Win a Quilt!N

Nope. I did NOT have time to make a quilt and raffle it off to my adoring readers. But somebody did! Go enter yourself, and do me a favor and tell them I sent you!

WFMW - gosh it's been a while!

Well, it's been pretty much forever since I had anything to contribute to a WFMW! We are currently prepping our house to put it on the market. While it's true that the cost to effect ratio is fabulous for paint, (meaning that it doesn't cost that much, but it has a really great effect on your house), it takes a lot of work. Here's a couple other cheap and quick fixes that I have found to be really effective in making your house look fresher and up-to-date.

• Change out your switch and outlet plate covers. These cost me a whopping 39 cents each at my hardware store. They take just a couple of minutes to replace an entire room's worth, but even if you didn't think they were that bad to start, you'll be shocked at how much new covers freshen up a space.
• If your floor / wall vent covers are really gross, and I don't just mean dirty but corroded, they cost about $5 at your hardware store. Again, a screwdriver and a couple of minutes, and you've got a quick freshening for the whole room.
• Clean your windows. I know, I know, everybody says to do it before you sell your house - and even though I thought my windows were pretty good, I cleaned them and was amazed at how much more sunshine it seemed to let in.
• Take out most of your stuff. I'm not talking "eat pizza off paper plates while sitting on the floor," but by removing clutter from walls, furniture and even removing extra furniture, your rooms will look so much bigger. Of course, you need somewhere to put this stuff, but maybe you have a friend with a garage you could borrow.
• Take out a ton of stuff from your linen closets / kitchen cabinets, etc. I'm going to be living with the bare minimum of spices, etc., for a while, which makes my cabinet look like there's actually room for them. Usually, my hundred different spices (exaggeration!) are jammed into a small space, and I have to paw through to find the one I want. Now my top twenty are neatly arranged in the space - when I eventually get bigger kitchen cabinets, my hundred can be neatly arranged, but for now I'm going to do everything I can to make my cabinets look gigantic!

I may add some more today as I think o f them, but I hope this helps!

Sunny Day

Really, doesn't this look comfortable? A sunny spot to sprawl out and soak up some rays? I have to tell you, Peanut was very entertained by this! Although she kept signing "dog, cat, dog, cat" because she was very confused as to what it was. I guess the sign for squirrel just hasn't sunk in yet!

Was It Worth It?

Oh my gooooodness.

An hour of nausea and a few minutes of retching in the bathroom - just to discover that at the bottom of the last few days' garbage lay my drivers license, ATM card, and a few other treasures from my wallet. Did I tell you that for the last five or six days, we've been fighting off a stomach bug? Everyone else seems to be past it, except for the lingering nausea and heightened awareness of smells that I got stuck with (and no, not pregnant!)... and I also got stuck with the job of digging through garbage!

Peanut loves to play with my wallet. My Discover card has a picture of a chimpanzee on it, and she just thinks that is the coolest thing ever. It will entertain her for an hour if I let her take everything out of my wallet, put it back in, etc... Except yesterday, she decided to take a handful of stuff and THROW IT OUT.

So now I'm going to be collecting all those fake cards that come with credit card offers, and go get a dollar wallet from the dollar store, and let her throw those out to her heart's content!!

Imelda Marcos, here we come!

Peanut is obsessed with shoes. Seriously. She wakes up in the morning, and the first thing (after nursing) is to ask to have shoes on. Every day. Since they are the prelude to her favorite activity, Going Outside, shoes have their own appeal.

She has three pairs of shoes - shiny black patent leather ones, squeaky brown sneakers, and girly pink sneaker / sandals. She likes them all, but especially the squeaky ones.

It is not unusual to have six shoe changes in a day. We cycle through them all, trying to see which one works best with the outfit. At least, that's what I tell myself. I think she just likes watching me drop everything to hunker down and help her change her shoes.

I just said "not now, Peanut, soon..." because I was reading the internet, so she went in her room, opened her shoe/sock drawer, and brought me ALL SIX OF HER SHOES. She is now sitting next to me, unvelcroing the velcro ones and prepping them for wearing. She's not very good at putting them on herself - they precariously balance off her big toe, usually!

