crop.JPG) |
| me! me! |
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| I didn't think it was possible, but sitting up makes me look even cuter! |
Saturday, June 22, 2013
Look who's sitting pretty!
Friday, June 21, 2013
Quick takes: We can see the finish line!
Pant! Pant! Pant! Final sprint! One way or another, we will be done prepping the house by the end of the month. Either the house will be done, or we will be dead. Either way, I'm good! The photographers will be here Monday, so we've got a couple days left to get the visible stuff done, and then the rest of the week to finish off details before the open house at the end of the month. Good grief, is June almost over already??
We got new carpet yesterday, in the storage room (because the old stuff was musty and cut partway and made the room look like a pit), boys' room (because it was old when we moved into the house... 10 yrs ago...), and the living room (and the choirs of angels sang!). Since all 3 levels were affected, I had to keep the kids out of the house from 9:30 am until 4:30 pm. THAT was fun. (and by "fun" I mean "exhausting") We went shopping, we went to the park, we went out for lunch, we went to the pool, we bought groceries, we came home... and everyone collapsed. But it was on our beautiful, new, soft, fuzzy, funny-smelling new carpet so it's all good.
----------
Also, I may or may not have been up way too late the night before watching an episode of "Lark Rise to Candleford," so that may or may not explain why I was pretty much worthless for house work that evening. But we did get the house more or less rearranged after it had been deranged for carpet installation, so that counts, right?
----------
Actually, because Mr. Pickles was a good boy and got a good nights' sleep (we've been taking it in turns, it seems -- on a given day one of us is usually able to function as a human being -- it's a hard day when we're both zombies! ...did I mention the baby is teething?), he was able to attack the kitchen cabinets. They were all primed, just waiting for their coat of paint. I sort of batted ineffectually at the corners with a foam paintbrush (because all the good bristle brushes were still drying) while he used the roller. So now the cabinet boxes are done, and I've started on painting the doors. We'll be happy if we can get just the fronts of the doors painted before Monday, since that's all that's going to show in the pictures anyway.
----------
We're getting all the non-new carpets plus upholstered furniture cleaned on Tuesday. If they don't disintegrate, the house is going to look so sparkly clean! With all the moving things around, the floors are just ALWAYS dirty, and I have so little time to do anything about it. The other day I just had to vacuum the steps, and I felt like a better human being afterwards. I didn't bother vacuuming the living room before the installers came -- I figured, as linty and hairy as our carpet was, they've probably seen worse and won't judge me too harshly for my housewifely skilz. (Besides, my kids are so cute that their presence covers a multitude of homemaking sins, I think -- the men who come to our house to install things or fix things always smile and make a fuss over them -- I love that!)
----------
Why do I care what total strangers think of me as a housewife, anyway? I don't get it.
----------
In the house hunt arena, we're still looking. Found a genuine "maybe", but it would need a bunch of work. (For one thing, the HVAC is over 50 yrs old...) While reading all the silly house descriptions, I came up with a Real Estate drinking game: take a swig every time you read "must-see," "gorgeous," "spacious," "move-in ready," or "gleaming." Two swigs when gleaming is misspelled "gleeming." OR WHEN THE REMARKS ARE ALL IN CAPS! A MUST-SEE!!!
I keep seeing Frank & Ernest realtor strips in my head.
----------
Sort of wondering what is behind the trend in having no doors on the master bathroom.... or better yet, see-through doors...
----------
As far as what kind of house we're looking for, we went from considering purchasing a fixer-upper, to purchasing something that might need a little painting or a new appliance here & there, to "move-in ready." We are tired of fixing things up! Just give us a nice house already, Universe!
----------
All right, back to painting. FURTHER BULLETINS AS EVENTS WARRANT.
We got new carpet yesterday, in the storage room (because the old stuff was musty and cut partway and made the room look like a pit), boys' room (because it was old when we moved into the house... 10 yrs ago...), and the living room (and the choirs of angels sang!). Since all 3 levels were affected, I had to keep the kids out of the house from 9:30 am until 4:30 pm. THAT was fun. (and by "fun" I mean "exhausting") We went shopping, we went to the park, we went out for lunch, we went to the pool, we bought groceries, we came home... and everyone collapsed. But it was on our beautiful, new, soft, fuzzy, funny-smelling new carpet so it's all good.
