Life Round These Here Parts 12.9.15

I keep beginning blog posts in my head, but I never seem to find the time to actually sit down and write them out. Life has been very full lately, not acually busy but just full. We are finding our rhythm as a family of five, working on some house projects, investing in our people here - it's all good and right and fills our time.

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My stateside brothers flew out to spend Thanksgiving with us. It was a fast and furious weekend filled with trips to the airport, many games of Catan, birthday celebrations and way, way too much food. We took my brother Jon, the hunter and animal lover to our favorite little hidden gem, the Arsenal Refuge, and saw some amazing bucks and got the closest we've ever been to the buffalo. Observe.

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Jon's birthday was the 28th, and then Javi turned four on the 29th. Here is where I am supposed to go off on a sappy diatribe of "how has it been four years, and why is my little baby growing up?" Instead, I'll say that four years was a big milestone for me. Lover and I spent four years together kidless before we decided to take the leap of faith into parenthood, and with Javi turning four we've now spent as much time together as parents as we did as young marrieds. That milestone seems to have flipped a switch in my brain, and I am just feeling a lot more centered and calm about the whole parenthood thing.

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He picked out the colors of his cake himself and was so excited to help make it and decorate it. When asked what he wanted for his birthday meal, he declared "Apples, cheeseburgers and Toritos." So that is what we had. It was delicious. :) He is very happy to finally be 4, and is already talking about his next birthday when he will turn 5. In his words, he's "almost 5."

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It really was great to see Dan and Jon and be all together. (Ben, Eva and Steph, we missed you guys!) I'm really proud of the men that my brothers have become, even if they do seem to have quite the affinity for Under Armour. I'm sad they live so far away, but it's fun to go visit and have them fly in for special occasions!

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These two have been into all sorts of shenanigans lately. There are pen marks all over my couch arms, unidentifiable substances on my windows, and everyone seems to have forgotten how to sleep at night. But - they are the best 4 yr old and 2 yr old a girl could ask for.  They seem to have come out of a particularly rough patch in their relationship and are now even more best of friends. Peanut is old enough to really play together and the creative, imaginative games they come up with make me smile on a daily basis.

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My little guy is all sorts of sweetness, even when he is not sleeping because of teeth. He just turned 5 months and he is just a delight to be around. Happy, giggly, loves to snuggle - this boy is a keeper. He loves his big brother Javi like no one else. Lover and I often ask ourselves why Javi seems to be everyone's favorite. Both Declan and Keilana love him to death. I guess that's what happens when you have an awesome older brother.

 

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Christmas is only a few weeks away, but I'm still not feeling the Christmas spirit. To be clear, I'm not feeling the endless to do lists, holiday craziness and overwhelming decorating. I seem to still be stuck in Thanksgiving. I woke up Thanksgiving morning just overcome with the ways that God has blessed me. A husband who loves me unconditionally, three beautiful, healthy, growing children who love their mama, warmth and safety and all of my needs, and most of my wants. A God who loves me fiercely, gives me the strength to face each day, and is transforming me from the inside out.

The hustle and bustle of the season is just not working for me this year so instead I am taking it slow, meditating on the amazing changes that happened when Christ was born as a baby, and trying to teach my kids a little bit about that. We'll still set up our tree and open presents and all, but we're taking it really slow. Because the Earth waited four thousand years for its Messiah, so why can't I take a few extra days to contemplate His coming?

I'm not sure I'll be back to post again before Christmas, so if I'm not, Merry Christmas!



P.S. A few people have mentioned problems viewing the images in my posts lately. I tried something different today, so will you let me know if you're still having trouble seeing the pictures? Thanks!

 

Two Months Later

Surprising even myself, I am back in a timely manner to chat about the progress we've made thus far on the living room. The thing is, I suffer from a pretty severe condition called Project ADD, which basically means at any given time I have a thousand ideas for improving our home, and can be found working on between three and twenty seven of them at a time. For example, right now I'm itching to switch out the knobs on the kitchen cabinets, replace a light fixture in the hall, paint the ceiling in the basement and overhaul the bathroom in the basement. However, this causes me quite a bit of stress from the constant chaos in my brain as well as in my house, so I am really trying to get a handle on this.

Which means that currently I am working on projects only for the living room. Okay, and also painting the entry and hallway. But in my defense, those spaces are all open to each other, so once you start painting, you pretty much HAVE to keep painting or it looks stupid. So! The living room. So far we have installed a new ceiling fan, painted the walls, made curtains, made and hung two shelves and refinished the mantel. Actually, typing that, I'm pretty impressed with what we've accomplished in a couple of months. Go us! :) Last I showed you, the living room looked like this,



Here's that same view (mostly) today.



