New Baby Bliss and A Can of Paint

In May I had the privilege of photographing a newborn baby. He was less than 24 hours old when I went up to the hospital and did his first photo shoot. A month later, I got to take my camera to visit him in his home. It was time for his 1-month photos for his birth announcement. Little Hunter is a mellow, easy-going baby, and photographing him at home with his parents was very much fun. I got to put together his birth announcement, too! I made three different styles of announcement and let the parents pick their favorite. Here is the one they chose (which was my favorite, too!).



On a totally different note, I have big plans for tomorrow. Back in March we bought new paint for Snapper's room. For the first 2 1/2 years we lived here, the room Snapper is now in was our guest room/office. It was a lovely blue and white and went perfect with the curtains and bedding I had. That blue does not go so well with Snapper's pink and brown bedding and curtains. Time for a change. The white wainscoting will stay, and the rest of the walls we be a lovely tan. Tomorrow I'll be taping off trim, and Matt and I will paint together. It should be a gret change.

Do you have any big plans for the weekend? Our 4th of July celebration is shaping up to be a ton of fun. But that's another post for another day.

Just What I Needed!

While we were on the road the last 2 months, I really missed our daily routine and the comfort of home. Now that we've been home for a few weeks and are back in the routine, I began to feel just a tiny bit restless--ready for some good fun. This was a weekend of good fun.

Friday night the staff ladies of our church hosted a lock-in for the church ladies. Good food. Good friends. Well-planned activities. Laughter in great abundance. Sweet conversations. Hardly any sleep...and totally worth it! I have not laughed that much in a very long time. When I first arrived, I was hit by a wave of sadness and lonliness for my Arkansas best bud Carol who moved to Tennessee last month. But that lonliness soon passed, and I had the most fantastic evening. Thanks, staff ladies! We need to do that more often!

I crawled into my bed at home at 7:45 on Saturday morning and enjoyed some dozing and cuddling with my sweet hubby for an hour before getting up to face the day. The kids slept until 8:30, then joined us in our bed for a while. I soak up those Saturday morning cuddles with them. I remember cuddling in bed with my parents, and it is a memory that makes me feel all warm inside. I hope in years to come that Snapper and Pepper have those same warm memories. Once we were up and at 'em, it was project time. The weather was a balmy 74 degrees with a light breeze. I opened the garage door, cranked up my new 90's playlist on my iPod, and spent just about the whole day priming my kitchen cabinet doors. Matt stationed himself on the front porch with his tile saw, and cut all the tile for the living room entryway, fireplace hearth, and downstairs bathroom. Snapper and Pepper played together beautifully all day. Their activities included: Jumping on the trampoline, building cities in our two sandboxes, digging in the dirt, playing Star Wars (stick light sabers), doing gymnastics on our new tumbling mat, decorating our driveway with sidewalk chalk, riding bikes and scooters in the cul-de-sac (yes, Snapper actually rode her bike ALL BY HERSELF), and eating pickles on the front porch. I only had to break up one argument all day. I think that's a record!

When it got dark, we closed up shop. Matt completed the entryway and hearth tile! He ran out of tile before he could finish the bathroom. I finished priming all 19 cabinet doors. All that's left for me is the final coat of paint, putting on the new hardware, and hanging the doors back up. We brought the kids in, and saw for the first time how absolutely FILTHY they were. I don't think I have ever seen Snapper that dirty! And wouldn't you know it, Matt had them in the tub before I could get pictures of them! We put in some bubble bath and ran the jets to create a mountain of bubbles. They were so cute with only their faces poking out of the middle of the mound! And wouldn't you know it, the battery on my camera was dead! Stink! You'll just have to use your imagination to picture them. Seriously though, it was adorable.

Matt made dinner (steaks with savory mushroom sauce and garlic couscous) while I scrubbed the kids. I finally got the sharpie art off Pepper's arms and face. Hee hee! When the bubbles finally dissolved, I was horrified at the BLACK water and the layer of silt at the bottom of the tub. Oh gross! So I put Snapper in the shower, drained and rinsed the tub, and washed Jackson again.

After bundling the clean, sweet-smelling kids into their jammies, we all enjoyed a tasty dinner together. We played tennis on the Wii for a while before tucking two tired kids into bed. Then Matt and I played on the Wii for another 2 hours before we finally crashed. It was an almost perfect day. The only thing that would have made it perfect was if the ice cream man would have come down our street. We heard him in our neighborhood all afternoon, saw him on the next street over, and had our money all ready. What better way to celebrate the first warm day of the year than to buy ice cream from the ice cream man (is this magical for anyone else?)! But alas, he decided not to come down our street. Snapper was so sad. She sat on the front steps and watched for him through her binoculars for a half an hour. Sad!

So I had to blog about our weekend because it is a weekend I want preserved forever in my memory...just a good ol' special, fun day. I'm home from church this morning. Something I ate yesterday does not like my guts today. And Pepper has a lovely seal cough...he always gets croup when there's a major shift in the weather pattern. We're looking forward to a relaxing afternoon--garlic artichoke parmesan dip and a good NASCAR race. Ah yes, my restlessness is gone. This weekend is just what I needed!