----------
Also, I may or may not have been up way too late the night before watching an episode of "Lark Rise to Candleford," so that may or may not explain why I was pretty much worthless for house work that evening. But we did get the house more or less rearranged after it had been deranged for carpet installation, so that counts, right?
----------
Actually, because Mr. Pickles was a good boy and got a good nights' sleep (we've been taking it in turns, it seems -- on a given day one of us is usually able to function as a human being -- it's a hard day when we're both zombies! ...did I mention the baby is teething?), he was able to attack the kitchen cabinets. They were all primed, just waiting for their coat of paint. I sort of batted ineffectually at the corners with a foam paintbrush (because all the good bristle brushes were still drying) while he used the roller. So now the cabinet boxes are done, and I've started on painting the doors. We'll be happy if we can get just the fronts of the doors painted before Monday, since that's all that's going to show in the pictures anyway.
----------
We're getting all the non-new carpets plus upholstered furniture cleaned on Tuesday. If they don't disintegrate, the house is going to look so sparkly clean! With all the moving things around, the floors are just ALWAYS dirty, and I have so little time to do anything about it. The other day I just had to vacuum the steps, and I felt like a better human being afterwards. I didn't bother vacuuming the living room before the installers came -- I figured, as linty and hairy as our carpet was, they've probably seen worse and won't judge me too harshly for my housewifely skilz. (Besides, my kids are so cute that their presence covers a multitude of homemaking sins, I think -- the men who come to our house to install things or fix things always smile and make a fuss over them -- I love that!)
----------
Why do I care what total strangers think of me as a housewife, anyway? I don't get it.
----------
In the house hunt arena, we're still looking. Found a genuine "maybe", but it would need a bunch of work. (For one thing, the HVAC is over 50 yrs old...) While reading all the silly house descriptions, I came up with a Real Estate drinking game: take a swig every time you read "must-see," "gorgeous," "spacious," "move-in ready," or "gleaming." Two swigs when gleaming is misspelled "gleeming." OR WHEN THE REMARKS ARE ALL IN CAPS! A MUST-SEE!!!
I keep seeing Frank & Ernest realtor strips in my head.
----------
Sort of wondering what is behind the trend in having no doors on the master bathroom.... or better yet, see-through doors...
----------
As far as what kind of house we're looking for, we went from considering purchasing a fixer-upper, to purchasing something that might need a little painting or a new appliance here & there, to "move-in ready." We are tired of fixing things up! Just give us a nice house already, Universe!
----------
All right, back to painting. FURTHER BULLETINS AS EVENTS WARRANT.
Saturday, June 15, 2013
It's Always Something
It's our new family motto
So we've pushed back our Open House date. Again. This time our reason was that because all the rest of the house was all fresh and new-painty, it made the basement look like crap. So we're repainting the basement too, just because we don't have enough to do. Actually, Mr. Pickles got most of the basement done just today, with help from an awesome teenaged member of the same awesome family who helped us finish our bedroom last weekend.
Mr. Pickles is a veritable painting machine, I tell you. I have had to relinquish most of the painting to him, because a) SOMEONE has to feed the bottomless pits known as Our Children, several times a day even, and b) we have very, very different painting styles. For the sake of marital harmony I am giving him (almost) complete freedom to follow whatever process seems most logical to him. If there is a process. I wouldn't know.
N-E-WAY, there's always something. Whatever house-related task we undertake can never be simple. When we first started Doing Stuff, the toilet tank in the front bath decided that Mr. Pickles wasn't busy enough and gave him 3 extra days of work trying to deal with totally rusted bolts. (Why, WHY would one make a bolt for a toilet tank using non-rustproof metal? WHY?)
Then after removing all the kitchen cabinet doors and TSP'ing the cabinets and priming them (twice) and painting them (twice), I realized I hated the color. On the card it was a lovely, neutral straw-ish. ("Ivoire" by Sherwin Williams. Who comes up with these names???) On the cabinets, it was yellow. Like, hello! yellow. It's a weird trick of the light in that room. And after the new countertops were installed, it definitely did Not Go. So, now what?
