, but with my history they offered me the super charged, 99% correct, ten week genetic testing which I accepted solely to find out the gender of the baby a couple months early.  The baby is completely fine genetically speaking--except for that pesky y chromosome.

I kid, I kid.

The unexpected consequence of finding out that he is a he was that my anxiety over this pregnancy has all but evaporated.  Apparently I was mostly afraid that I was having another little girl and that my little girls are somehow doomed.  A boy though?  A boy will clearly be totally fine.  Irrational?  Probably.  Rational thinking isn't exactly a hallmark of pregnancy anxiety though.

{happy}

  

I had a bit of a break down around the fact that my living room always looked dirty due to to my previous rug choice from hades and bought a new rug.  I cannot even begin to describe how happy this rug makes me.  I had a carpet remnant bound in a color much closer to that of the stains on the old one and it is glorious.  It looks a lot lighter than it really is in these pictures. While we were rolling it out we also decided to rearrange the furniture in a way that kaboshed the current traffic flow, which led from the front door directly to the sofa, in an effort to help the most soiled high traffic areas stay cleaner.

It looks so good, Chris fell asleep on the couch the first night we had it and I caught him talking in his sleep about how beautiful the room is.  Really.  Actually I thought what he said was "you are so beautiful" which was flattering, but no, he said "the room is so beautiful."  True but not as good for my ego.  He maintains that since I was sitting in the room I was included in the overall beauty of the space.  I'm still not convinced.

Also, someone said recently that gallery walls are so out.  I hope this isn't true because I've kind of committed, what with the plaster walls and all.....

{funny}

Since Margaret will be turning two in October she obviously needs a dollhouse.  I found this little Melissa and Doug fold and go house on craigslist for $15 and I've started rehabbing it for the little lady.  I've got big plans that include shingles, paint and wallpaper.  The scale of the house is a smidgen on the small size which is good in the sense that we don't have room for a giant dollhouse right now but bad in that regular toddler/wooden furniture won't fit.  I think I've found some on Etsy that will do the trick though and I'm pretty sure I'm getting her a little Calico Critter squirrel family to go with it which appear to be the  perfect size.

I'm feeling so torn between wanting to make all the miniature things right now and my desire for her to have a simple toy that's good for imaginative play.  I keep reminding myself that this is just a starter dollhouse and we have plenty of time to make a real dollhouse later.  You know when she's actually old enough to play with a real dollhouse and not eat it.

I just loved my dollhouse so much growing up and I worked on it all the time and I'm really hoping Margaret will share that love and we can do fun mother-daughter dollhouse projects together.  I know that being presented with a totally "done" dollhouse that's completely furnished and decorated would be sort of lame since a lot of the fun of a dollhouse is rearranging, collecting and making all the bits and pieces.  At the same time though, it's so hard to not go for it Pinterest style now that I'm an adult and have the finances and hand-eye coordination to actually do all the things I wanted to do as a child.

What we sacrifice for our children :)

Oh, I've been waiting so long to work on a dollhouse!  The baby's quilt and the house have almost the same deadline so I'm trying to get them both done before the final stages of pregnancy sap all my enthusiasm. Somehow I think I'll manage.....

{real}

Just so we're clear that my living room is generally not what you'd call "tidy" during the day.  Here's the epic train layout we had going this week.  I even let them keep it up overnight because I'm such a cool mom.  Okay, it was just one night before I broke and took back my living room, but still.




And as always, make sure to pop over to Like Mother, Like Daughter for even more captured contentment!

{p,h,f,r} My Grandmother's Quilt Edition

I don't have my photos properly divided into categories, but I've been linking up my progress on this quilt for so long that it seemed wrong not to link up the finished piece. You'll just have to forgive me this time.*

My grandmother had several of these quilt tops tucked away in a trunk in her room for as long as I can remember.  She had hand pieced them with an array of fabric scraps--it looks to be mostly old clothing and maybe, flour sacks?  She never told me the story of them--when she made them, why they were never finished--and I never thought to ask until it was too late.  Isn't that the way it always goes.  You think there will be plenty of time later, and then your time is up.

It took a long time to finish hand-quilting it since it's a queen sized quilt and I am a slow quilter but I didn't mind.  It's relaxing to have a project you can pull out and work on a bit in the evenings without making a huge mess--although it did take up a fair bit of space and I think Chris was glad to not be constantly shifting it around the living room anymore.

My goal had originally been to finish it by Thanksgiving so that I would be able to work on a baby quilt once we found out what we were having.  Obviously that timetable changed when it turned out that little Frances wouldn't be needing a quilt after all.  When I called Chris to let him know we had lost her and that he needed to meet me at the hospital for my induction the one thing I asked him to bring was the quilt.  I knew it would be a comfort and that I needed something to do with my hands while I labored.

When you're experiencing a typical labor you can distract yourself with something like binge watching Gilmore Girls while you eat as much as you can before you head to the hospital where you know they won't give you so much as a popsicle, not that you'd have time to eat one once you arrived anyway.  But when you're laboring for hours and hours to bring a child into the world who you know you've already lost you need a different sort of distraction.  One that you can pore all your grief and prayers and tears into.  That's what this quilt became for me, at the hospital and then at home as well.  I was almost sorry to finish it.

