Sleepy weekend

There's been an UNREAL amount of sleeping around here this weekend!  If last weekend was super-busy, this has been the opposite.  Well, except Saturday morning we got motivated and retextured our entire living room ceiling.  It only took us 4 months :)

Anyway, poor Patrick is now our #1 sicko and yesterday he was unconscious more than he was awake - 3 NAPS! Joe was home all day, so lucky for me I got to take 2 hours of nap with Patrick - I was loving the tiredness. Same thing today - after being up only two hours he came back to bed and said "I need a rest" and (weird, it wasn't even 8:00 yet) I did too, so Joe took the other two and hung out while we snoozed. While I am SUPER hoping Joe and I don't catch this; while it has produced some memorably sweet moments with sick kids, I doubt it would produce anything of ths sort with sick adults and jobs and meetings and such.

I should mention that while I napped yesterday (Eli was asleep, too) Joe got crazy and ripped out the basement carpet! 

One thing continues to lead to another and we're planning on rearranging some furniture once the carpet's installed, so Joe lugged out one of the couches to the garage, leaving us seat-less for all those movies my sick kids want to watch.  Well, solved that problem - we moved the guest bed into the family room so we can get busy and rip out the carpet in Caroline's room.  Makes a nice lounger, don't you think?

Bring on the move marathons, cold and flu season!

Cheetos dreams

Eli's fever gave him fitful sleep last night, which kept interrupting our Netflix date, "Water for Elephants." We enjoyed it and didn't want to be interrupted so much so we finally just got him to hang with us - it was so nice!  He snuggled right in, complained that we already ate all the popcorn but drank his juice anyway, and LOVED the elephant and the train parts.  After the movie was over the got some ice cream in the kitchen, just stretching out our special time with him, and he saw the bag of cheetos on the table from lunch, so he had a little midnight snack of ice cream and cheetos!  Joe said we might not be winning any parenting awards with our snack selection, or our timing, but I think it was all about the exceptions in life, the fun times when you eat junk at random hours and enjoy each others' company.  Reminds me of so many times eating shrimp rings and drinking Pepsi for lunch - not the most balanced meal, but those weird meals did more for my spirit than any whole wheat sandwich and apple combo could do for my body.  Hope you enjoyed your special time, Eli!  And thanks for being sick :)

snot and songbirds

YUCK.  Caroline’s been under the weather this week, getting worse each day (at least getting snottier and grumpier each day!), and Eli woke up this morning with a fever.  Sick kids are no fun, but WHINEY sick kids are just awful-waffle.  We’ve tried to have fun staying home – playdough, coloring, movies, reading – but in the end it’s still a messy pile of criers laying on my lap, rubbing snot all over the place. For everyone’s sake, I hope this doesn’t last much longer! I’m pretty sure my patience is being tested just as heartily as their antibodies are.

 2 sick kids meant no Joy School, today, but Patrick still loves singing “I’ve got Joy,” one of our favorite songs from school.  We sing it often (and loudly) enough that Caroline has caught on – she chimes in “ooooohhhhhh, baahhh” during the pauses.  I tried for 10 minutes straight to get it on camera, but no luck, just lots of singing from Patrick and I.

Eli, aside from his recent sickness, is doing well – when we ripped out the carpet in their bedroom Joe took down the crib and now Eli sleeps in the trundle.  So far so good (it’s only been 2 nights and 1 nap) but we’re looking forward to building some bunk-beds in the near future.  Yep, building, DON’T ASK. But even before being sick he’s gotten in a nasty habit of whining for things instead of asking.  For instance, on Tuesday the Patrick went to Joy School at R’s house so she teaches the big kids and I watch the little ones, Adam and Benson and my own.  Adam was taking an unexpected afternoon nap and as we pulled away with Benson but no Adam, Eli whined “where Adaaaam?!?”

