Oliver at 11 months

Casual and cool this one is.

Not really.  Still completely on the go all day long.  As I mentioned previously he is learning how to walk, he is still doing about 4-6 steps at a time.  He has even ventured out on his own without being prompted, but he doesn’t get too far before he goes down to the ground.

Usually his problem with walking, is that he likes to dive head first towards the object he is walking towards, therefore there is no possible way he can stay upright.

I will have to say that he is at a really fun age right now.  He is good about playing by himself, but always laughs and has a great time if you play with him.  He is still a very happy little boy, without a fear in the world.

Crash and Burn

A couple of weeks ago I got…

Which lead to…

I’m talking about our diet of course.  I did pretty well when I was busy with work.  I did okay when Bella was sick.  But when I was sick, busy with work and didn’t have a sitter, I just couldn’t keep up with it.  I went back to my old favorites of quick and easy carbs with my trustee old Dr. Pepper.  I did notice that my portion sizes were a little smaller, and luckily I was paying attention to the scale and while I wasn’t losing any more weight, I was holding steady.  And then this past long weekend we were super busy around the house, plus had guests.  So we ate out a lot.  And sure enough the scale went up 3 pounds.  I guess that tell me, I can be a little bad at home in certain circumstances and very short periods of time, but eating out is horrible for you!

So it’s back on the diet for me.  I originally had 7 pounds to go to reach my ultimate goal, now tacking on an additional 3 pounds, I have 10 pounds to lose.  I have a feeling it won’t go as quickly this time around.  But the good news is, our spring crops are starting to be edible in the garden, so we have plenty of salads and greens to eat in the coming month.

And I am very excited to try this….Avocado Banana Ice Cream recipe

Another great recipe I found, which is decent for you and tastes delicious.

Healthy Energy Bites recipe.  I eat these for breakfast with my coffee.  I have also been known to add fiber powder to them to replicate my FiberOne bars (I also omit the coconut flakes, I didn’t have any and I didn’t think they needed them).  Don’t expect these to last long, you will have to quadruple the recipe and even then, they go fast.

I found both the recipes on pinterest, which my husband makes fun of (the website in general), yet somehow seems to benefit from it.

Memorial Day Weekend

Hope everyone had a great Memorial Day weekend!  The weather was beautiful, especially for everyone wanting to try out the just opened public pools.  We did manage to take the kids swimming one day, but the majority of our time was spent on the house.

Jesse took off work on Thursday and Friday.  Jesse’s parents came down to help watch the kids so both of us could be productive.  Thanks Grandma and Grandpa Kuhlen!  We had planned to paint the house.  Yes we just paid someone $3000 to paint our house 1.5 years ago.  Shortly after they painted we got hit with hail, which caused enough damage the house needed to be repainted, only on the West side.  Even though it’s our 3 story side, we decided to tackle it ourselves.  But more on that later.

Thursday – Jesse power washed the house to prep for painting.  Then he had to replace the bathroom window which had been broken by hail.  Yes we had a broken window for over a year, but not anymore.  We ran out of time to start painting, but it rained heavily that night and the next morning, so it was a good thing we hadn’t started painting.

Friday – The house was still wet from the rain, so Jesse decided to tackle clearing out the tree house.  We are having a major “improvement” done this week on the house and we have plans to convert the tree house into a shed of sorts.  Here is the cleaned out tree house support awaiting it’s shed like conversion.

I was busy working on my own project to convert our sitting room into my office.  I did some painting and staining to convert some used bookshelves into these.

I also finished hanging the picture frames on my gallery wall.  Now I just need to order new prints.  If the picture is in color, it will be gone, as all the photos on this wall will be black and white.

We also had canvas prints made up of our family photo shoot from last fall.  These have been up for awhile, but I don’t think I had gotten around to show them yet.

Saturday we tackled the painting project.  As I mentioned we professionally hired it out.  The quality of work was not great.  We did get hail, but that damage was minor compared to the general fading and cracking of the paint.  They had sprayed everything, even though we had specifically requested they roll everything.  Together Jesse and I were able to tackle the largest side of the house in one day.  So thinking back now, the two of us probably could have gotten the whole house done in 4 days or so, and we are definitely amateurs when it comes to painting on a ladder.  It’s not fun work, but neither is spending $3k on basically nothing.