Oh, we gained a new Picklesbane: the banisters! After dealing with the wood of the kitchen cabinets, we realized what a pain painting the banisters was going to be (2 flights of stairs plus rails plus supports plus 6 spindles on each side plus upstairs and dining room times TSP times primer squared times paint squared times polyurethane equals BIT FAT STINKING HEADACHE), and went through several days of mental anguish trying to decide what to do. Meanwhile the TSP we were using to clean them was actually taking off the top layer of finish (in addition to the accumulated years' worth of greasy handprints which I had never been able really to clean off), so we had to do SOMEthing and couldn't just stick it to the new owners.
Most recently, after the new double sink was installed, Mr. Pickles was hooking up the plumbing all by hisself (despite the fact that he is haunted by a personal plumbing poltergeist the sole purpose of whose existence is to make any ostensibly simple plumbing job take at least 3 days and 4 trips to the hardware store to finish -- seriously, it's like a curse) and after attaching the faucet with cold water (only cold at first b/c the hot connection was giving him trouble, natch) and getting one drain attached (huzzah!), he realized that when the house was built, the drain pipe for the other sink was installed A FOOT TOO HIGH. So the pipe was butting up against the bottom of the new sink. And there was no room for the u-bend. Who does these things?!?
----------
I am so, so, so thankful that none of the kids has had fevers, or the stomach flu, or fallen off their bike/scooter and gotten a concussion/broken bone/scrape-induced infection. Because you know that's what's missing from our lives right now.
Oh, the baby did fall down the stairs today. That probably counts. And I thought I was getting mastitis earlier this week.
----------
You know, as much as all these issues made us want to pull out whatever hair we have left, we've been able to find solutions for them all. Nothing has been insurmountable... so far. (Quick! Find wood! *knock knock knock*)
1) Mr. Pickles, through sheer force of will, fixed the toilet tank. I don't even remember what he did, it was so many eons ago, before we'd given up hope of a social life. I think it involved his hacksaw.
2) We're painting the kitchen cabinets white. We just happen to have a gallon of Ultra Pure White semi-gloss which we are using on the trim. We considered getting half a dozen samples of varying paint shades and trying them on a couple cabinet doors to find one which worked, and then I pondered the logistics of first choosing half a dozen paint samples that matched both the walls and the granite and then bringing my entourage (that would be the children) to the paint aisle of the hardware store and then painting the cabinet doors and then going BACK to the hardware store to purchase the color we'd chosen and then I think at this point my brain stalled and my attitude became something along the lines of "who the hell cares" and I decided to save myself a migraine and go with what's trending now anyway. (Go ahead! Search Pinterest!) Plus if the new owners hate it, white is really easy to paint over!
3) For the banisters, a friend recommended Minwax, a water-based squeezy-tube wood stain-with-finish, thereby earning herself after her death an honored seat among the seraphim. It squeezes out of a tube! You rub it on with a rag!! It looks fabulous!!! And you don't even have to sand the life out of your banisters first!!!! We will probably still need to put some kind of a protectant on top, since these rails get some serious use. But they are going to look awesome!
4) So after Mr. Pickles realized that he had been overpowered by his plumbing poltergeist curse, he called the granite installers and told them of his difficulty, and they sent a plumber THAT DAY to fix it. (!!) The plumber agreed that whoever installed the pipe that high was an idiot. (paraphrasing) But, because he's a professional plumber, he has Tools and Supplies which are not available to mere mortals. He had a u-bend that was deeper than standard issue at the local Home Despot, and was able to attach the drain. Huzzah! ...Until he realized there was a clog in the pipe. It had never given us trouble before, but it was very obviously draining e x t r e m e l y s l o w l y. He ran a snake down and pulled it back with all this disgusting gunk on the end. Sigh, it's always something. But wait! This story also has a happy ending -- because it is a double sink, that means it has double drains, and therefore double drain pipes, one of which is fully functional -- so he simply capped off the evil too-high-nastily-clogged pipe, and redirected the sink's drain so the two sinks share a drain pipe.