It's getting there, right? The cute kid makes it a lot more fun too :) First up, let's chat about that ceiling fan. I found a guy selling a really nice Hunter ceiling fan on Craigslist for $20. It was in basically brand new condition, and he wanted next to nothing for it. The kicker? This fan hung from a much higher ceiling, so the down rod was about three feet long. When we held it up to the ceiling, the fan was just about even with that ottoman beneath it. So... no? I was confident we could purchase a really short down rod, which is why we bought the fan in the first place. But it turns out that you can only purchase 6" or 12" down rods from Home Depot (still too long) or you can also order a 2.5 inch rod from Hunter. The kicker is that they charge you $3o for the part. So my super thrifty but still awesome ceiling fan was now going to cost quite a bit more. And honestly, for $50 we could just find another used fan on CL without all the trouble of switching down rods and assembly and yada yada. But - I was thinking ahead when I married a genius nine years ago, because I knew that someday, I would buy a ceiling fan with this problem, and I would need a genius to come up with a better solution. And of course he did! Turns out those down rods are a standard pipe size, and lo and behold Home Depot sells them in 2.5 lengths with both ends threaded, for like $2. Assembling and installing the fan was kind of like putting together a jigsaw puzzle without the box for reference, but, again, genius. I just stood there and handed him tools and a variety of screws. Voila!



We painted the walls in here with our neutral gray as with the rest of the house. It goes nicely with the tan brick on the fireplace, and is a nice simple background for everything else we're adding into the room. I've found that this color looks a little cold and sterile on its own, but once it's paired with nice bright white trim, some warm wood tones and some color of any kind it is perfect.



I hemmed and hawed about curtains in here, trying to find ones that I really liked that were somewhat interesting. Some simple white curtains would have looked nice in here, but I was trying to be a bit more creative, especially since I am leaning towards making that loveseat a lot more neutral. But I was also trying not to break the bank on curtains or fabric - which is easier to do than you might think. This is a super big window, and even though I didn't plan on closing the curtains that often, I still wanted the ability to close them whenever I wanted.



Is anyone else liking Target's Threshold line as much as I am? I feel like it is really channeling my style. Because clearly Target takes its style cues from little ol' me. :) Anyways, I picked up two of these tablecloths for the express purpose of making them into curtains. They were $18.99 a piece, so that's about $8.25/yard. In other words, a very nice price for that much fabric. It's a nice heavyweight cotton too.

Sewing is not my favorite activity, but curtains are pretty much a no brainer - especially from tablecloths that are already hemmed! I folded one end down about two inches, ran a seam to hold it in place and bam! Curtains! It took longer to thread the curtain onto the rod than it did to run a seam. No joke.



The packaging was another piece of the fabric with a little button holding it all together. It makes a great tieback, or also works well as a crown if you are a little Princess Peanut.



Also, can we talk about curtain rods for a minute? Big ones that are not ugly are super expensive. When we lived at Wendhurst I came across a chunky, pretty curtain rod for our bedroom that extended to 120 inches for $10. I did not realize at the time what a steal that was. I went with an IKEA rod for now, because they cost next to nothing, while I decide if it's worth trading our kid's college savings for a curtain rod in a living room. It totally is, right? The finials are totes boring, so when I found some cool mercury glass ones at the thrift store, you know I was all over switching those out, right?







Better. I'll talk about the shelves in a post of the their own, because they are actually quite fun to make. But for now, let's admire the amazing styling that I did for all your viewing pleasure. Go ahead, I'll wait while you pin it. You know you want to.



In all seriousness though, They're looking really good, and they're extremely handy. My thought it to use the shelves as a spot for library books, plants, remote controls and picture frames. So basically things that little fingers shouldn't be touching. Then the side tables stay clear and childproofed. I'm still debating if that top shelf is hung too high, but I'm waiting to get the other two made and hung and then I'll make a final decision.



The mantel got a facelift, and it looks soooo much better. I'll do a post on that too to show the transformation, but let's just say that I pretty much rock at refinishing stuff. How do you like the chalkboard art? I was going to draw something pretty, and then the kids joined me, and now it's awesome.



So that's what the living room looks like today. Actually, today it is significantly messier. :) We've made good progress, so now I just have to find the right fabric for that loveseat. It will totally be easy, right? :)

 

Exploring around Lompoc, CA

At the beginning of the month we went on our first vacation in over a year. Of course we traveled back home and to Spain for my brother's wedding in May, but traveling 5,000 miles while 8 months pregnant is not exactly my idea of a relaxing vacation. So, instead, we thought we would take three kids 3 and under on a long weekend to explore California. #weareprobablycrazy It was totally relaxing.

