Easter Sunday

On the evening of Easter Sunday, I told myself that I would blog about the day before the next Sunday rolled around.  Obviously, I failed at that goal.  Ugh.  Now my goal is to crank this out before another Sunday passes us by!  Edited to add:  Oops, missed that deadline too.  I've been typing this thing for days!

Katie Wynn woke up Easter morning to a visit from the Easter bunny.  No, she had no idea what that was about.  As I scrolled through Facebook later that day, I saw that the Easter bunny rivals Santa Claus at a lot of my friends' houses.  Not so much the case at our house.  Katie Wynn got a coupe car (I wanted to get her one anyway so this was a good excuse for it), an inflatable pool for this summer (a $5 score from Bargain Hunt that I'd already bought for her anyway), and 7 empty eggs.  Yep, like the tomb, they were empty.  She brought them home from her hunt at daycare and I immediately ate all the candy out of them before realizing I didn't really have anything to fill them back up with.  She didn't seem to notice or care.  :)

She loved the coupe car so much that she insisted on eating her breakfast in it.  

I LOVE Easter Sunday...definitely my favorite Sunday of the year.  But this year, I was stressed about how it would all work out.  Matt and I were playing handbells during the service which meant we had to be at church early for a practice.  Someone (my dad) would need to watch her during that and then she'd have to make it through a long (and crowded) church service, lunch, and an egg hunt before nap time.  It really could've been a disastrous day with a cranky toddler, but it ended up being great!  My dad managed to get her to go down for a mini nap before church which was a HUGE help.  We just had to quickly get her dressed before heading back for the service.

There is one major rule after church on Easter Sunday: everyone has to pose for pictures in their Easter best before running off and changing clothes.  My big, fat, pregnant self included.

It doesn't seem right that one person should be allowed to have so many chins.  It's not fair for me to keep so many to myself when some people don't have one at all.

Cute, even though Katie Wynn has weird, comb-over bangs.  Darn wind!

Katie Wynn is definitely to the point where she's not a fan of my camera.  She doesn't want to look and she sure as heck doesn't want to smile!  I absolutely love the pouty picture below on the left.  Matt was just trying to coax that snack cup out of her hand but she didn't really wanna do that.  He managed to get her laughing, though!

One of my favorites from the day.  And you should be thankful that I cropped it the way I did...nothing about the position I'm in was flattering.  :)

The flowers were my (brilliant, if I say so myself) idea to get rid of the snack cup.  Added bonus: they made for such a pretty prop!  My mom made her Easter dress so I tried hard to get some good pictures of it.  I hate that I didn't get a close up of all the shadow-work embroidery she did.  I have about 50 photos from this five minutes to choose from, so here are my favorite 6.  So hard to narrow it down!

Just like last Easter, we invited the Thompson family to join us for lunch and the big egg hunt.  They're practically family anyway.  I don't think the twins, Anna Charlotte and Stuart, made it into any of my pictures last year since they were still so new and tiny and slept the afternoon away.  This year, though, they're walking and talking and into all the fun!

I'm sure my niece and nephews dread seeing my camera out!  :)  Here are my oldest brother's (Nick's) kids.  Jett is just days shy of turning 9 and Bren is 5.

And these two giggle worms belong to my other brother, Ben.  Parker is 5 and Ramer is 2 and a half.

We tried really hard for a picture of all five of the grandkids, but my moody toddler wasn't really up for taking pictures with her cousins.  The oldest four were about done with me and my smile requests, so I tried my old standby trick of having them scream as loud as they could.  The thinking behind this is that as the screams die down, their faces fall into real smiles as they're laughing and that's the prime time to snap the pic.  (Click here to see how this trick actually worked for our Christmas cards!)  After going back through all of these outtakes, though, I realize that I should have told the 5-year-olds that they had to hold still while screaming, no moving out of position!  Instead, I ended up with a lot of crazy pictures like the one below on the right.

This time they all stopped screaming and put their arms down at different times, so the picture below on the left is the best I could get.  Matt had the brilliant idea to just hold Katie Wynn into the picture while he hid behind them.  Uh huh.  See how well that worked out?  There's your Easter pic, Mom.  :)

We lined up for a full family pic too, sans our parents since Dad seemed to be MIA.  Poor Katie Wynn... #squished

We tried to do the scream trick again too.  This time, in addition to telling the five-year-olds to stay still, I also failed to tell the photographer (ahem, Emily...) to keep snapping after the screams stopped.  I don't think she got that memo so all I have are a bunch of screaming outtakes.  To be fair, this is probably much more representative of all of us together though.  Also, I so wish Nick (coral shirt) was on social media because I'd totally crop this to be his profile pic.

After that group photo, I just gave up.  No more trying for posed pictures!  With that out of the way, we could finally enjoy the awesome spread of food that (mostly) Mom had prepared.  Oh my goodness, we had enough food for the whole neighborhood! The kids all ate quickly and ran outside to play, which left plenty of room for fatties like me to go back for more! 

After lunch was cleaned up, it was time for the egg hunts!  I think Mom had stuffed about a thousand eggs.  At least that's what it looked like; I could be off by a few.

This year the first hunt was for the tiny kids - Katie Wynn and the twins.  We hid their eggs on the screened in porch and, as expected, all three walked in, sat down in the middle of the floor, and played with the first eggs they got their hands on.  Obviously they didn't know the game was to get as many into their baskets as possible.  #amateurs 

Thank goodness for the older kids who came in to "help" and get the show on the road.  They did a great job of filling up the baskets while the babies (I can still call them that, right?) just sat and shook eggs.  Katie Wynn did eventually put some in her basket herself thanks to some help from Mimi.

The BIG hunt was out in the front yard.  Since this is the first time Ramer and Alice got to go with the bigger kids, we gave them a minute head start.

Then we unleashed the others and they were off!  

The two pictures below totally crack me up.  Bren's basket got too full midway through the hunt, so she poured her eggs out into a pile so she could keep going.  Katie Wynn finally caught on to the point of this game and decided to capitalize on Bren's unsupervised pile-o-eggs.  Ha!  Look how innocent she looks.  "Finders keepers," she says.

As the oldest, it's no surprise that Jett found the golden egg.  Folding money for the win!  Alice's method of counting her eggs was my favorite...open the egg, eat all the contents, and then move on to the next one.  :)

After counting eggs, it was time for my very favorite part of the day...confetti eggs!  If you've been reading this blog for a while, you know cascarones are a staple for our Easeter Sunday so that we can all have good luck.  It doesn't hurt that they're also fun and colorful and really add to the celebration of the day!

And here are just a few more snapshots I took while we all hung out outside and enjoyed the beautiful weather.

Just as everyone was getting ready to load up their cars and head home, I yelled at Matt to run inside and get the dessert I made.  Phew!  Close call!  I was gonna be really mad if everyone got away without eating the egg-shaped rice krispie treats I'd slaved over the night before.  :)

With everyone properly sugared up, then we could head out for afternoon naps.

Once again, it was another perfect Easter Sunday.  I really do think this is my favorite holiday.  Christ is risen!  Christ is risen, indeed! 

Trivia question: how many times did you spot Katie Wynn's shoes on the wrong feet?

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!