Finding a New Rhythm

With two full weeks of this whole two parents working from home thing, I can hardly say that we've got it down pat, but we are starting to find our groove. We both prefer to work in the mornings, which means that on any given day, one of us is not working during our favorite time. Will likes the office to be silent, or worse, to have country music playing (he is a Texas boy) and I have a hard time working in either, preferring soft music like Vienna Teng or Haley Westenra, so when we are here together it's a hilarious show of me not hearing him because of my earphones or shouting at him when I have a question because I've forgotten I have them on. We've kept the kids pretty well entertained, lots of walks and trips to the park and library, which is nice.

I'm finding that I spend much less of my "free time" checking blogs and emails now that my computer isn't in the kitchen, always at the ready, and more time having fun when I'm in mommy mode. Evelyn and I had fallen into a boring sort of routine where most of the day was taken up with chores and email checking and trying to squeeze in a few minutes of writing time here and there. there are still chores, but when Will is working and I'm mommying, I'm more likely to sit outside and watch her swing, or even read a book, instead of using that time to pound away on my computer.

Dinner is a little bit of a struggle. I'm a meal planner so I know what we are having, but this new style of living has left me a little disorganized, and when I'm writing in the afternoons I have a hard time switching into dinner mode. I suppose Will could cook, but I'm so used to it that I suddenly look up at 5:45 and realize that I haven't started dinner. Besides, he's taken over dish duty, which I absolutely hate, so I'm ok with keeping with the cooking, I just have to adjust my brain to either get things started at lunch or remember to stop at five. I've been using a lot of old favorites from Everyday Food and new ones from Jamie Olivers iphone app which, by the way, is the best money I've spent on an app so far. Eaton Mess= Yumm...

We've tried to make it a rule that we start at 9 and stop at 6, working a little more only after the kids go to bed. Will is, surprisingly, much better at it than me. I think I've spent so many years being "on" for all things all the time that the idea of having a start and stop time seems odd, although it's one of the things that I insisted on when we started talking about embarking on this.

The real test will, of course, start Monday, when both kids are home all day, all summer long. And like I said, we're no experts, but so far, so good.

We're pretty much set for the party tomorrow, I'm going to work on cakes tonight and my lovely Auntie Amy gave me the best idea for hats for the kids that means I don't have to whip out half a dozen paper mache hats, which, whew, because I'm not sure they would have gotten done.


Oh, and if you don't read Ohdeedoh or missed this activity yesterday, Evie says "this is amazing!" She's playing with it now, as Daddy tried out his first Friday morning house cleaning. Yipee!

Fun with Shipping Labels

A couple of months ago I saw something on Design*Sponge using one of those funky stamps where you put all the teeny little letters in with tweezers to make business cards. I think they were business cards at least. That's how it stuck in my head. And ever since I've been wanting to buy a set for myself to make my own cards. They aren't cheap however, so I've been putting it off. But since I am, for now, the only income earner in the house and having cards made ends up being about the same, I decided it was worth it. And while I was puttering around Staples (dangerous, I used to love to hang out in the supply room at my mom's office, so many pens and papers and notepads and stickies....) I also picked up a pack of shipping tags because, well, I love them.

So now I've been playing. Playing with the stamps, playing with tags, and now, because I'm getting ready for the Mad Hatter Party, playing with markers and tags and stamps all together. Hey, that almost sounds like a song. Markers and stamps and tags, Oh My!

These things are seriously fun. I can see that I'm going to have to restock soon because I'm going through them at a kind of alarming pace. They've been gift tags and bin labels and gift cards. It's like when I had my lovely label maker and could find so many uses for it. Except prettier than the dot matrix on white tape look that the label maker spit out.

Oh, I could use them on our work board too... and hanging from the drawer knobs of my craft dresser. Humm....Oh, and the price tag on Will's Mad Hatter hat. Oh the possibilities are endless. (I'm making Will dress up as the Hatter, complete with a giant tie. Hey, I didn't make him dress up at Halloween this year, he's due!)