I suppose Frances got her quilt after all.

...

*I guess this post could still be considered pretty and real, but I really veered off the happy and funny once I started writing didn't I?  I'm going to link up to Like Mother, Like Daughter anyway because I do want to share the finished quilt, and the quilt does make me happy, if not actually upbeat.

{p,h,f,r} The Project (Almost) Finishing Edition

{pretty}

Can I just say that I really love this link-up?  Whenever I grab my camera and start walking around my house looking for bits of beauty and contentment to capture my mood is almost automatically lifted regardless of where it started.

When Chris went to the store for emergency supplies last weekend I asked him to pick up some flowers because, though I had meant to get some myself when I had previously gone, I was forced to evacuate the commissary in a hurry and bypassed the flower section in order to save my sanity and potentially the lives of our children.  When he came home with these beauties he said he was embarrassed to buy them because he thought people were assuming that he was getting me last minute grocery store flowers for Valentine's Day.  Um, I think the last time I received non-grocery store flowers from my husband he was deployed and therefore forced to order through a florist.

He hasn't been deployed since 2007.

{happy}

Aside from Christmas decorations I have not had this mantle "decorated" since we moved into this house over a year ago.  I just had this kind of awkward piece of salvage on the wall that made sense when we had the television on the mantle but didn't once we moved it with a mirror propped up in front.  The husband refuses to move the salvage because we have plaster walls and he doesn't want to deal with the aftermath.   And I'm not going to do it myself because that's clearly man's work :)

Anyway, I had sudden inspiration last weekend to finally de-sad-ify my mantle and I think I'm loving it.  I pulled our radio from the kitchen which wasn't getting any use because the kitchen is tiny and the radio is loud and therefore too much for my frazzled nerves while I cook.  Of course the radio is tiny so I needed something big to balance it and the biggest thing we have is our monstrous dictionary.  Chris saved this beauty from a military purge at his last office which is technically frowned upon but they were going to throw it in a dumpster!  I mean what would you have done?

Then I just pulled some other books from our shelves to fill out the other side and added one of my grandmother's iron stone pitchers for good measure.

Well that's not completely true, I actually stood in front our bookshelves for an absurdly long time trying to decide which books to use.  What did I want my literary mantle to say about our family?  I mean I didn't want to seem like I was trying too hard to look well-read, so it couldn't be anything too deep.  On the other hand I didn't want to be lame and have people think I only buy books to use as decorations, so I needed to have actually read them.  Should they be Catholic so everyone would know how holy we are?  Should they be popular so everyone will know how hip and up to date I am in my reading selections?  Could I ever convince anyone that I am hip and up to date anyhow?  Probably not.

What does your mantle say about you?  I think mine might say that I overthink things.........

{funny}

Aside from finally decorating our mantle, and by decorating I guess I mean tastefully rearranging things we already own, I also finally finished quilting my grandmother's quilt top.  When I first taught myself to quilt using internet directions I remember reading that you should use rust proof pins if you pin your quilt together and I thought, who leaves a quilt sitting around unfinished long enough for its pins to rust?    Now I see.  Sometimes these things take well over a year.  Sometimes you don't want to sit with a queen sized quilt on your lap all summer while you plug away at it so you cross stitch something instead.  Sometimes you eat your naive words, or in this case thoughts, while your unfinished project laughs at you from the living room side table where it took up permanent residence.

Well, no more.

I just need to make the binding and I can finish up this project that never ends and move on to baby quilt making.  Well, hopefully.  Because of my history, my doctor did offer me the super mega genetic testing package that tells you your baby's gender at ten weeks which I am very tempted to do.  Would it be unethical to have the military pay for a test and then tell them afterwards that I don't actually want to know the results, just the sex of my baby thanks?  I'm not sure that I'd be bold enough to start working on a baby quilt that early but it would be nice to know anyway.  

{real}

I also finished another, much less exciting project last weekend, which was hand scrubbing our living room rug only to have the dog run through the very next day with muddy paws.  Three times.  Back and forth.  I might have cried.

This rug choice was just the worst.  I'm not sure how I convinced myself that something with a WHITE STRIPE would ever work out in our living room, but everyone on the internet said these Dash and Albert cotton rugs were so easy to clean, and so amazing in every way, and you could even use them as stair runners, and they did look so good in the pictures.  To be fair, the rug did look very cute in our room before it looked dingy.  And I'm sure a smallish cotton rug would be easy to clean if it could fit in the washing machine.  A giant rug though, not so much.  Even the Stanley Steamer people couldn't clean it because it just stuck to their machines.  They took it back to their bosses and they still couldn't clean it.  They even suggested I take it to their competitors, the fancy rug cleaners who I had also gotten price quotes from, which were scarily close to the actual price of the rug.  Um no.

I checked my favorite homemaking book for tips and there was literally no advice on cleaning a cotton rug.  I suppose because the author wouldn't have dreamed anyone would ever be so silly as to buy one.  I ended up cleaning it with a scrub brush and a bowl of soapy water and it still didn't look amazing.  Better, but not amazing.  And now......it looks awful.  Really, really awful.

