Fun-Filled Saturday!

We had so much fun the Saturday before Easter, and for most of the day I had my phone camera with me to capture it all!  Here are the highlights from our fun-filled day.  :)

Started off with a ride on the trolley with Mimi...
(Fellow mom friends - the trolley only costs one dollar to ride and you can stay on as long as you'd like.  It's practically free entertainment for little ones.  Go!  Ride!)

We hopped off the trolley right at the Farmer's Market where one of our first stops was to get smoothies.  My little girl is a greedy little thief.  

We spent so much time walking around the market, chatting with friends, and enjoying the nice weather that we worked up an appetite.  We bought some pizza and found a shady place to sit!

When we were finished shopping and eating, we hopped back on the trolley to get to our car.  Katie Wynn leaned out the window (making her mama a nervous wreck) and yelled "Hi puppy!" to every dog we passed.  

A Saturday isn't perfect unless there's a good afternoon nap thrown in.  This girl crashed HARD after all the morning fun we had.

Our fun day continued after nap time when we went over to Mimi's house to play on the swing set.  The weather was too spectacular that day not to be outside!

Here's a bump progress pic in shadow form.  I'm a huge blob.  :)

Doing some drawing and looking like a teenager.

Back home that evening, my two favorite people grilled us a tasty dinner!  

It really was one of the best Saturdays ever and the weekend only got better since the next day was Easter!  Pics from Sunday coming soon...once I make my way through all 600 of them!!

Weekend Visitors

The weekend before Easter, our very favorite houseguests came to spend the weekend with us...Lala and Poppa!  (Or "Matt's Parents, Bill and Pat" to those of you that aren't their grandchildren.)

Lala and Poppa hadn't seen Katie Wynn since December, so you can imagine how much she'd grown to them!  Since the last time they'd seen her in person, she's become a high-fivin', fist bump givin', kiss blowin' little girl.  She had all kinds of new tricks up her size 18 month sleeves to show them.

They arrived on Friday afternoon right around the time she was waking up from a nap.  As expected, she was pretty shy at first but they knew just the way to win her over...presents!  She wasn't as excited as I was about the first one - a hand-knit sweater by her Lala - but she was super excited about the second one - Lego ice cream cones!

As you can see, Bill and Pat were really good sports and sat at her tiny table with her to play.

Outside, Lala continued to find ways to win over Katie Wynn's affection.  Like, when Katie Wynn showed her how to use the Cherry Blossom petals as confetti...

...but then Lala showed her how she could put a pile of them in her hand and then blow them off her palm instead of throwing them in the air!

I wish I could tell you how many times a day Katie Wynn has to sit down and inspect the bottom of her feet, but I probably can't count that high!  She hates to have dirt on them (or her hands, for that matter) but it doesn't stop her from constantly taking off her shoes.  Silly girl!  Thankfully, Lala was able to help scrape off whatever fleck of dirt was bothering her.

With her feet clean, it was back to doing fun things with Lala!  

Poppa came out to join in on the fun so Katie Wynn was able to show him her newly-learned trick of blowing the petals.  And, as anyone with a toddler knows, applauding afterwards is required.

The whole weekend that Lala and Poppa were in town, we had the most spectacular weather!  It was so nice that we spent most of every day outside.  And the best part was that we didn't have to swat any mosquitoes since they hadn't arrived yet.  

Saturday morning started out on the porch after breakfast (where Katie Wynn was wrapped up like a cocoon)...

...and we were back out there that afternoon for a snack.  I don't know why but I always think Katie Wynn looks so grown up when she uses utensils to feed herself.

Speaking of grown up, this girl opens doors like its nothing these days.  We have to keep them deadbolted or she'll escape!

Lolli.  Oh, poor Lolli.  She was just sitting there minding her own business, enjoying the nice weather...

...when I told Katie Wynn to give her a hug.  Oh dear!  Lolli never saw it coming.