OK, time to stop playing with tags, there are giant playing cards to make still!

He Grows

Evelyn's fourth birthday is Saturday so by all rights I should be freaking out that my youngest child is slipping further and further away from babyhood. But I'm not. Four is a nice, comfortable age to me. It's over the hump of potty training and baby food and not quite big enough to be a truly a big kid. When she turned three is was huge. The end of an era, no more baby. Five will kill me, the last child off to school. But four is good. I'm excited for four. Of course I'm saying this now, by the weekend I may be sobbing into my oatmeal.

But it's Briton that seems to be growing up before my eyes these days. Suddenly he is very big. Tall and broad shouldered like his daddy. And looking more and more like his daddy too. His chubby cheeks and mischievous grin are being replaced by a more chiseled chin and a smaller, softer smile. It used to be just Briton and I. All day. We were conspirators. Roaming the streets of Dublin, hanging out in parks. Eating cake for lunch because every once in a while, you should just do that. And now he is getting too big for that.

He wants a pageboy hat and a LLBean Rolling backpack because they look cool, because other kids have them. He turns away when I kiss him in public. He can walk up to his friends house by himself. He can swim almost all the way across the pool, without touching.

Today when I dropped him off at school, late because we had photos taken today in honor of Evelyn's big day, I asked if he wanted me to walk down to his class with him, pulling out the sign in book as I asked because, he always does want me to. But today he looked at me with a wry "why would I want that?" kind of look and said "No, I'm good." Then turned and headed down the hall. I smiled until he turned the corner, then almost cried. "He's growing up mom!" the school secretary said. She's probably seen it a thousand times in her role as gatekeeper to the school, but for me it's a first.

I'm proud of him, my not so little boy. He's a good kid. A great kid. He loves his sister (most of the time) and is a good friend. Of course with growing up comes the inevitable door slamming and angry voices of "you don't understand" on occasion. And I suppose there is more of that to come down the road. It's a beautiful thing, watching your child grow toward being a young man. It really is. But sometimes I miss my finky little boy. I guess that's just the way of motherhood.

New Chairs or Old?

Because we are now paycheckless and officially starting a new business (or two, more later!) Will and I have called a halt to any major (read, if it costs money, it's major) renovation on the house. In my head I know this is the practical thing to do, but I look around the house and thing "but we never finished that! We haven't even started on this!" there are so many project that I want to do, and so many more that we've started but haven't yet finished. it's hard to think of going any length of time without working on some kind of something in our house. And the reality is that we wont really stop. We'll just scale down. I might not be able to talk Will into installing a huge skylight over our stairs, but painting the nasty redish brown deck, that's probably doable. Which is why I'm faced with a chair decision.

While Will and I are pretty good at finding deals, we are nothing compared to our friends Nell and Steve. They seem to come upon the most amazing finds for free, or close to it, all the time. Last week I got a message on my phone that they had found some chairs, was I still looking for chairs? Well yes and no. I needed more chairs for outdoors, we have six, plus two more that need serious aid before they can be used, but with our long table, we could, theoretically, have ten chairs out there. Did I need them? Probably not, but at $2 each, it seemed like a good idea.

The thing is, I also need chairs inside. Will and I bought our dining room table and chairs almost 10 years ago. They've served us well and we've loved them, but they have also lived through too many moves, two wiggly children and come from a time when, of course you matched your tables and chairs. For the past year I've been toying with the idea of getting a new set of chairs, something vastly different form the solid dark wood of our table. I haven't been able to convince Will of it, although when we had friends over for dinner the other night during a freak rain storm and couldn't use our much larger outdoor seating, I think he got the point as we all shoveled food while standing around the kitchen island. We need more chairs.

So now I'm faced with a decision. I have five, solid, kinda funky chairs that could be painted some interesting color and set around the dining room table, at last giving us a decent amount of seating.









Or I could use them outside (again painted, I've finally settled on a tealy blue and red color scheme for the outdoor chairs) and get above and beyond my ten chairs at the table goal.

What do we think?