Now we are debating painting the rest of the house so that it will provide a better coating and help protect our siding.

That evening we managed to slip away and hang out at the pool for a little while.

Sunday we lost our sitters, so the amount of work we got done dwindled.  We did spray paint our house fixtures.  Before they were a washed out gray, now they are aged bronze.

We also did some work on the garden.

This is our cabbage plants.  They are being eaten by something, I believe some type of cabbage worm.  So far nothing I have put on it has seemed to stop them.  That being said, I’m not sure what you eat from this cabbage plant.  I’m waiting for a small tight cabbage head to form like you would buy in the store.  But maybe it doesn’t do that in a garden, and we should be eating the big leaves instead of letting the insects get them.

I also did a lot of rearranging of my new office.  Here is a sneak peak of the office in transition.

Remember a couple of days ago it looked like this.

And eventually I would like to head in this direction.

Which basically just means I need to finish organizing everything, and then get a chandelier hung and find a pretty rug.  But I might get the veto on this, we will have to see!

Well that was our weekend roundup.  Officially Monday we did a little mowing, fixed a few things, and then did some shopping and socializing with friends.  So we did get a little enjoyment out of the holiday weekend.

If only we had 5 day weekends and full time sitters for a few days every week, we could really get some progress made!

Feeling Left Out

I get the feeling that Bella is understanding that her brother can go wherever he wants, and she is stuck in the place she gets put.  She seems to be wanting more attention and she seems to enjoy activities that we can all do together.  Yesterday she was fussy and I proceeded to roll her across the room.  She had a great time.  We rolled for probably 15 minutes straight.  In the past that would have frustrated her and she would have considered it work.  This time she laughed and laughed and seemed to enjoy moving.  Of course I did most of the work!

Today she was being fussy again, so I put her on Oliver’s new fire truck.  Oliver’s legs aren’t quite long enough to ride it yet, so he pushes it around.  Well, I put Bella on it and she laughed and screamed with joy even holding her head up the whole time as we lapped around the house 5 times.

I wanted to get a picture of the event, so I tried using the timer.  It wasn’t working the greatest, I needed about a 30 second delay versus the 10 seconds our camera had.  But I think you can get the idea.

Oliver on the other hand does a great job playing by himself.  He likes to take his walker toy and will head off in all directions of the house.  Normally he always comes back to the room you are in as he smiles and passes you by.  Every once in a while he will park his toy and get into trouble.  Today someone forgot to close the bathroom door and for a bonus, forgot to put the seat down on the toilet.

Hand in the toilet, hand in the mouth.  Guilty as charged.

A Day of Summer

Yesterday was Bella’s last day of school.  We celebrated by spending some time outside.

And onto some exciting news.  One week before he turns 11 months old, Oliver took his first steps.  He took a tentative few outside with me, so I told Jesse that by the end of this holiday weekend, someone would be walking.  We worked with him a little more tonight, and he is up to about 4 steps on his own.

We will have to try and get some good pictures of him walking outside soon.

Did the house fall down?

I’m always in trouble around here.  It seems I have a lot of unfinished projects.  And my husband has to comment on everything.

Jesse - “Why is there newspaper taped to the wall?”

Kristen - “Because I was hanging the pictures that have been sitting in our bedroom forever.”

“So you are hanging newspaper instead?”

“No, you cut the newspaper to the size of the frames so you can tape them up and get an idea of where the frames go to hang them.”

Jesse – “I don’t want to hang the frames with the old pictures in it.”

Kristen – “I don’t plan to keep the picture, but want to get the frame on the wall so it looks right.”

“So you are going to hang an empty frame.”

“No I will be hanging the frame with the old picture in it and then ordering a new picture.”

“Yeah like that is going to happen.”

“So you are telling me you don’t want me to hang the frames anymore, you would rather have them laying back in the sitting room?”

While we are out for a walk this evening we talk about whether we should finish the frame hanging or remove the column in the kitchen.  I told Jesse I should be able to finish the frame hanging myself, so let’s attack the column in the kitchen.

This next conversation I will label us as Person 1 and Person 2, you can guess who is who.

Person 1 – “Are we sure this isn’t supporting anything?  The beam is running in the weak axis, but there are two porcelain tubs right above this wall.”

Person 2 – “It shouldn’t be, the floor joists should be supporting the tubs and the floor joists are two feet above this wall running from the side of the house to the load bearing wall in the middle of the house.  This column should only be holding up the soffit for the ceiling, and hopefully it’s not even doing that.”

Person 1 – “I’ll remove the first post and then we can see if the second post buckles under the load.”

Person 2 – “Ok.”

Person 1 – “Do you know how pissed I’m going to be if I have to work on putting back in a column this weekend when I had other plans.”

Person 2 – chirp chirp

Person 1 – “What are you going to do about the hole in the floor when the column gets removed?”

Person 2 – “Put in a piece of wood.”

Person 1 – “Where are you going to get that?”

Person 2 – “From up my arse…apparently.”

Person 1 – “And why are we even removing this column, what are you going to do differently in here?”

Person 2 – “Move the kitchen table over so that we can replace the sliding door that leaks air and is ancient, once the door gets replaced buy a new fridge and put it where the old sliding door used to be.”

Person 1 – “You are NOT putting the kitchen table on the carpet.  I’m so sick of starting projects that we can’t finish, look at the dining room.  Those columns have sat unfinished for almost 2 years because we can’t finish them till we replace the floor, and we can’t replace the floor until we make the opening wider when we are redoing the kitchen.”

Person 2 – “What do you want me to say?”

Person 1 – “Here goes.”

First column gets removed.

Person 1 – “Does it look like the wall is sagging?”

Person 2 – “Can’t really tell.”

Person 1 – “You can’t look up close, look from far away.”

Person 2 – “Still can’t tell.”

The second column doesn’t move very easily when trying to remove it.

Person 1 – “Are we sure this isn’t supporting the wall above?”

Person 2 – “It would be really crappy construction if it was, I don’t think it is.”

Person 1 – “Okay here goes with the sledge hammer, hold on to the 2x under this wall in case the wall falls down.”

Sledge hammer successfully gets second 2x column out of the frame and thankfully, the wall stays up.  Now we have a nice big opening in the kitchen, and some trim work to finish everything up.  Maybe we will actually get to that this weekend, or save it for a few years.

 

And in case you were wondering, here is the lovely hole in the flooring.

Sewing–the truth

I saw a t-shirt I liked at a little boutique store.  It was a printed t-shirt with a military type pocket on it.  They wanted $65 for it.  And I immediately thought, I could easily make that.  So I tried it.

I actually sewed the t-shirt too, but it would have been very easy to just add the pocket detail to an already made t-shirt.  The shirt at the store had two different prints one of the front and one of the back, I wanted to recreate that, therefore I made it myself.

I would still classify myself as an intermediate sewer.  As I mentioned before most things I make, I don’t even wear.  My biggest problem is, I’m afraid to make something too small, so everything turns out too big.  This is a problem with the things I make for myself and for Bella.  I also like to order fabric online.  Fabric.com is one of my favorite sites.  The main problem with ordering fabric online, you can’t exactly tell what the fabric feels like, or what the colors will be when you get it.  Most times it fits well with how I thought it would, sometimes it doesn’t.

I also like to find inspiration photos online.  Sometimes I use patterns, most times I just wing it.  Truth is, I’m not very good at winging it.  I have had this tank top in mind forever.  I can not find a good representation of this fabric anywhere.  I recently tried a bolder print, but it turned out too “70’s” for me.

I found this fabric online really cheap (I think $4/yd), so I picked it up.  I decided to try a pattern with this one, but tried to modify it.  I also cut a few steps out, and instantly regretted it.  I do wear it, but the collar never stays up like it should, and the sleeves (the piece I adjusted) need more work.  I just need to spend 30 minutes on it someday and then it could be salvageable.

This one was the same story, cheap fabric online.  Couldn’t tell online it was completely see through.  This top actually turned out decent, and I cut it to the correct size for once.  I just have to wear a tank top underneath.

So the truth about sewing is this.  You have to make a lot of mistakes and a variety of mistakes to become good.  At the end of the day, if you value your time, it is still probably cheaper to buy clothes rather than make them.  I spend an average of 2 hours on every shirt.  But if you want a unique and interesting look, or you want that $100 shirt but can’t quite pony up the money and you enjoy doing it, it can be fun to sew your own clothes.