Let me tell you, that plumber's bill was worth every penny.
Oh, you want to see the actual SINK? And the new granite countertops?
Well, too bad, because within 2.5 minutes of them being installed, they were covered with Stuff. And now they pretty much always look like this. (This is what they look like after we clean up!)
I pinky-promise we will do a huge reveal of all the rooms, after I get all this guldurned junk outta the place so you can see the bright! shiny! The photographer will hopefully be coming in not this Tuesday but the next, and the realtor will come over the day before with her "staging team" (sounds kind of ominous to me) to basically make the place look like 7 people don't live here. I wish them luck. At any rate I will take pictures before that, of all the things WE'VE done, just so we can have a record of how awesome our place could look if we're willing to forgo sleep for 2 months.
----------
Oh, and I don't have mastitis. And I promised myself not to skip any more of baby's feedings just to fit one more essential errand in. You know, every day something's gotta give -- either it's the laundry, or the housecleaning, or the homsechooling, or sleep or regular meals or personal hygiene... not everything can be done every day. I just get to choose what's going to get neglected each day. (Note to self: not baby.) The plugged duct also could have been due to massive stress -- I think that was the day we realized that we were going to have to call a plumber plus our basement looked like crap and we were going to have to paint it. So as soon as I felt flu-like symptoms I abandoned all semblances of being productive, took baby to bed and drank gallons of water. And said a prayer of thanksgiving that my body can speak so clearly: "Stop moving for five minutes, you idiot, and take a break!"
---------
Sorry this post is a little more... dippy than usual -- I think I'm a little high from priming the cabinet doors in a semi-enclosed space. Wheeeeeeeee!
----------
And because no post is complete without a totally unrelated picture of adorable baby:
So we've pushed back our Open House date. Again. This time our reason was that because all the rest of the house was all fresh and new-painty, it made the basement look like crap. So we're repainting the basement too, just because we don't have enough to do. Actually, Mr. Pickles got most of the basement done just today, with help from an awesome teenaged member of the same awesome family who helped us finish our bedroom last weekend.
 |
| see? doesn't it look better already? (actually, I took this picture as further evidence of the state my poor house is currently in.) (that would be: "a wreck") |
N-E-WAY, there's always something. Whatever house-related task we undertake can never be simple. When we first started Doing Stuff, the toilet tank in the front bath decided that Mr. Pickles wasn't busy enough and gave him 3 extra days of work trying to deal with totally rusted bolts. (Why, WHY would one make a bolt for a toilet tank using non-rustproof metal? WHY?)
Then after removing all the kitchen cabinet doors and TSP'ing the cabinets and priming them (twice) and painting them (twice), I realized I hated the color. On the card it was a lovely, neutral straw-ish. ("Ivoire" by Sherwin Williams. Who comes up with these names???) On the cabinets, it was yellow. Like, hello! yellow. It's a weird trick of the light in that room. And after the new countertops were installed, it definitely did Not Go. So, now what?
Oh, we gained a new Picklesbane: the banisters! After dealing with the wood of the kitchen cabinets, we realized what a pain painting the banisters was going to be (2 flights of stairs plus rails plus supports plus 6 spindles on each side plus upstairs and dining room times TSP times primer squared times paint squared times polyurethane equals BIT FAT STINKING HEADACHE), and went through several days of mental anguish trying to decide what to do. Meanwhile the TSP we were using to clean them was actually taking off the top layer of finish (in addition to the accumulated years' worth of greasy handprints which I had never been able really to clean off), so we had to do SOMEthing and couldn't just stick it to the new owners.
Most recently, after the new double sink was installed, Mr. Pickles was hooking up the plumbing all by hisself (despite the fact that he is haunted by a personal plumbing poltergeist the sole purpose of whose existence is to make any ostensibly simple plumbing job take at least 3 days and 4 trips to the hardware store to finish -- seriously, it's like a curse) and after attaching the faucet with cold water (only cold at first b/c the hot connection was giving him trouble, natch) and getting one drain attached (huzzah!), he realized that when the house was built, the drain pipe for the other sink was installed A FOOT TOO HIGH. So the pipe was butting up against the bottom of the new sink. And there was no room for the u-bend. Who does these things?!?