Later that afternoon, us girls left the boys to grocery shop and cook dinner while we went to the park.  Katie Wynn has a little bit of scaredy cat in her and will not go down a slide - even tiny ones - by herself.  She had a blast sliding down with Lala though!

Eventually, Lala had her sorta going down by herself.  As long as she could have a death grip on Lala's shirt.  

I tried to give Lala a break and take Katie Wynn down a few times.  Y'all, Shakira is right.  Hips don't lie and mine were screaming, "What are you, crazy?! You're nearly 8 months pregnant!" It's a miracle we didn't get stuck.

Before church on Sunday, Katie Wynn played in her box of balls.  She loved diving down into it and pulling out two balls for me to tell her the colors of.  Then, of course, those two had to be thrown out so that she could go down for two more.  Not exactly the most fun game ever for me since I had to corral all the thrown balls.

I've been racking my brain trying to remember what we did Sunday afternoon, but I just remembered that Katie Wynn and I both took pretty long naps.  No wonder I couldn't remember!  The best part is that while we napped, Matt and his parents planted a whole bunch of new hastas that they had brought to us from their flower beds.  Free plants + free labor = major win for me! 

It was a quick visit for Bill and Pat since they'll be back soon to meet the newest member of the family.  They dropped Katie Wynn off at daycare Monday morning so they could see where she spends her days and then they hit the road for home.  I know Katie Wynn loved being spoiled by them so she'll be thrilled when they come back.  Not too much longer!

Tulips!

Last fall, as Mom and I wandered around Sam's shopping for stuff for Katie Wynn's birthday party, we stumbled across these bags of 100 tulip bulbs for something like 12 bucks.  Tulips are my absolute favorite flower ever, but I had zero experience in planting bulbs.  But for 12 bucks, I really didn't have much to lose!  Needless to say, we both left with a bag of bulbs and figured that if 70-ish of them actually popped up, it'd be a pretty good percentage and worth our HUGE investment.  :)

Fast forward to this spring and all 100 tulips popped up!  I swear, this was so freaking exciting for me!  I know, call me a weirdo but I just really love colorful flowers, especially ones that bloom with minimal effort on my part.  (Although let's not totally dismiss that minimal effort...I planted them last fall in what I thought would be a quick ten-minute task.  Um no, it takes longer than that to dig six-inch deep holes...times 100!  And I didn't have on yardwork clothes so I squatted down to do each one while trying not to get dirty and my little helper was a very new walker that kept falling down and eating dirt.  Oh, and I was freshly pregnant too.  But still - totally worth it!)

So everyday after work for about two weeks, Katie Wynn and I walked around the house checking on our tulips.  I loved getting to watch their progress from tiny buds to full blown flowers.  And my little girl seemed to enjoy them too!

I planted 40 bulbs in the backyard, 40 in the front flower beds, and 20 beside our garage.  And yes, I counted every one of them and they were all there!  :)

One thing I never knew about tulips was how often they open and then close back up in cooler weather.  Thanks to the wonky weather we've had this spring, they did lots of opening and closing!  

Tulips don't really have a fragrant smell, but I told Katie Wynn we had to sniff them each day anyway because really, is there a cuter photo op than this?

Our bag of tulips were mostly red, orange, and yellow, but there were a couple pink ones that surprised us too!

Another day, another round of sniffing...

Shout-out to ALL FOUR grandparents that noticed Katie Wynn's backwards shoes when I posted these pictures on Instagram.  This is so common these days that I almost don't even notice it anymore.  Just so we're clear, though - if they're backwards, I'm not the one who put them on her.  :)

I only took pictures of the cute moments, but in keeping things real, yes, several tulips lost petals due to some "aggressive petting" by Katie Wynn.  In fact, that pink tulip pictured above on the right took a pretty good slap right after that picture was taken.  We'll call this a learning year.  :)

Our cherry blossom trees were shedding their petals during this same time, so I taught Katie Wynn how they could be scooped up and thrown as confetti.  SO fun!