Hip Hip Hooray!

We have a working washing machine!

So now excuse me while I go run the first of ten thousand loads of backed up laundry.

Back tomorrow!

Birthday Season is Upon Us

Well, almost. For our family, our little family of hour (six if you count the dog and cat, I cant even think about adding the chickens) we are summer heavy when it comes to birthdays. Evie, Will and Nigella all have June birthdays, Briton and I are both in August, as is our anniversary. So we get pretty busy around here at the start of summer in terms of party planning. Last year Briton opted for a kind of non-party. He had a sleepover with two friends and really they didn't come out of the playroom the whole evening. We had to drag them out for cake. It was lovely. But also kinda sad for me. I love planning parties and so having my child express taht he didn't really want a big to do anymore, well, I might have been a little teary. Then there was the "I just want a yellow cake from a box" incident which, I can't even talk about (come on kid! Your mother loves to bake, are you really going to make her make box cake? Yes, yes you are) Although we were in the middle of moving so it ended up being a good thing. This year he hasn't decided what he wants but Miss Evelyn knows for sure what she wants. I'm not really sure, but she is sure. So far she has told me she wants a GIRL party, but with boys too. And a TEA party, but really with cake. And a playing outside party, but wearing dresses.

You see my confusion. So we're having a Mad Hatter's Party which, I think, covers most of the bases there. I'm starting to gather old teapots and cups for the party and have great plans to get started on a bunch of paper mache hats for them to decorate and wear. I've been informed that the cake MUST be pink, with pink frosting and pink sprinkles and am in the process of making some very Alice-like "Eat Me!" signs for the food. I have a vague idea of dressing myself up as the Queen of Hearts, somehow. But most of that is still on the to do list. Or even just on the "in my head we will have this" list. The only thing that I have done is the invitations.

These are pretty much the same as the pencil cups I just made, except this time I typed out the party information in a (totally dorky, but they're three, what do they know!) poem and swirled it around some funky tea cups that I found at Salvation Army. Each of the kids in Evelyn's little posse of three year olds is getting one. I'd almost say that I'm going to have to give this whole strange and unusual (and only hand deliverable) invitation thing up once Evelyn hits school, except that's kind of the bonus you get for having summer birthdays. The trade off you get for having to suffer through 100 degree weather while pregnant, twice, is that you don't have to invite the whole flipping class to birthday parties. Don't get me wrong, it's fun to have a big party, but really, all they want is to hang out with a few really good friends. Or at least my kids do.


So in honor of the kick off to the Grimm Family Birthday season, here are Evelyn's totally unmailable Mad Hatter Party Invitations.

Shuffle Continued....

This weekend Will and I finally got around to getting started with the second part of the big playroom to office shuffle - building storage in the kids room.

Because they share a room, which isn't huge to begin with, adding some built in storage has long been on our to-do list. But until all the toys that previously occupied the playroom moved upstairs, it had never been a critical issue.

After two weeks of bins and baskets piled everywhere, and more than a few night time tripping incidents, I convinced Will it was time to get going on building them some shelves.

We pulled apart the shelving unit that had been there, which was actually something that had been in the house when we moved in, to use the parts and added a sheet of MDF that Lowe's cut into three not-so-even strips. Will wanted to lift the whole thing off the floor and pull the molding forward the way we did in the living room which caused some frustration (uneven floors) but in the end, we got the thing mostly built, all except for one piece on the top which I mistakenly told Will to cut to 37 inches instead of 39 (can't read my own handwriting it seems)

All that's left to do is to paint, something I'm not looking forward to because I know I should use oil paint, which has worked so well on things like trim and selves, but I hate the stink. And I really hate how long it takes to dry. I'm waiting for a weekend when we will be gone for a day or two (camping maybe?) so I can pull everything out and slap on the paint and then not have to be there for the mess or the stink. We'll see.




And by the way, holy cow (or as Evie says it "Roly Cow!") why do my kids have so many books? That's just one shelf too, they have three in their room!.









Oh, Right. Well, there is that.....