Finished a few things today... hooray!

Do you ever undertake projects that are super easy, but cool, and then never sit down to do them?  These shirts and Pjs have been shuffling around my craft room since last year!  I think the T-shirts might be from last summer...embarrassing.  Maybe I thought that the whole concept of dressing them up a bit was too easy and I could just finish it "anytime".  For me that sometimes means "never" and then I get frustrated because there are so many projects that I want to do like this....I just never start them.  Maybe this is the start of "nesting" but man, it feels so good to get something off of the "to-do list"...8 somethings.  Yay me!

Can I be frank for a moment?  We have been living without a functioning kitchen for over a month.  We have been without a stove for 3 weeks.  It hasn't been that bad, we have been laughing about how great the new kitchen will look... we have been getting fun "take-out" for dinner and sometimes lunch.  Sometimes I take the kids out for breakfast and we all LOVE that...

I am so done!  Yesterday, our flooring was supposed to be installed and then we were going to have a stove AND a refrigerator AND a running sink, ALL in the same room.  We got home and looked at our beautiful new floor and  ARE you supposed to have a long, blackish, raised seam in the middle of the room when a "professional" is installing the marmoleum??  Are you???  I could let it go if I was the one doing the installing, because I am NOT A PROFESSIONAL!  Also if I had to deal with myself it would have been WAY more pleasant than the two men that came to do the floor... can you say rude??  Condescending??  Not very nice people??  They were all of those.  AND I have had it!  I am hugely pregnant, I am sick of eating food prepared by other people, and I am sick of having rude men come in to my home and then having to pay them and smile about it.  

Serenity NOW!

I just want people to do their job, well, and with a little bit of kindness.  Is that so wrong??

OK, 

The crab is done.  These are small potatoes compared to so many things.  I am a blessed woman.

One small note:

Last week I had a bit of a small scare on the baby front...just some higher than usual blood pressure, but it merited more testing.  I am happy to report that the blood tests all came back normal and that is a LOAD off my mind!

JMB

Better, lots more work to do...

Ahhhh, Summertime, and the living in easy...

Is it??  I am not quite sure.  Today brought an end to our first full week at home for the summer.  All I know is it was busy, busy.  Mostly, in the sense that the boys and I got a full measure of play in each and every day.  But busy also in the sense that time is ticking, ticking away... until we leave for a bit of a vacation next week, until the new cabinets arrive 2 days after we return, until I leave for my Sisters Quilt-o-rama, and then there is the time until our family of 4 is a family of 5.  I like to think of us as a Party of 5.  I like the ring of that, but I am not going to be as angsty as Neve Campbell's Julia.  Our 5 make up a TOTALLY different construct, but I still like to say  "Party of 5."

I made the boys go strawberry picking again this morning (I didn't post a picture, but yesterday I picked a whole bowl of raspberries from the garden...it was pure decadence, I tell you!).  I need to remember next year that I think the boys have ONE productive visit to the berry patch a year... just ONE.  Today was more of mommy picking the bucket, Blondie eating what Mommy was putting in to the bucket and Brownie chucking yucky berries at his friends (when I saw this I was MORTIFIED!  Why does he come up with these things???)  Luckily, the morning weather has been so temperate, it didn't bother me to be out and "working in the fields".  All the same, I just picked one bucket, and one was plenty to prep and freeze....believe me.
I have been working on some swaps and I cut up some of my favorite fabrics for them.  I am still working on the hoarding monster that lives in my studio.  I am so much happier when I am using what I like, but it is SO HARD to make that first cut, so hard.
Here are some blocks that I have received back from Another Quilting Bee 1 friends.  I never thought that I would enjoy this project this much.  I was hanging the blocks up today and really admired the effort these wonderful women put in to each block.  Seeing them all together inspires me to get some motion going on this tree quilt.  It has been a real creativity boost to work with people like this on one project.  Being one piece of a whole.
I also felt the need to revamp my mini quilt wall.  It is in my bedroom and I just love looking at them.  I put up some of the ones with the more summery colors.  Yes, I left up my orange and aqua disappearing 9-patch.  I just love looking at it.  It is so orderly compared to what I have been coming up with lately.  I really love to get lost in the pattern.  I think that I want to make one that is larger. (that is the nice thing about minis...they are like little testers for ideas.)
There is my hero.  While I messed around in my craft room on some swaps, while I blogged, while I surfed the web...he diligently worked on "the once and future kitchen."  I know that this project, even though we are having the professionals do most of it, still has been more work than either of us anticipated.  I am so glad that I married a hard worker, sometimes it makes me batty, but I am so thankful that he is my partner in this crazy fun life.