But back to the tulips...  I did get brave and cut a few stems for a vase.  I had initially told my mom that I just didn't think I could bring myself to cut them, but then decided I should get to enjoy them inside too.  It was a good decision as they lasted for about a week inside (and pepped up more than in the picture on the right).

Now they're all gone and I'm having withdrawals.  So sad.  This weekend I guess I will cut off the stems - but not the leaves! - and just cross my fingers that they survive our hot summer and come back next year.  Actually, I've already told Mom that we have to go back to Sam's this fall to look for more bags-o-tulips.  Maybe this time I'll go crazy and buy three bags!  Tulips for days!

Nursery Wardrobe

We have made a lot of progress on the new nursery!!  For those of you that have not toured our home in person, here are some details about our house and the room that will soon occupy our newest family member.  We purchased our house as a four-bedroom house and if you count all of our family members (Me and Matt, Katie Wynn, Wyatt, and Anna), that means we are already at max capacity when it comes to bedrooms.  So where would we put our little man?  We did lots of brainstorming on bedroom arrangements - it didn't seem fair to have him and KW share a room since they're both here full time, but it also wouldn't be good for Anna and Wyatt to share rooms as opposite sex moving into their teenage and high school years.  And we definitely weren't ready to move KW upstairs so putting A and W together to clear a bedroom wouldn't really have helped anyway.  

So, we decided to turn our office into a new nursery.  What office?  Right.  It has never been pictured on this blog because it has never been used!  I have said since the day we moved in that it would eventually become my craft room (aww, yeah!) but fixing it up and adding cabinetry was loooooow on the priority list.  So for the most part, it has held junk for the past 18 months and pretty much served no purpose.  

Here's how it looked right when we moved in...this is where we unloaded all of our "decorations" - things like picture frames, candles, vases, and all the junk we didn't know what to do with.  What a mess!

As for where this is in our house, it's right up front off the entry hall.  In fact, it's right across the entry hall from the dining room that I just wrote about.  Not necessarily the most ideal place to put a brand new baby, but we figured we could make it work.

You know what I have always thought was really weird about this room?  The previous owners used it as a formal sitting room that also housed a mini grand piano and it has two nice french doors with glass panels that open into it.  So kinda a formal-ish room...yet it's the ONLY room in the house that didn't have crown molding.  Isn't that bizarre?  

Ok, so obviously the biggest problem about using an office as a nursery is that it didn't have a closet.  We figured that was just as good as any place to get started!  We called Cesar, the skilled trim carpenter that did our mudroom cabinetry, and got on his schedule as soon as possible!  I think I've already shown you these drawings but this is what we gave him as our inspiration.  I had drawn out my vision on a piece of paper at work one day, and then that night Matt and I tried to draw it to scale on the wall (albeit with VERY crooked lines!).  (And yes, that's five outlets right in a row on that wall.  Who knows?)

I met with Cesar one afternoon and he spent about thirty minutes measuring everything out so he could price his materials and give us a price.  The price was right so we told him to come on over and make it happen!  Luckily for us, he had a spot open in his schedule the week we were at the beach on vacation.  My mom and oldest brother, Nick, took turns letting him in and stopping by the house to check on his progress.  I loved receiving pictures of the transformation that was happening while we were gone!  

End of day one...and you can see it matches up pretty closely to my drawings! :)

End of day two - trim has been added and construction is done!

From the pictures, it looks like most of the work was completed on the first day.  But, the wall unit was only half the work.  In addition to adding trim on the second day, Cesar also made all of the doors, shelves, and drawers.  If you look closely at the top left corner of the Day Two picture, you can see that Cesar also added crown molding to the rest of the room.  Fixed that weird little problem!

We were thrilled to get to come home to finished construction, except that it meant it was now our turn to get to work.  Despite the sinus infection I was fighting, duty called and we got busy painting!

I spent Friday morning prepping the wall unit for paint...lots of nail hole filling and caulking up seams.  By lunch time, it was ready to be primed and my rockstar Mama came over to lend a hand!  The picture below on the left shows how far we got before running out of primer.  Agh!  So frustrating to be so close to being done and have to stop to get more paint.  I made a quick trip to the store and was able to finish the coat of primer before Matt made it home from work.

I did not do a very good job of taking progress pics throughout the weekend.  The big kids - especially Anna - were a great help in keeping Katie Wynn occupied so that Matt and I could paint both Saturday and Sunday.  She and Lolli both were very curious about what we were doing.  Thankfully, we only had to clean up one set of white painted doggy prints across the wood floors!

It took two coats of white paint after the primer and then we still had a few touch-ups to do.

Painting the huge wall unit was actually the EASY part of the job.  The hard part was the seven drawers, four shelves, and ten doors that had to be painted.  That part was hard because, since there were so many pieces and our indoor space was limited, we had to do them in shifts.  Plus, every side and edge had to have a coat of primer and two coats of paint.  Ugh.  We laid out the drawers and shelves and painted them as we painted the wall unit, so they weren't too bad.  Once all that was done, we were pretty excited that we only had ten doors left to go.

Of course, that's when the stomach bug from hell hit.  

I returned home from the hospital late Wednesday afternoon and Cesar was scheduled to arrive out our house early the next Saturday morning to hang all the doors, add hardware, etc.  We had no choice but to push onward and keep painting.  Matt was a superstar and was able to get the backs of all the doors primed and painted while still taking care of me.  We primed the fronts together and then by Friday afternoon, I had enough energy to get them painted while he was at work.  (That's kind of a lie as it totally wore me out, but at least they were done!)  The paint was barely dry when Cesar arrived Saturday morning!

We were pretty limited on the hardware we could select because of how he put the trim on the drawers, but we found some that we thought would work at Home Depot.  I was naive and thought he'd be able to finish everything up in about an hour on Saturday.  He and his brother were at our house working for five hours!  I'm just glad it was them hanging the doors and not me...I can't hang a door straight to save my life.  :)

The finished wardrobe!!  (Well, except for the face plate that goes on that outlet...)

Here's a view of the inside of the side cabinets.  Each one has two shelves at the bottom right now, but they are removable and adjustable, so who knows how they'll actually end up.  Oh, and these pictures were taken after we'd painted the walls khaki.  

We painted the built-ins and the walls ourselves but hired painters to paint the ceiling and the rest of the trim work.  They just finished painting yesterday afternoon so I'm pumped about getting to start putting this room together!  And I can finally hang some tiny boy clothes into those brand new closets!  I am not by any means ready for this little boy to grow up, but man-oh-man I can't wait for this to eventually become my craft room...SO much storage!!!  One day...

Here are some sneak peeks of a few things I recently purchased for the room.  The rug and mirror were both super scores at Home Goods.  If you look closely at the mirror you can see that it has slid down in it's frame - I was able to weasel an extra discount for that "flaw" even though I knew it would be a simple fix.  :)  Also in the mirror's reflection you can see a rope lamp...that came home with us too!

We officially have a changing table too!  Now, the DIY-er in me would much rather have found a cool piece of furniture to refinish and use as a changing table like we did for Katie Wynn's room, but the very tired, pregnant part of me saw this changing table for the low, low price of 25 bucks at Bargain Hunt and said it'll do.  :)  The baskets on it were another Home Goods find and I've since added two more coordinating ones to the bottom.  

The chair is one that we already had.  It was a red stationary chair that sat in our little sitting nook at our old house, but has been in the attic since we moved here.  We added a swivel glider base to it, had it recovered (along with a storage cube ottoman) and just like that we have a nursery-appropriate rocker!

Mom has been furiously sewing away on the curtains and bedding, so hopefully we'll be able to add them to the room soon.  There are days when I think we have done so much and this room is practically done, but then I remember that we only have 6 weeks left and I haven't even started on the craft projects I want to do.  Eep!  Better get busy!