----------
I am so, so, so thankful that none of the kids has had fevers, or the stomach flu, or fallen off their bike/scooter and gotten a concussion/broken bone/scrape-induced infection. Because you know that's what's missing from our lives right now.
Oh, the baby did fall down the stairs today. That probably counts. And I thought I was getting mastitis earlier this week.
----------
You know, as much as all these issues made us want to pull out whatever hair we have left, we've been able to find solutions for them all. Nothing has been insurmountable... so far. (Quick! Find wood! *knock knock knock*)
1) Mr. Pickles, through sheer force of will, fixed the toilet tank. I don't even remember what he did, it was so many eons ago, before we'd given up hope of a social life. I think it involved his hacksaw.
2) We're painting the kitchen cabinets white. We just happen to have a gallon of Ultra Pure White semi-gloss which we are using on the trim. We considered getting half a dozen samples of varying paint shades and trying them on a couple cabinet doors to find one which worked, and then I pondered the logistics of first choosing half a dozen paint samples that matched both the walls and the granite and then bringing my entourage (that would be the children) to the paint aisle of the hardware store and then painting the cabinet doors and then going BACK to the hardware store to purchase the color we'd chosen and then I think at this point my brain stalled and my attitude became something along the lines of "who the hell cares" and I decided to save myself a migraine and go with what's trending now anyway. (Go ahead! Search Pinterest!) Plus if the new owners hate it, white is really easy to paint over!
3) For the banisters, a friend recommended Minwax, a water-based squeezy-tube wood stain-with-finish, thereby earning herself after her death an honored seat among the seraphim. It squeezes out of a tube! You rub it on with a rag!! It looks fabulous!!! And you don't even have to sand the life out of your banisters first!!!! We will probably still need to put some kind of a protectant on top, since these rails get some serious use. But they are going to look awesome!
4) So after Mr. Pickles realized that he had been overpowered by his plumbing poltergeist curse, he called the granite installers and told them of his difficulty, and they sent a plumber THAT DAY to fix it. (!!) The plumber agreed that whoever installed the pipe that high was an idiot. (paraphrasing) But, because he's a professional plumber, he has Tools and Supplies which are not available to mere mortals. He had a u-bend that was deeper than standard issue at the local Home Despot, and was able to attach the drain. Huzzah! ...Until he realized there was a clog in the pipe. It had never given us trouble before, but it was very obviously draining e x t r e m e l y s l o w l y. He ran a snake down and pulled it back with all this disgusting gunk on the end. Sigh, it's always something. But wait! This story also has a happy ending -- because it is a double sink, that means it has double drains, and therefore double drain pipes, one of which is fully functional -- so he simply capped off the evil too-high-nastily-clogged pipe, and redirected the sink's drain so the two sinks share a drain pipe.
 |
| behold, the Frankendrain! |
Oh, you want to see the actual SINK? And the new granite countertops?
 |
| ta-da! Don't they look lov-- ...er... |
I pinky-promise we will do a huge reveal of all the rooms, after I get all this guldurned junk outta the place so you can see the bright! shiny! The photographer will hopefully be coming in not this Tuesday but the next, and the realtor will come over the day before with her "staging team" (sounds kind of ominous to me) to basically make the place look like 7 people don't live here. I wish them luck. At any rate I will take pictures before that, of all the things WE'VE done, just so we can have a record of how awesome our place could look if we're willing to forgo sleep for 2 months.
----------
Oh, and I don't have mastitis. And I promised myself not to skip any more of baby's feedings just to fit one more essential errand in. You know, every day something's gotta give -- either it's the laundry, or the housecleaning, or the homsechooling, or sleep or regular meals or personal hygiene... not everything can be done every day. I just get to choose what's going to get neglected each day. (Note to self: not baby.) The plugged duct also could have been due to massive stress -- I think that was the day we realized that we were going to have to call a plumber plus our basement looked like crap and we were going to have to paint it. So as soon as I felt flu-like symptoms I abandoned all semblances of being productive, took baby to bed and drank gallons of water. And said a prayer of thanksgiving that my body can speak so clearly: "Stop moving for five minutes, you idiot, and take a break!"
---------
Sorry this post is a little more... dippy than usual -- I think I'm a little high from priming the cabinet doors in a semi-enclosed space. Wheeeeeeeee!
----------
And because no post is complete without a totally unrelated picture of adorable baby:
Thursday, June 06, 2013
{pretty, happy, funny, real}
Because I need a reason not to deal with the {real}, below.
{pretty}
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| can a teeny tiny baby bunny be pretty? (I think so) |
{happy}
 |
| look! I found all the pieces! several have been missing for MONTHS -- maybe even years. you better believe I'm packing it up before the kids see it |
{funny}
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| I probably need to start a gallery of "Baby Bedhead" |
{real}
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| as I said, my life in boxes. sigh. |
Monday, June 03, 2013
What We've Been Up To
...besides accidentally painting the carpet, that is.
What have we been up to? Short answer: lots and lots! Here's a sampling.
First up: packing.
I think we've moved about a third of our belongings into storage (Mr. Math Whiz can correct me on that), to make it easier to spiff up the place. After we removed all the bookcases and painted the living room, it became SO much lighter in there! Having less stuff around to look at has made me feel more calm in some ways -- well, at least as calm as one can feel when, at any given moment, one room in the house looks like this:
But Getting Rid of Stuff feels so good that I have been ruthless in my decluttering. It's been a positive lesson in detachment -- I'm realizing how little I really need to have a happy home life. (hint: it's not the box of papers from college days)
So I'm filled with all kinds of good resolutions for homemaking in the new house. And of course, we ALL know that after we finally move (Lord knows when that will be), there are still going to be boxes full of Stuff that lie around indefinitely, until I "find" the time to unpack them. I should schedule the house blessing for a month after the move-in date to give myself a deadline.
The kids are handling the rolling chaos remarkably well. It helps that the weather has been extremely cooperative for the most part, so they are able to spend much time out of doors. I think they're also responding positively to the lack of clutter -- when there's less stuff around, they can focus on just a couple favorite things, and the tendency (and ability) to leave a disastrous mess in their wake is lessened. (They still make messes, they're just less... disastrous.) After we had cleared out the living room and a good part of the basement toys, Katie still managed to create an amazing fort/secret hideout complete with drawbridge and pennants using a filing cabinet, the piano bench, a piece of cardboard, pipe cleaners, a bit of string, scotch tape (she has her own roll so she won't use up mine), and pencils. Oh, and half a ream of construction paper (give or take). That girl was born about a century too late -- she would have been a whiz at Making Do during the Great Depression.
We've made quite a bit of progress -- I'm beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel. It's good to remember that this will all eventually end, because everything is still in limbo. Not one room is actually finished. Being the perfectionist I am, it's driving me CRAZY. I have such lovely visions for what each room could be! Instead, this is the closest I have to an "after" picture:
There are just so. many. little. things. that need to be done. And a couple big things still. But I'm not complaining! No I'm not! I have a house, and not a pile of matchsticks instead. I am very grateful for that.
I am also very grateful for a hubby who always does wonderful Mother's Days. :)
Speaking of Mother's Day, I had a delightful one! As you can see the breakfast was awesome. Then after Mass, Joseph's Atrium teacher held an open house, so the students could show all their favorite works to their families. Joseph's favorite was an awesome building set of Jerusalem, complete with labels for all the events of the Passion. We had a good time looking at all the materials, and Joseph was very proud to show us around.
After that Mr. Pickles dropped Andy and me off at the National Gallery of Art, so I could visit the Pre-Raphaelites exhibit before it left. It was amazing and beautiful. I was surprised by how many other mothers chose to spend their afternoon there too. I guess I'm not surprised that they wanted to spend their afternoon surrounded by beauty -- I'm just surprised they decided to bring their (small and unappreciative) children with them!
