Happy Fourth of July!

What a great holiday week we have in store for us! The weather is going to be absolutely perfect and Steve and I are on vacation! Well, it's called a vacation, but there is certainly no plans for rest and relaxation! Steve is tearing off the garage roof and putting a new one up and I'm going to paint the livingroom. We have fun stuff planned with the boys - camp outs on the livingroom floor, sparklers in the backyard, cookouts, fireworks, trips to the beach and the Renassaince festival.

Enjoy the holidays - I know I will!

Before and After

Once again (and this is the last time ever I PROMISE) here is what my sun porch has looked like for the past four years:

Ugly yellow walls, stark white curtains and, if you could even see the floor – it is a horrible shade of baby poop brown and wooden.

Now, my porch looks like this:

It still needs some decorations, but it’s coming along nicely~

Curtains!

 

I love it when a project goes from this:

To this:

In an afternoon.

I am slowly working on converting my porch from a playroom to an adult room!

Spring Has Sprung

The warm weather has arrived!  Which also means, so have a lot of projects around the house.  Steve has replaced four more windows on the second level – only four more to go and then we will have replaced all sixteen windows upstairs.  And I’ve been working on…remember the eye sore in this picture:

The nice yellow walls, the piles of toys, the lopsided, unfinished curtain?!?  The dreaded “toy porch” is in the processed of being completely overhauled.  I have taken numerous bags of toys to the dump, made two trips to the consignment shop and several stops at the Salvation Army.  There is not one single toy left on that porch, the walls are now green (like the dining room), I’ve got the ball fringe to finish the curtains and the trim needs one more coat of white paint.  Oh, by the way – this paint ROCKS:

I have covered my trim in this paint – it goes on great and wipes off easily!  The only thing is it is oil based which makes clean up a challenge!  I’ve overcome that challenge by buying cheapo brushes that can just be thrown away after I’m done painting and I keep a wet rag close by for drips.  Another trick I learned – put your paintbrush in a zip lock freezer bag and stuff it in the freezer and it will not harder!  You can take it right out and start painting again like you just set the brush down 5 minutes ago.  Also, make sure the room is WELL ventilated and get the kiddos out if possible.

I’ve bought my new porch furniture and we picked it up from Sears yesterday.  All I need to do is find a rug, touch up the painting and buy some decos!  Hopefully by the weekend, we’ll be enjoying our new room.

The Boys

We live in the best neighborhood - I could not ask for a better location for these boys.  Right in our area there are at least 13 kids (all boys) that I can name off the top of my head that all go to school together, they are all friends and the parents are friends.  I just came back from a night with my girls and there were six boys together playing.  I love that any given night we can have a get together and the boys all have their friends around.

Two of the boys have younger brothers with the name Jack – so Joseph tells me tonight that he wants a younger brother with the name of Jack.  I asked him what we would do if it was a girl and he answered just as serious as could be “well, she would just have to live in another house because your the only girl allowed in our house”!

Dryer Sheets and Bubble Gum

 

I don’t know who the genius is, but my son owes them his life!  He went away on vacation with his friend over Spring break with his friend and came home with a ton of laundry.  I pulled the final load out this morning and just about went through the roof – four stories up!  All over the inside of my brand new dryer – green gum!!  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve told the males in this house to empty their pockets, but one day, they’ll understand.  I’m sure Greg would have gotten the hint this time, but oh no, a dryer full of his clothes (brand new clothes I just bought for his trip) and the gum was only on one pair of shorts, the rest, strung around the whole drum of my dryer.

Anyways, I checked the internet for a solution and I read that if you soak dryer sheets in water, then place them on the gum in the dryer, and let it sit for 10 minutes, the gum will come out.  Low and behold – IT WORKS!  I was very skeptical at first because how in the world was that going to work?!?  It did take a little bit of elbow grease with all but my rear end in the dryer, but IT WORKS!

And now, I don’t ever want to smell another lavender dryer sheet or spearmint gum again – EVER!  And Greg, if this happens again, you are doing your own laundry – you’re lucky I’m even giving you another chance!

Easter 2010

 

We did not decorate our Easter eggs this year the traditional way – instead we opted for plastic, already colored eggs and used glitter glue and stickers.  I just wasn’t up to the mess of dying the eggs, hiding them overnight and then having to throw them all away (I’m not eating eggs that have been unrefrigerated for any amount of time).  The boys had a great time squirting the glitter glue haphazardly all over the eggs and placing stickers on them.  An the bonus – the eggs were filled with candy.  But, of course, Greg wanted no part of this!

Easter morning we were loaded up on candy.  The sad part is – I’ll probably eat a majority of it!  I’ve got a candy dish at work that I keep well stocked also!  And there is my secret stash of Cadbury cream eggs in the back of the refrigerator that no one knows about.

Then we had an egg hunt.  Looks pretty bad that the boys are carrying around plastic bags rather than Easter baskets – but hey – it’s what’s in the eggs that counts~

  

Hope everyone had a great Easter~