“He’s at home sleeping.”
“Where Adaaaam?!?”
“He’s at home, sleeping.”
“Where Bensaahhhn!??”
“Uhhhhh, he’s right next to you.”
“Where meeee?!?”

That’s it, we’ve reached the height of whine! Let's fast-forward to being well now, eh?

Busier than usual Wild Hair

What did you do today? Well, I don't know about you but we got a little crazy today. One of those "wild hairs" my sisters claims we're famous for (I have no idea why!). Last week we decided to pull the trigger and order us some new carpet! It's a big expense, but it's a big deal - a good amount of the carpet is original to the house (about 30 years old). In order to save money (plus we need to paint all the baseboard trim) we decided to rip it out ourselves - hooray! Wild hair #1 today: rip out carpeting. Check!

 8:00 a.m. (some furniture moved before I remembered to take a "before" picture)

1:00 p.m. - Carpet and pad ripped up except under Patrick's bed, which weighs 10,000 pounds.

Wild hair #2: Demo wood wall paneling. In addition to carpet we are also putting in laminate flooring throughout the main floor, but BEFORE we lay flooring we need to texture the ceiling (from when I scraped it way back in October, remember?), and as long as we're texturing the ceiling we might as well do the wall project we've been talking about since the day we moved in: taking the paneling down to a wainscote and drywalling the top half (which involves texturing, thus the combo). So in a classic case of One Thing Leads To Another, we are doing the wall because we want laminate floors but I scraped the ceilings. Somehow that's all related, I swear! The boys were big helpers - anything to stay up past their bedtime! 

7:30 p.m., just getting started. 

9:00 p.m., all ripped off!

Date Night, but not for me

Yesterday was rough.  Joe had to work in the morning, I had to work in the afternoon, we've hardly seen each other this week, and the kiddos were a bit nuts.  Okay, LOTS of nuts, and they drove Joe nuts while I was at work yesterday afternoon.  He felt bad that he was rough on Eli especially (who yesterday tried flushing a roll of toilet paper down the toilet and flooded our downstairs bathroom) and wanted to have a nice day with him today, so they took some quality time this afternoon and went out and got donuts from Krispy Kreme!  Patrick hates to be left out of the fun, but Joe told Patrick he was going to bring home a surprise when they got back (he didn't tell Patrick they were off the K.K.). When Joe initially walked in he brought Eli's half-drunk single-serve milk from Krispie Kreme and told him THAT was the surprise.  Patrick was genuinely excited and thankful for it, it about broke our hearts! What a tender, sincere boy, and we were totally playing a joke on him!

Happily, while the milk WAS delicious, there were donuts to be had as well.

  

Eli, who got donuts at the shop AND at home, loved the sugar rush.

Let's play house

Patrick's friend Alli was over to play and I listened in on the conversation:

Alli: Phone's for you
Patrick: Sorry, I can't get it.  The crocodile is still eating me.

I think they were playing slightly different versions of house :)

2 posts in 1 day? You guys are so lucky

Since it's Valentine's day, and this is a Valentine's craft, today is the last really acceptable day to post it, even though I already posted.  But feast your eyes!  And don't laugh when I say, "It's SUPER easy!"  because it is.

I got the idea from http://thriftydecorating-nikkiw.blogspot.com/2012/02/inexpensive-valentine-art.html 

While we were in Pueblo visiting Kari we headed over to ARC, where I picked up a couple frames for 99 cents.  Nice frame, eh? The suggestion was to paint it, but this finish was still too nice. Then, they don't get the newspaper for the personal ads on the inside of the heart, so Kari suggested combining two ideas, the plaque that says "the Blahblah's, Established 19blahblah" and then the paper rosette heart.  I think it turned out so great!  As you can tell I added my own touches, changing the colors and sizes of roses, as well as doing a little chalk shading on the edge of the paper (black) and the inside of the heart (pink).  Although I love the original, I think mine was dang cute, too!  Too bad it's not actually MINE... enjoy it, Kari!