Ninja Invasion

Dave Barnes is a singer/songwriter out of Nashville, TN that I've listen to since my college days.  He's one of the few musicians I've seen in concert multiple times.  I really like his music (the boy can write a love song) but I also enjoy his shows because, at times, he can be pretty funny.  I think he even does stand up comedy every now and then. Anyway, all that's to say that I like Dave Barnes and so I follow him on twitter.  He tweets about soccer (blah) and about his upcoming shows (if it's not my town I scroll through) and sometimes he just tweets about funny things.  Like the time a piece of fried chicken fell from the sky onto his patio while he was doing yardwork.  Or his interpretations of merchandise in the Sky Mall magazines on flights.  So it was no surprise when last night, he tweeted this:

davebarnesmusic: Fun game to end your Friday night?  Substitute ninja for woman in a song.

With his tweet he gave some song suggestions to get the ball rolling: More Than A Ninja, Pretty Ninja, Witchy Ninja, She's Always A Ninja To Me.

The rest of my night was spent checking my phone and giggling at all the new ninja songs people were coming up with.

• You Make Me Feel Like A Natural Ninja
• Man, I Feel Like A Ninja
• When A Man Loves A Ninja
• No Ninja, No Cry
• I'm Every Ninja
• Ain't No Ninja (Like The One I Got)

Yea, so ninja songs = totally pointless, totally stupid, totally hilarious.  I mean, come on.  Who doesn't want to sing about a ninja?

That was Friday night.

Today (Saturday) I spent the afternoon over at my parents' house working on a few projects.  One of the projects was to finally drag down two dressers from my mom's attic to see if they could be spruced up to use in the beach house (final verdict: they're too rickety and messed up).  The dressers used to be in each of my brother's rooms back in the day, but had been in the attic for a few years.  When my dad and I started dragging them out of the attic, we realized that the drawers were still full of old junk.

We managed to get them out of the steamy hot attic and into my bedroom at their house but decided we needed to clean out the drawers before attempting to carry them down the stairs, through the house, and out to the woodshop.  Mom had joined us at this point and the three of us spent 20 minutes or so pilfering through the drawers' contents.  For some reason one drawer was full of old pictures and newspaper articles of my dad (I have no idea why) and we spent the most time flipping through those.

Then, between the baseball cards and pile of old baseball socks, I found this:

A ninja costume.

Obviously, I immediately put it on and then started looking for my phone because you can't find, and then put on, a ninja costume without taking a picture.  You just can't.  I'm searching through the house looking for where I laid my phone when I remember that I left it out in the shop.  I've got one foot out the backdoor headed to go get my phone when I stop myself because it just hit me that my dad's got a crew of workers out in the yard working on his chimney and I'm wearing a ninja costume.  Close call.  I can only imagine what they would've thought if they'd seen me walking out to the shop.  I grab my dad's phone instead and decide I can just text the pictures to myself.

The story of the ninja costume is awesome for several reasons, one obviously being that it's a ninja costume.  You can't beat that.  Actually, I take that back because I can beat that - in the drawer was not one but two ninja costumes!  I cannot wait until we get an invite to a couples costume party because Doc and I are officially set.

But it gets even better than that.  We start talking about the ninja costumes and my parents are telling me that they were on vacation in San Francisco (or somewhere) and they brought them back to my brothers as souvenirs.  So, that's sweet and all but the part that takes this from warm and fuzzy to totally awesome?  Is that at the time, my brothers were approximately 2 and 5 years old.

TWO and FIVE years old people!  What 2 or 5 year old needs a full-out adult-sized ninja costume?!?

The only way I can make sense of this is that my dad totally wanted a ninja costume for himself and convinced my mom to let him buy one two by saying that they boys would love them.

I mean, can you come up with any other logical explanation?

Friday = ninja songs.  Saturday = ninja costume.  I can hardly wait to see what ninja-y thing happens tomorrow.  I hope it occurs during church.

Superhero Party

Parker turned 3!  To celebrate, his mom and dad hosted us all for a superhero swimming party.  (The sign that his mama made, above, totally took me back to my cheerleading/banner painting days.  I feel like a team of football players should've run through that sign after the party was over...)

The backyard was also full of superhero-themed balloons.

As the guests arrived, Parker greeted them dressed as Spiderman.

Things started getting a little risque after we'd only been there a few minutes.  We were crowded around the birthday boy giving him hugs and asking him how old he was, when he just turned and dropped his drawers!

I guess even Spiderman has to go sometimes.

Obviously, since it was a swimming party, the main activity for the party goers was...swimming.  I tried to snap a few pictures before hiding my camera from all the splashing.

Bren thought the water was coooold!  (And it was!  I only made it in to my knees before chickening out.)

She decided sitting on the edge was good enough for her.