Happy Friday! (It is still Friday isn't it....yikes it is after 12, Happy Saturday!)

JMB

No pictures, I am sour...

Two days of car chores... and it still looks like a band of wayward mules live in there.

Two days of keeping the kids out of the house so the electrician can fix our "mid-century" wiring.

They still aren't done and left a horrid mess today...  this mama's a little bit mad.

JMB

Weekend times...

Mmmmm, don't you just love a good smoothie?   I do.  I really have been craving fruits this pregnancy and smoothies always hit the spot.  This one was especially good.
I couldn't resist putting this picture in, mostly for myself, to remember this one's little personality quirks.  At our end of the year celebration for Brownie, little Blondie just really felt like he owned the park.  He asked me for help on one part of the play structure and after I suggested that he go up the twisty bar to figure out how to get on the main structure by himself, he just kept climbing across over and over again.  Apparently he felt like I was hovering and (I was just there in case he lost his grip, I swear.) because he kept telling me to "Stand and watch me from over there Mom, I need my space."  Then when we sat down for snack, he sat near me and laid down and ate on his back...(really funny).  When he realized that his big brother was eating near some other friends, he picked up his plate and left me ALL ALONE, because he "wanted to be near Brother."  So big, so fast, I guess it is a good thing I am having another baby, but I wonder if the 3rd will just come out ready to run off with her big brothers. (sniff, sniff, tear.)
Since my blog is the only journally type thing that I have been very faithful to over the past few years, some of my entries may be an "over-share" type thing to you all who read, but it has been nice to have some place to document what goes on in our lives from day to day.  

We moved in to our current house 9 years ago.  Our kitchen is small, but once we painted over the liver colored cabinets and brightened up the walls with a bit of yellow, it felt like ours.  Over the past 3 years the white from the cabinets has chipped, doors periodically fall off and the linoleum has curled and our kitchen has started to lose it's charm.  I think I also told my husband that I did not want another child learning to crawl on the disgusting painted linoleum floor in our "sunroom".  After much talking about it we are finally tearing out the cabinets and getting ready for the new one to be put in (Step 1!!)  I am so excited, but also so mortified this picture, WHAT A MESS!  We excavated 2 kinds of old wallpaper and a number of different wall colors...the yuckiest being a hospital scrub green in a really weird matte finish.  I can only imagine what it looked like next to the wall paper (I will take a picture later and share, it is ALMOST charming, but not quite.)
The best part (for me, I really haven't been doing much beyond making meals and keeping the husband supplied with Coke...the soda, not the drug...but it is a fine line.) is our Daddy has been doing such a fabulous job of employing the boys in the whole process.  He has been having SO much patience with them, much more than I would in a project like this.  The boys have been working hard unscrewing all of the screws and carrying drawers and things outside.  It has been wonderful watching all three of them work together, in a way that I am removed from (I don't know how that sounds, but it is one thing to organize your kids yourself and another to watch them work together in a totally different way not organized by you???  Do you get it?)
I did make a trip to IKEA this week end for a crib and some clothing storage solutions.  There was cardboard a-plenty, and while their dad tidied the garage an amazing thing was built...
A bizarre and funny little house.  They were so pleased because they said, "Even you can come in this one Mom!"  It was decorated with a rocking chair and some old kitchen drawers and the roof kept blowing in.  They were disappointed when they found out they couldn't stay out there over night with their stuffed animals.  Maybe we will have to get the cardboard out again later this week, ya think?

JMB