In all seriousness, we had a really good time. My brother Dan moved to California a little over a year ago, and we've been trying to go visit him and scope out his new stomping grounds since then. But you know, we've been busy with moving cross country and buying a house and having a baby and finding time to sleep. :)



So - we purchased four tickets through Spirit Airlines for the first weekend in October. Lover worked a half day on Friday and then we caught a direct flight from Denver to LAX. The kids all did great on the flight - it really helped that everyone (minus Declan) had their own seat, plus we brought Peanut's carseat on the plane. That really helped to cut down on her squirminess. She wasn't thrilled about being contained, but the flight was only about two hours so it was fine. By far the most challenging part of the trip was the time between deplaning and picking up our rental. It involved finding all our luggage (which of course included our two bags, backpacks, three carseats and our stroller), tracking down the shuttle and loading everyone into our rental car. I would have taken a picture, but we had no hands free. :)

We drove up the Pacific Coast Highway from LAX to Lompoc. (Just south of Santa Maria) The drive was really pretty, but we got stuck in some traffic and Declan was HUNGRY, so that made the first 45 min of our trip a little sticky. At one point Declan was screaming his head off, we were stuck in traffic so we couldn't pull over, and the other two kids started crying because Declan was so loud. We looked at each other and said "wow, I am SO glad that we went on vacation!" :) But, all was not lost, we found a place to pull over, fed the baby, handed out snacks to the big kids and were back on the road in no time. Or half an hour later. Same thing.





The drive was really pretty, and we had fun speculating just how much the homes in Malibu Beach cost. A quick Google search determined that a few were available for a mere 12 million dollars, so we're thinking that will be our next real estate purchase. :)

We met up with my brother in Santa Barbara for a walk on the pier and some dinner. I wish we had more time to explore Santa Barbara, but we'll have to save that for the next trip. :)

Saturday morning we puttered around the little town of Lompoc. This was actually one of my favorite parts of the trip, walking around the town, exploring the art murals and checking out the enormous stone pines. The kids had a blast finding the enormous pine cones and I walked and took pictures while Lover and Dan talked about topics way above my pay grade. Unfortunately, I seem to have deleted those pictures off my cards - which will teach me to never delete pictures EVER AGAIN. Here's a google image so you can see what the trees look like. Super cool.



Saturday afternoon we took an awesome drive through the mountains to Jalama Beach. It's fairly secluded and although there were quite a bit of campers, it was a windy day so the beach was pretty empty.



We walked for a long time down the beach, just enjoying the sun and playing chicken with the waves. Declan slept in the carrier, Peanut hung out on Lover's shoulders and Javi discovered his new love - the ocean! He had a blast and ended up soaked by the end of our time there. And he slept like a rock that night!





Sunday morning we headed into a little town called Solvang. It's a little Dutch town that looks like it came straight out of a Hans Christian Anderson story. It was jam packed with tourists, but it was fun to snap pictures and duck into the little shops. There are lots of little courtyards and hidden alleys. Dan said there are great wine tastings in the little shops there, so someday we will have to go back without the kids and have more fun exploring.

 We really packed a lot into three days! Sunday afternoon we drive up north a bit to check out the Guadalupe Sand Dunes. This is where they filmed Cecil D. Mills' The Ten Commandments, so that was really cool. What wasn't cool was the fact that some dumb bird is in danger of extinction, so the majority of the dunes (where we entered) were fenced off and you couldn't climb on them. Still, it was a pretty walk through the dunes down to the ocean, and we saw pelicans and tons of pretty flowers and then of course checked out the ocean. Although once we got to the actual beach Declan decided he had seen enough of the ocean so I didn't stay too long. All in all it was very pretty, but I would suggest driving a little further north (we entered at Oso Flaco) to see if you can walk around more on the actual dunes up there.



Monday morning we just bummed around the hotel, did some laundry (because of all the ocean!) and basically rested up for our big tour that afternoon. Dan pulled some strings and arranged for a VIP tour for us of SpaceX, the awesome place where he works. That's right, my brother is a rocket scientist. :) The launch pad is on Vandenburg Air Force base, and there's no photography allowed, which is a shame because the base is actually really beautiful. Gorgeous views of the ocean from the hills, and there are all sorts of interesting vegetation. It killed me a little bit to follow the no photos rule. But - it was awesome to tour the facility and see where Dan works and understand more of what he does. :)



Tuesday morning we got up at oh-dark-thirty, loaded up the kids and drove back down the coast to catch our flight back to Denver. It was a fast and furious trip, but it was so much fun to see Dan, meet his coworkers, eat lots of awesome Thai food, and explore around Lompoc. We'll definitely be back - there's lots more of California to explore!