All right, I'd better go. Since she's wearing a pink hoodie and red sweatpants, I'm going to guess that black patent leather will go best with this outfit!

oof

We've had a rough last few days here with a stomach bug. My parents were supposed to visit us on Saturday (and help us paint our kitchen) and then we were all going to my brother's and sister-in-law's house to witness the baptism of my newest niece - and Mister and I are her godparents!

But none of that happened. A couple movies, a lot of sleep, and a heck of a lot of family snuggle time happened. That part was nice. :)

What did you do this weekend?

ravelry

Okay, so I joined. (lifeasamama)

For you experts out there, what are some good places to start looking around? It's so big...

Spring Cleaning, Take 2

So yeah. I updated the look. What do you think? The other color scheme was probably more spring-y, but I needed something fresh. I really like the crispness of the white "life as a mama" against the header...

Any comments? I'd love to hear what you think!

I personally like the layout, so it didn't change, but suggestions would be embraced with open arms. :)

Spring Cleaning

So as I mentioned in passing in an earlier post, we're debating about selling our house this summer. We don't need a larger house at the moment, but if we want to have a handful of more kids like we're planning, we'll need one eventually. We only have one toddler and I'm not pregnant. That sounds like it would be a lot easier to move now than it would be in future years!

The area where we live is really quite stable, financially. We haven't had the crazy housing-price-fluctuations that other areas have seen. And while we wouldn't make any profit off of our current house, we'd be able to snap up a bargain on the houses we've been looking at.

Of course, we've been acting very rationally about this until this weekend. When we went to an open house. Of a GORGEOUS house. One that we could just really be excited about living in. I walked out of there saying "If we lived there, I would feel so adult." In a good way, not in an "I'm an old fogey way." I would feel like we'd be squarely in the middle of living life as a family. This was a house for kids... and it had the perfect little craft room in the basement that was just calling out for me to come be creative in it! There was a theater playroom next door that would exactly fit Mister's requirements. So now we're all in a tizzy, crunching numbers, deciding how quickly we could get this house ready to put on the market.

So I cleaned all my windows today.

Matt Maher

http://www.mattmahermusic.com/blogformusic

I'm not one to send you to other places. (Why should I? You enjoy me so much that I'm all you need, right?) If part of the criteria for a contest is that I would need to link back to the contest, I don't enter. I found that when I entered that kind of contest, my posts were littered with all these, and my content seriously decreased.

But I am making a serious exception. Matt Maher is worth it. I have had a serious music-crush on him for the last five years or so. (SWWOOOOON!) He's got this genuine, lyrical, subtleness to his music that I find so appealing. Mister makes fun of me all the time for it. Really. I even went out to Arizona to see him perform once. Does that make me a groupie? Oh well. I am. If you've never heard him, now's your chance - he's got a new cd out that I haven't heard yet, but am dancing in my desk chair about!

A Tendency of Mine

I have a tendency to not complete projects. These could be crocheting projects, computer projects, etc., because I enjoy working on them so much. There's also a great big part of me that doesn't like to see them leave.

For example, when I sent the Baby a Baby package away to Leo (and Tonya), I knew I'd never see that creation again. I had a (brief) sense of loss attached to it, even though I knew that a handsome young man would enjoy it soon.

I just finished a giant computer project I've been tearing my hair out about for the last two months. It's done. It's off my desk. (I freelance a bit for the Catholic Diocese...) But while I should be feeling a sense of accomplishment and be turning my attention to our next big project (prepping our house to put it on the market), I am disappointed.

I won't get to fiddle with that darn Microsoft Access anymore. I won't learn Access' amazing capabilities. I won't have the chance to figure out how to do the really cool things I know it was capable of, but I had to do chintzy work-arounds because I didn't know Visual Basic... (That was rotten English, but I bet you know what I mean!)

Farewell, sweet database, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest...