Eighteen Months

18 months now.  I meant to write a post to you at twelve, but so much was going on that like everything else, I just kept putting it off.  18 months, and so much has changed since the last time I wrote to you, at six.  It's like you're a whole different person, and in a way, you are.

You're a full-blown toddler now, and so big in your 3T's already.  You're almost as big as your friends who are two and three already, strangers can't believe you're as young as you are.  You talk so much, so many words, starting to put together two-word sentences, and still babbling to yourself in the language you made up for yourself.

My favorite time to hear you talk is when you read from a book.  Your voice ranges high and low, going up in excitement, mimicking the way you're read to.  And you do love your books, they're not really toys, but they're definitely your favorite thing to play with.  Your favorites are always the Bright Baby books, right now it's First 100 Words because you love to point and repeat the names of objects.  But at night, you still let me read to you, as long as afterward you can read back to me.  I can't wait until you're a little bit older and I can start reading chapter books to you, but right now I'll gladly settle for Chicka Chicka Boom Boom.  And you still let me read Goodnight Moon, although our copy is much more beat-up now.

I'm working now, and I hate not seeing you as much.  It was so hard going from being with you all day almost every day, to only seeing you for a couple hours at night and on the weekends.  I worry that you're going to have some sort of disconnect from me.  I especially feel sad those times that you seem to prefer your grandma over me, but I know it's because you spend so much time with her.  I worry that I can't do all the things with you that I want, but I'll always make time for you when I can.  I worry about ever having another baby, because how will it be fair for me to take even more time from you?

You get so easily excited about things.  You say Hi and Bye to everybody, over and over again, even cars passing in the street.  You love to pick flowers.  Bubbles are another favorite, you cannot get enough of them, and you're getting good at blowing them on your own.  You get nervous and giggly around dogs, and yell in excitement when the cat (CAT-TUH!) decides to make an appearance in your presence.  You've got your papa wrapped around your finger.  You're just so...old.  You haven't taken a bottle or a pacifier in I don't even know how long.  You have almost a whole mouthful of teeth, you get put in time-outs already when you forget that hitting is not nice, you already have a potty that you like to sit on but haven't used yet for it's intended purpose.

You carry your sippy cup and especially Baby Monkey around with you everywhere.  I love when you hug and kiss him, but you're mean to him sometimes too.  That's ok though, even a toddler has to get her frustrations out.  You take my hand and lead me around when you're ready to go somewhere, or when you want me to sit down here, lay down here, read, watch a video.  You can be very demanding, but I'm ok with that right now.  You freely give hugs and kisses.  You've learned how much I love your kisses and use them to stall at night, asking for a million in a row, knowing that I'll stay a couple extra minutes to make up for all the kisses I miss during the day.

A Project for March

So as I believe I've noted before, I'm not the best at taking photos.  One of the ways that I've decided to try to improve my lot is 31 Days to a Better Photo from My 3 Boybarians (found through Pinterest, duh).  I've had the tab open in my browser forever now, and of course I almost forgot about it since it didn't really sink in that it was actually the 1st of March until this afternoon, time flying and all that.

I haven't read through the all of the posts, but I do see that this is more for those with a DSLR camera.  I'm not lucky enough to have one of those, but I figure that it can't hurt to use what I've got, right?  What I've got, actually, is a beat-up Fujifilm Finepix S700 7.1MP.  My husband, however, did get a Nikon COOLPIX S9100 12.1 MP to use as a "company camera" (for better quality before/after pics) so hopefully I can steal that a bit.

The first post in the series is a welcome post that has a very important lesson: don't hesitate to take pictures!  I tend to do this, thinking that I'll wait until I have some perfect moment, but in reality you never know when that moment will be.  As someone's who a fan of candid photography, you'd think I'd know that by now.

Anyway, I hope you'll check back to see how I'm doing, hopefully having some sort of accountability will actually keep me on task!

P.S. Bam, two posts in one week.  Look at me go, right?

Look! I Made Something!

I need to get better about this blogging business.  Some sort of consistency, schedule, etc.  I've been told that I should keep it up, but I think part of my issue is a lack of feedback.  I mean, my husband doesn't really count, ya know? 

So anyway, this post is just for me show off the fact that a couple of months ago I actually had the motivation to do a project that I found on Pinterest and bring it into my real life, instead of just mind-numbingly pinning a ton of "Oooh look at that" things.  Unfortunately, I only took a picture of the finished project, no in-progress shots.  I did have a couple of badly lit phone shots, but they were lost when my subpar SD card decided that she just couldn't take anymore, Cap'n!*

However, I can direct you to the blog post that I followed to make the wreath, it can be found HERE- the steps are super easy to follow!  Here's my finished project:

Please ignore the unfinished paint job behind it.  It will soon be PURPLE anyway!

Obviously I made some changes in the way that I did mine - I used three different types of yarn (which made this project take for-ev-er) and I used two different colors of felt in in some of the larger flowers just to see if I could.  I was pretty stoked about how it turned out.  I chose the colors that I did so I could have this up in the winter without it being a "Christmas wreath".  After we pick out the new door color I'll probably be making a more spring-like style, maybe find/make some sort of bird(s) for it.** 

What I do need to figure out is what I can use to sort of "seal" the yarn after it's done.  After being outside for a couple months, it's starting to get fuzzy and I'm worried that it won't hold up.  Hopefully soon I'll find something and get started on the next one!

*Sorry, geek attack
**Apparently I need to watch Portlandia, I keep hearing about "put a bird on it" and yeah, that's just me.

Dining Room Update

  So we pretty much worked on pretty-ing up (totally a word) the dining room at the same time we were doing the kitchen.  Truth be told we were having one of our first shindigs in the house and wanted things looking better by the time a decent-sized group of people saw the house.  The only thing that we've really done so far is paint and hang some stuff, but it made a huge difference.  Here's a shoddy picture of a corner of the room from our original house tour:

The room isn't big at all, I'm standing pretty much in the back corner.  This used to be the eat-in kitchen!  That, by the way, accounts for the strange outlet placement (all but one are on the upper part of the wall).  What you can't see is the other area on the linoleum where the previous owners apparently used some heavy-duty carpet tape to hold down small rugs, and the peeling painted fruit border.  Ugh.  And don't you just love builder's grade brass light fixtures?  I know I don't!

Well here's the view from the opening into the kitchen:

I'm not a huge fan of the light fixture in here, I'd like to get something that fits the room better.  Jed loves it, though, and there's not really anywhere else that it can go right now.  If we can't afford a new one, I thought about tackling the brass one that was in here with some spray-paint and seeing what I can make of it. 

The frames in the back are from various places; Hobby Lobby, Garden Ridge, mostly Goodwill.  All but the long skinny mirror had to be spray-painted either black or silver.  I hope to eventually get more as I find them and fill the wall up a little more, I think it looks a bit sparse.  I did try to get a bit crafty with a couple of them, which went both good and bad.  On the bad spectrum, you have the oval shaped frame, which is is desperate need of something real to go inside of it.  I'm not going to post a close-up of what's in there now because it's just a mess.  Let's just say that DIY stenciling with spray-paint did not go well.  On the good end, I wound up with this:

The ceramic bowl in the middle is our ring bowl, that we used in lieu of a pillow for our wedding ceremony.  Super-fancy frame, spray paint, scrap-book paper, some jimmying, and there you have it.  I love it, it's my favorite thing in the room.

And from the other side:

The sideboard from Ikea was an awesome find, got it in the as-is section for $140!  It was a nice splurge.  Right now it's holding our "wedding china" (from Target) and fancy glasses.  I want to change up some of the stuff that's on top,  as the French-themed stuff in the front isn't my favorite anymore, it's just what I was able to dig up out of the basement.  I also feel like maybe there's too much going on, but I have a need to fill up every space with stuff, just stuff everywhere.  Not good in a small house, but dammit I love my knick-knacks and random crap. 

I also feel like something needs to go above it, as there's just a big block of space.  I did think about waiting for a bit, then hanging some empty frames to hold random bits of future toddler artwork as seen all over the internet.

I'm realizing now that it's hard to tell the color of the lower walls here, but it's a deep plum, like the color of...

These pants.  Like that.

 There's still obviously stuff to be done: I'm still deciding whether or not I want curtains in there, and it's yet another room that needs the flooring completely ripped up and redone.  Still, it's in way better shape than it was!

Updating the Kitchen

So it's been slow going over here when it comes to our house updates.  I say update rather than renovation because really we haven't much in regards to "tear it down, put it back up".  It's all been about paint jobs and cleaning up so far, plus there's all that time and especially money that's needed.

Our kitchen wasn't really horrible, I mean, it was completely functional once we put some appliances in.  But seriously, that countertop?  The sponge-stenciling?  No thanks.

This probably looked great in 1987.

It's a bit of a strange kitchen, I guess.  The kitchen in this house used to be in the dining room, which when you see that you'll understand why they put this in!  It used to be a breezeway, the door behind Jed there is actually the garage door.  Here's a look at what it looked like when we first saw the house:

I did not have a pic without Jed wandering around looking surly.

They did some things that we would have done differently, such as moving the sink underneath the big back window.  Plus, the location of the dishwasher means that you can't be in front of the sink when you're loading it, which is kind of a pain.  It's also freezing in there!  We had to put a space heater in this winter to keep it somewhat comfortable.  But, we do have awesome brick walls in there, and vaulted ceilings, so there's that.  Also, those stencils above that little cupboard in the back?  Cats and fish.  They had to go.  So one paint job and a new countertop later:

You can probably tell that these are not the most recent pictures, as it's a nice sunny day outside but really it's January and we just got 3 inches of ice or something (also, I needed pictures of my kitchen looking tidier than it does today).  Hopefully I'll be able to get some better ones too when we do something else to the room.

I'm kind of going for a funky-retro vibe.  I buy accessories in bright colors like hot pink, lime green and orange to complement the colors.  The countertop is laminate, but it's black and textured (and thanks to a former work connection of hubs', free!), so I don't knock it.  We also removed the cabinet that was above the microwave.  It was just completely useless, I actually had to sit on the countertop to get in there, and I'm pretty tall.  We still have plenty to do, the main things being replacing the lighting (ceiling fan and track lights), painting the cabinets (white), adding shelving (above the sink, where the cabinet used to be, and maybe above the "cat corner") and replacing the flooring.

Another big project that I've decided I want to do in there is to add a built-in kitchen bench in the corner where the small table is now.  We would need to take measurements to make sure it fits, but I really think that it's feasible and might help with resale when the time comes for that.  Damn you Pinterest, you fill my brain with too many ideas!

Trying To Ignore the Shiny Objects

So, apparently I'm not very good at this blogging thing.  I obviously haven't posted in a bit, for a myriad of reasons.  I get anxious about what to write about, about whether it sounds right, about whether it's something that people will want to read at all (all like, 2 of you).  And I'm just lazy.

Maybe lazy isn't the right word.  I think it's more like completely unmotivated, which unfortunately seems applicable to many facets of my life.  So, with that, it's January and with the new year comes a slew of goals that are normally abandoned before anyone even starts wondering whether or not it's a leap year.  The majority of my goals are family goals, though, something Hubs and I both want to work on to generally improve our lives.  It's kind of sad how basic they are:

-Keep the house clean
     I hate cleaning.  A lot.  A lot lot.  But we've started making an effort to actually do the dishes at night (what?!)  and pick up the toys (I know!), even do a load of laundry and put it away (shocking!).  As for the rest, Jed's sister is on our cell phone plan, needs a way to help pay for it, and does cleaning on the side- win win, right?

-Eat healthier
    We know how to eat healthier, we just don't do it.  I want to try making some freezer meals, using my crockpot more, etc.  This is my goal before I get to working out, I know that if I try to radically change something all at once I will quickly give up.  And we have to stop eating out so much!  Which leads to...

-Fix our money
     Pay bills.  Don't spend it on stupid shit.  Should be easy enough, right?

-Grow the business
     Jed basically took over his dad's remodeling company after he lost his job last year.  Things weren't working out when he used to work for him, but he's really motivated to make something more out of it this year.

So those are the basics.  We really want to turn things around this year, at least get started on a good path (

-I tried to come up with some yellow brick road analogy, but that particular road just led to a discovery of lies and "Oh, I had it all along," but guess what, I don't have a pile of cash and carrots and Mary Poppins hiding anywhere.  Great movie, though.


    

Saturday Night

Cookout at the parents house, with their friends.

Two+ bottles of wine and a shot of Jack.

Walking with my brother and his girlfriend in the dark, in the rain, with the express purpose of jumping in puddles and getting soaked.  The absolute best part of the night.

Trying to make sense of ignorance.

Hoping for deep friendships that stand the test of time, forever.

Secretly shedding tears, realizing that finding a job is eminent and the time of spending every day with Baby Girl is coming to an end.

Another Saturday night.