So in conclusion, don't buy a super cute gigantic cotton rug if you have a dog, or children, or live anywhere where something other than dry sand might ever come into contact with it.  And also don't believe everything the internet says, no matter how much you want it to be true :)  



And as always, make sure you check out even more captured contentment over at Like Mother, Like Daughter!

{p,h,f,r} The Bookshelf Edition

I was planning on putting up cute snow pictures today but Auntie Leila asked for bookshelves, so bookshelves it is.

I shared pictures of our library/playroom/homeschool room last year but I've done some rearranging since then.  I reoriented our bank of IKEA shelves so that it enclosed the play area in the hopes that it would be less distracting to those actually attempting to be homeschooled.  I had Chris make a back to the exposed shelf to give us a bit of wall space to hang maps on on the other side and also to stop children from shoving all the books out and tunneling through to the other side.  It's been wholly effective at deterring tunneling but only mildly effective at reducing distractions.  Mostly due to the fact that those banished to the playroom side have taken to playing/frolicking on top of the shelves in order to stay out of the baby's range and also drive their mother crazy.  

When I did the rearranging I also sorted out the books and labeled the sections for ease of re-shelving.  I wasn't sure if it would help or not but it has gone surprisingly well--especially considering only one of my children can actually read the labels.  There were so many books before that the boys were having a hard time finding what they were looking for and a lot of the books were living lonely and forgotten lives.

I pulled out all the books we had and sorted them into piles to get a feel for what categories we needed.  I ended up with:

• Goose, Seuss, Scarry and Spy (John's favorite section by far, which is why there are hardly any actually on the shelf)
• Picture Books--two shelves of favorite stories
• Fairy Tales and Fables
• History and Geography
• Science & Nature
• Insects & Ocean Life
• Animals & Dinosaurs

We also have a section of poetry books on the bottom of our homeschool shelves that I couldn't fit in here.  And then of course there are even more books stashed in the bedrooms upstairs. 

As you can see my labels are very fancy--index cards cut down to size and stuck down with packing tape.

Opposite the children's books are our main bookshelves, also from IKEA and hard to photograph due to the skinniness of the room.  I like these shelves because they are sturdy (made from actual wood, not press-board), they have a built in feel and with all our military moves I know I can always go pick up some more if I need to reconfigure them.  I could actually use a couple more right now but I have no idea where I would stick them.....

These shelves were organized by subject and alphabetized by author but unfortunately our sweet little Margaret is a bookshelf dumper.  And also a bookshelf climber.  I think it's the red hair.

I did recently gather up all of my book piles from around the living room and stick them on this one, 'you need to finish reading these before you buy any more books' shelf of shame.  I only let myself keep out four that I'm currently reading and I'm not going to grab any more until I've actually finished those.  Well except those two from the library that I need to pick up tomorrow. But after that I promise.

And lastly, my favorite shelf.  I'm not a collector of things in general but I started picking up these Agatha Christie books our local used book store in Florida and now I'm hooked on them.  Apparently they are from a collection that you could buy and then you would have one new book sent to you by mail each month.  How fun would that have been?  I wish there was something similar now.  I suppose I could just go on Amazon and pick one out for myself each month but that just doesn't really have the same feel............


Make sure you click on over to Like Mother, Like Daughter for even more captured contentment and bookshelves :)

{p,h,f,r} The Christmas Eve Edition

{pretty}

This year we had Christmas Eve dinner and then went to a seven o'clock vigil mass which worked out really well--two out of four kids slept the whole way through and no one had to be taken out once mass began.  A Christmas miracle!  Once we got home the children went straight to bed and we got busy decorating the tree and working our Christmas magic.  This year was the first time we've pulled off the fully decorated tree plus presents for Christmas morning and it was actually really fun.  There was so much extra to get done than we usually attempt on Christmas Eve though, that I went to bed sure that I forgot something.  I did.  It was the breakfast I had intended on putting together the night before so I could just pop it in the oven in the morning.  And also the candycanes for the tree that are still hiding on top of the fridge.  Oh well, regular french toast and a candyless tree it was. There have been worse Christmas catastrophes.

{happy}

We started off the day finishing up our Christmas baking which made me very happy and we made entirely too many sugar cookies.  But you know, you need to be prepared for the big guy--no cookies no presents.......at least I wouldn't want to risk it.  I think making and decorating Christmas cookies is the boys' favorite Christmas Eve tradition.  I can't be certain but it might even beat actually going to mass.......

{funny}

Of course no one in their right mind would actually want to eat the cookies that the children decorated, except maybe the children.

John John:  Don't take a picture of me with a messy face mom.
Me:  Oh, don't worry honey, I'm not.  (Well, his face wasn't messy......)

{real}

I set aside about half of the cookies and decorated them in a way that adults might actually want to consume, which wasn't hard since the children apparently only wanted to decorate as many cookies as they had to before I would let them start eating them and then they were pretty much done.  More cookies for the grown ups!  Because that's what we need.

Make sure to check out Like Mother, Like Daughter for even more Christmas Eve contentment.