Parker's not afraid of the cold water!  Kicking those legs keeps him warmed up, but it means side-sitters like me and Bren have to watch out for splashes of icy cold water!

And sometimes all that kickin' and splashin' made this little Spiderman have to go again.

It's his party and he'll go where he wants to, go where he wants to...

Jett sprung a leak, too!  Man, I'm going to have so much to blackmail these little boys with as they get older...

Erin, Parker's mom, ordered him a pretty cool superhero cake.  If I have all my characters right, the top is for Superman (or Super Parker in this case), the second layer is Batman, and the bottom is for Spiderman.

When it was time to sing, we brought the cake outside and Parker climbed up on the table to see everyone.

When the singing was over, he huffed and puffed and blew those candles out!

But then they lit back up!  Poor little guy got tricked with the relighting candles!

Bren was pretty excited when they finally went out and she could get a piece of cake some icing.

It wouldn't be a birthday party without some present opening.

Here's the perfect gift that my mom found to go with Parker's Pirate tent.  Arrghhh!

Quick pirate joke: What do dyslexic pirates say?

RAAAHHH!

Moving on...

My gift didn't go with the Pirate tent, but it did go with the superhero theme.  Sure, Mega Bloks are probably the generic legos, but these have Spiderman and his friends!

After the cake had been eaten and the gifts opened, Erin announced that it was time for all the kids to get tangled up in Spiderman web.  They all got to choose their own color of Silly String and have at it!  (You KNOW I wanted a can, but I let the kids have them.)

Jett got caught in someone's web.

But I think he got 'em back.

Parker did lots of watching the big boys.

Mimi tried to help Bren with her "web" but I'm not sure they ever even hit anyone.

Bren eventually gave up and decided she was better at doing the noise makers.

After the webs were cleaned up, Parker opened up some of his new toys.  He spent quite a while going fishing in the swimming pool with his new rod.

His big toy from his Mama and Daddy was a new bike.  Check out his cool helmet!

By the time we were all leaving, Parker was so worn out from the excitement that I'm sure he took a great nap!

These pictures have convinced me that I need some kind of polarized filter to put on my camera lens on super sunny days.  They make me want to squint just looking at them!  (You can tell I tried to "dim the lights" on some at the top, but then got tired of editing towards the bottom.)  Anyone have any suggestions on what to use to make pictures less bright?

Pirate Tent

I told you that you wouldn't have to wait long to see our second attempt at the card table tent, and so here I am keeping my word.  When we made Bren's for her 3rd birthday, we knew that her cousin Parker would also be turning 3 just eight days later, and we couldn't make a tent for her without making one for him.  So that trip to JoAnn's that turned into a 3 hour affair was spent picking out fabrics for two tents, not just one. Now, with Bren's, we pretty much followed the pattern that I bought and made very few alterations.  We couldn't do that with Parker's though.  What little boy wants a tent that looks like a playhouse, complete with flowers and curtains?  Not Parker, that's for sure.  After doing a little googling, I found this etsy store that had several different themed card table tents.  It was there that we found a Pirate tent and instantly knew that's what Parker's should be.

We were able to use the pattern we had for all the basic measurements.  But for all the details, I had to draw everything by hand.  Luckily his doesn't have as many teeny tiny details like Bren's, but it still turned out just as cute.

And of course, just like with Bren's, I waited until during the birthday party to take pictures of the finished product.  Shame on me.  These aren't great pics by any means, but you know I'm going to share them anyway.

Might as well start with the front.  The door to this one is a flap, just like on Bren's.

Zoomed in on the door, you can see we "hung" an old wooden sign warning trespassers to enter if they dare.

No front door is complete without a lantern.  My mom said the nice thing with working with the black fabric was that it hid any of her sewing mistakes.  The down side is that it showed every single piece of lent, and this fabric picks up everything!

And it wouldn't be a Pirate tent (fort? ship?) without a skull and crossbones.

The two sides of Parker's tent were much less detailed that the playhouse tent.  One side had three portholes.

And the other had a regular window with broken shutters.

For the back, we drew a flagpole and flag so that the skull and crossbones could fly high.

And that's it.  Much simpler than the playhouse version, but perfect for a little boy.  My mom got Parker the perfect gift to go with his Pirate tent.  Check back for his birthday party pictures to see what it was!

Beach House Update!

Our builder emailed us am updated picture of the progress being made on the house.  Check it out!

We've got porches and balconies!  Woo hoo!

I don't really know what else might be going on in that picture.  The builder said they passed the nail inspection.  Yay!  (I really have no idea what that means but it sounds like something worth celebrating, right?)  Next up, I think, is installing windows.

For those of you that might be interested, I've also got some floorplans ready to share!  I drew the downstairs layout about a month ago and then got busy.  I didn't get around to doing the upstairs until last night.  Just in case anyone is curious, no, I don't have fancy software to use to draw this up.  I did these in excel.  What can I say?  I'm an accountant; I've got mad excel skillz.  Oh, but I should note that nothing about these drawings is to scale.  I'm not that good.