Then in the evening after I returned home we had some friends over for dinner, and Mr. Pickles grilled. It was fabulous. We had a great time. Oh, and all the kids had made me cards and the girls sewed me little gifts -- it was just a beautiful, sweet day.
Oh, and speaking of strawberries, guess what time it is?
Jam-making time!!
Three batches of strawberry in the pantry already. I hope it's not too prideful to say that this year my strawberry jam is AWE.SOME. Like strawberry candy (and that's even with the low-sugar pectin!). I finally figured how not to scorch strawberry jam -- a) turn down the heat to med-high (duh), and b) have your kitchen elves take turns stirring constantly, and by constantly, I mean constantly. It's worth giving yourself carpal-tunnel from all the stirring -- the results are yummers. I hope blueberries will be at the Farmer's Market soon, b/c we're already going through this stuff pretty quickly!
I figured out that to have enough jam to last us the year and still be able to give some away at Christmas, I would need to make 65+ jars. If I make a batch every weekend this summer that I can, taking time off for the homeschool conference and for moving, I should be able to get a good dozen in. (One batch makes from about 6-7 jars for peach to 9-10 for blueberry.) I can crank out a batch pretty quickly now, especially when I have little elves to help!
So that's some of the latest. I have a couple more things to write about, but it's now pumpkin time for me.
And because no post is complete without a picture of the baby:
What have we been up to? Short answer: lots and lots! Here's a sampling.
First up: packing.
 |
| boooooxeeeeeeessss... |
 |
| proposed new subtitle for this blog: My Life in Boxes |
 |
| you can kind of see the color difference here: new neutral paint on the near walls, older yellow in the back. the new paint looks like french vanilla ice cream. |
So I'm filled with all kinds of good resolutions for homemaking in the new house. And of course, we ALL know that after we finally move (Lord knows when that will be), there are still going to be boxes full of Stuff that lie around indefinitely, until I "find" the time to unpack them. I should schedule the house blessing for a month after the move-in date to give myself a deadline.
 |
| after just the first coat of primer, the kitchen became so bright! |
 |
| waiting to paint the bottom half until the new countertops come... |
I am also very grateful for a hubby who always does wonderful Mother's Days. :)
 |
| baked french toast with chocolate melted in between layers... |
 |
| ...smothered in mashed strawberries and hand-whipped cream, served with mimosas. |
After that Mr. Pickles dropped Andy and me off at the National Gallery of Art, so I could visit the Pre-Raphaelites exhibit before it left. It was amazing and beautiful. I was surprised by how many other mothers chose to spend their afternoon there too. I guess I'm not surprised that they wanted to spend their afternoon surrounded by beauty -- I'm just surprised they decided to bring their (small and unappreciative) children with them!
Then in the evening after I returned home we had some friends over for dinner, and Mr. Pickles grilled. It was fabulous. We had a great time. Oh, and all the kids had made me cards and the girls sewed me little gifts -- it was just a beautiful, sweet day.
Oh, and speaking of strawberries, guess what time it is?
Three batches of strawberry in the pantry already. I hope it's not too prideful to say that this year my strawberry jam is AWE.SOME. Like strawberry candy (and that's even with the low-sugar pectin!). I finally figured how not to scorch strawberry jam -- a) turn down the heat to med-high (duh), and b) have your kitchen elves take turns stirring constantly, and by constantly, I mean constantly. It's worth giving yourself carpal-tunnel from all the stirring -- the results are yummers. I hope blueberries will be at the Farmer's Market soon, b/c we're already going through this stuff pretty quickly!
I figured out that to have enough jam to last us the year and still be able to give some away at Christmas, I would need to make 65+ jars. If I make a batch every weekend this summer that I can, taking time off for the homeschool conference and for moving, I should be able to get a good dozen in. (One batch makes from about 6-7 jars for peach to 9-10 for blueberry.) I can crank out a batch pretty quickly now, especially when I have little elves to help!
So that's some of the latest. I have a couple more things to write about, but it's now pumpkin time for me.
And because no post is complete without a picture of the baby:
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| arrr, matey! have ye any booty on which I can drool? |
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| ...um, how do you get this thing off? |
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