Dining Room...Finally!

As of about two months ago, our dining room finally looks like a place where you could possibly enjoy a nice meal!  Of course, we still haven't actually had a meal in there yet, but it's nice to know we could if we wanted to.  :)

Let's back up about 18 months to when we first moved into the house.  We sold our kitchen table from our last house and plopped our old dining table down in the kitchen of our new house.  That meant we no longer had a dining table to go along with our large china cabinet.  So for months our dining room consisted of just the china cabinet and a couple of leftover chairs that we didn't have a place for.  (These pictures were taken before we had the hardwood floors refinished.)  (I just looked through the pictures from that old post and man, our house has come a long way since then!)

Like I said, the room sat like that for months.  It had grey walls, a chocolate brown ceiling that I love and that ties into the walls of the adjoining kitchen, and that hideous shell chandelier.  And some of those boxes may still not be unpacked, but at least they're up in the attic now!

Shortly after we moved in, I found a table that I immediately fell in love with.  Like, capital L love.  But I didn't buy it because A) it was expensive and B) it didn't come with chairs and C) we were focusing our energy (read: money) in the living room instead.  About a year later, though, the table was still for sale and I could get a deep discount on it if I bought the floor model with the so-small-no-one-would-ever-notice-it imperfection on it.  Um, yes please.  Mama likes a good deal. :)

With the table purchased, I felt motivated enough to start pulling this room together!  I usually don't drag my feet so long on things like that, but the table was ordered in early September and we didn't get it to its current state until this past February.  Life just kept getting in the way, I guess.

Also, I painted the room twice.  After picking out a rug and fabric for curtains, I decided the existing grey walls wouldn't work and that green might be nice.  I wish I had a picture of the first shade of green I painted.  It was like a green screen that the weatherman stands in front of to give his report.  Way too limey and way too bright!  My mom took pity on me and helped me repaint it in January.

With the new table that I capital L love, a new light fixture that is WAY better than the seashell monstrosity, the freshly painted chairs, and some homemade chunky floating shelves, the room now looks like this.  Still not complete, but much further along than before!  (Crappy photos, sorry.)

I love the way the fixer-upper chairs turned out and look with the table.  We have seven of them so one end of the table remains empty right now.  The plan is to find a pair of affordable chairs - upholstered? wicker? - to use at the heads of the table and then that 7th chair would just be extra for when we're feeding a crowd.  

The bar is something I found at Pottery Barn Outlet a while back; it was a deal I just couldn't say no to.  :)  So far our sweet toddler has only thrown down and smashed one martini glass, despite our repeated "no touch!" warnings.  We made the floating shelves one afternoon in the woodshop.  I didn't take any in-progress photos or I'd type out a quick tutorial for you.  They were super easy though!  When I took the photo below in February, I had to borrow a few pitchers from my mom.  Now I've upped my collection size thanks to some birthday gifts so they've since been rearranged.

The table top shows all kinds of pretty wood grain in shades of brown and grey and even some red.

Even with all this progress, there's still lots left to do.  I'd like to get a sidebar of some kind for the big empty wall and then there are lots of places that could use some artwork.  In time, I suppose!

Our dining room opens up into our front entry hall (the first four pics were all taken from standing in the entry hall if that helps give you a reference?) and while we still haven't really done anything to it yet (we're painting it tonight though!), I did get one new project up on the wall.  I copied off several friends and had all of our Christmas cards framed to display.  I dug out all the ones we've sent since we've been married (5 Christmases) and then, since I wanted a fuller display, also found all the ones my Mom has sent since we're pictured in them too.  All ten cards got a white mat and a coordinating silver frame.  I can't wait to add to this gallery as the years go by!  

I'm glad to finally have this Dining Room update post done so that I can move on and show you the progress we're making in the new nursery.  Things are coming along nicely in there and I hope to have some progress pics for you soon!