Here's the floorplan for the downstairs.  (You can click the picture to view larger.)

Let me help you out here.  The bottom of the picture is the front of the house.  Those double-doors are the front doors.  There's a porch on most of the front of the house and it wraps around to the right, but the porch on the right is screened in. Everywhere the black perimeter line turns blue  indicates a window.  The doors are in green and my curvy lines show which way they open.

As you go through the front doors, the staircase is right in front of you.  The dining room is to your right and the living room is to the left.  The living room and kitchen are one big open room, separated by the kitchen bar.  There's a half bath under the stairs.  And finally, at the back of the house, there's a bedroom with a full bath.

The downstairs will all be hardwood floors, but we haven't officially picked that out yet.  The walls that I have in red (one in the dining room, the far left wall in living room and kitchen, and the back wall of the kitchen) are the ones that will have horizontal paneling.  And it's the side of the bar (peninsula) that faces the living room that we're considering putting the corrugated metal on.

Ok, let's mosey on upstairs.  (You can click the picture to view larger.)

Same story as the downstairs: the bottom of the picture is the front that will face the street.  The balconies are over the downstairs porches.  It looks like the edge of the balcony got cut off in the picture below, but you can probably figure it out.  It's the same size as the screened porch in the picture above it.

When you come up the stairs you're towards the back of the house.  The laundry room is right at the top and through the laundry room is the owner's closet.  This is where we'll be able to store our stuff that we don't left out when renters are there.  On the left side of the upstairs are two bedrooms that share a full bath.  The master bedroom and bath are on the right side of the house.  The door to the balcony is at the end of the hall.  The upstairs will all be carpeted, and we haven't picked that out yet either.

So that's our house!  Four bedrooms and three and a half baths.  A kitchen, dining room, living room, and lots of outdoor spaces.  I don't think I mentioned the tiny patio off the back of the house (through the kitchen).  The stairs off that patio will lead to where the pool will be.  If the pool were drawn in, it'd be in the top right corner of the pictures.

Whaddaya think?  Anyone else as ready for it to be done as I am??

Our Weekend

I feel bad that I haven't blogged in a couple days.  Time just keeps getting away from me and I don't know where it all goes!  I had every intention about writing about our weekend earlier but since I didn't do it then, I'll give a shortened version now. Actually, I'll go even further back than this past weekend.  I'll go back to last Wednesday.  That's the day that Doc quit his job.  He left for work bright and early so he could turn in his resignation right when his boss got there and hopefully avoid running into too many coworkers/friends.  He was on his way back home before I even got out of the bed.  (I had a mid-morning appointment so got to sleep in, and ended up taking the whole day off so we could hang out.)  His boss was blind-sided and wasted no time in getting together an offer to make him stay.  After 3 LONG days of negotiations between both his old company and the one he was going to go work for, he finally accepted the offer from his current company.  So Monday of this week he started a new job at the same company.  The whole ordeal was drawn-out and stressful and exhausting, but now that everything's done we're both very happy.  This is a great opportunity for Doc and I'm so glad he took it!

The kids were at our house this past weekend.  Wyatt had a football jamboree bright and early Saturday morning (he and Doc left the house before 6:30!) so Friday night was very low key.  Doc made beer can chicken for the first time ever and it was awesome!  Highly recommended!  You would think we hadn't eaten in days with the way we devoured it.

Saturday afternoon I ran errands with my mom.  We finally got around to picking out a color scheme and fabrics for my nephew on the way.  He should be here in early October so we've got to get busy on his nursery!  I will  post pics when we get it all done.

By dinnertime Saturday evening, Wyatt had started feeling sick.  He had a fever and was in bed sound asleep by 7:30.  Poor guy!  Doc checked on him around 9:30 and he'd completely sweated through his clothes so we figured his fever had broken.

Sunday after church the whole family ended up at my parents' house (with the exception of Erin, who was definitely missed).  I took Bren and Anna up in the attic for me to look for a certain box...the box of all my old barbies!  I was probably the most excited about it, although Bren did do a little jumping up and down.  Anna was a good sport even though she's probably past the barbie age.  (Wait, that probably means I should be too.  Whatever, I love my barbies.)  The girls ditched me after about 45 minutes.  I probably spent 2 hours on the floor of the playroom sorting and organizing all the clothes and accessories.  It was so fun to dig through them all again!  The clothes could all use a good washing and some ironing though...

By the time Doc took the kids home Sunday evening Wyatt was feeling fever-y again.  He ended up going to the doctor Monday morning and found out he had swollen glands and a viral infection.  Thankfully, it was short-lived.  He was back in school on Tuesday.

So that was our weekend.  Sorry for the boring post with no pictures.  I'll try to do better next time.