Renovations and Aliens

The home improvements are moving along nicely. The living room paint, a wonderful, warm tan, is mostly up. Matt will be finishing it tonight. Next to the living room paint, the dining room looks horrible...almost green. So the paint guy at Lowe's mixed up a lighter version of the living room paint for our dining room. I've made good headway on the cabinets. The main cabinet bodies are stipped, sanded, and primed. The cabinet doors are stripped and sanded, and priming is on the agenda for tomorrow. Still a ways to go, but we're moving along.

The home projects are not our biggest projets, though. The biggest projets in our home are son and daughter. Someone snuck in last night and fed them something that replaced their sweetness with the grumps. Oh wait, I know! Maybe it was an alien invasion and something else is now inhabiting the bodies of my babies. Wow, what a day it has been! It has been one of those days that makes me question whether anything I do as a mom is making a difference. For that sake of destroying the reputations of my little sweeties, I won't go into detail. Just know this: I can't tell you the last time I was so happy to put those children in their beds at naptime. And I am praying that whatever stole my kids in the night last night will bring my kids back tonight.

Extreme Home Makeover

Well, it's actually not that extreme, but it sure feels extreme to me! As of today, we have lived in Little Rock for three years. In those three years, we have done a lot to improve our home and increase its value. Tax return time has allowed us some extra money to work with, and each year we put some of that money toward things that need doing around the house. When we first moved in, it was new paint for the bedrooms, kitchen, and dining room, window treatments, and Pergo flooring for the kitchen and dining room. In 2007 it was some front yard landscaping. In 2008 we did some more landscaping, painted the hallway, stairwell, and bathrooms, and put in new baseboards and chair rail in the kitchen and dining room. Little by little we have been making modifications.

This year was a particularly large tax return. We were able to pay off a large chunk of debt, which was really exciting. We also decided to do a few bigger things in the house that have been screaming for attention since we moved in.

1. Kitchen cabinets. They are nice oak, but the clear finish is peeling off, leaving the cabinets looking grimy and old. Rather than fork out thousands for new cabinets, I have undertaken the daunting task of refinishing the cabinets...by myself! For you who haven't seen it, my kitchen is huge--one of the main reasons we bought this house. It has lots of cabinets and storage space, which means lots of work to refinish. I spent 6 hours yesterday and 4 hours today stripping the old finish off the cabinets, washing them, and drying them. Tomorrow I will prime them, and the rest of the week I'll work on painting them. I've decided on a nice, off white to go with the wainscoting and trim. It will brighten up the kitchen considerably, and get rid of the dated look of the old finish. Add new hardware and we'll have "new" cabinets for about $100!

2. Paint the living room. We're pretty sure the living room paint--a boring, dingy, off white--is the original paint, which makes it 13 years old. It is all scuffed and dirty. We would have painted it long before now, but have not because of the 18-foot ceiling. Matt spent his whole afternoon, and I spent much of mine, painting. The living room looks so much nicer painted a warm tan! We should be finishing off the painting in the next few days.

3. Entryway, downstairs bathroom and fireplace hearth. Scarred, chipped, cracked parquet flooring is on our tiny (4 ft. x 4 ft.) entryway. There's no place to take off shoes when you come in the door. This has resulted in badly stained carpet just a few feet inside the door. The downstairs bathroom floor is ancient linoleum that has tears in it, and is curling away at the seams. The fireplace hearth is cracked, white, faux marble. All of the above are coming out and being replaced by a very nice tile. Matt is doing the work himself, and it is coming together nicely. He's extending the entrway further into the living room so there will actually be a place to take off shoes when you come inside. A shoe rack will help solve our shoe storage problem, too.

4. Snapper's room. When we moved here, we painted Snapper's room two shades of pink. It was adorable and she loved it. When Matt's sister Debbie moved in with us last summer, we moved Snapper into the guest room (more storage space) and put Deb in Whit's old room. The guest room is white wainscoting on the bottom and a deep blue on top. It worked beautifully with a few pieces of white furniture and very little clutter. It looks horrible with Snapper's pink and brown bedding, and all the kids' toys. The room feels dark and small. Therefore, our final project for this year is to pain the upper half of Snapper's room. It will be a nice, light tan. I'm also painting her bunkbed white and getting a few organizational items to help all the more.

5. Carpet. A fantastic sale at Lowe's is allowing our dollars to stretch far enough to put new carpet in the living room and stairs. The 13-year-old, very light tan (almost white) carpet is so stained and filthy that I have a huge area rug in the middle to hide the worst spots. Steam cleaning helps it look better, but within a few weeks the stains rise again and look even worse against the clean rest of the carpet. Hooray for new carpet! It will be installed next week!!!

So really, it isn't and extreme makeover. But it will seem extreme to us. It is tough living here with the house torn apart, but I know it will be worth it. Once we're done, I'll post pictures of my "new" house!