SIMPLIFY

As I sit here and type I am surrounded by chaos. But it is sort of organized chaos. My friend Roseanne has taken the girls home with her and I am trying to get stuff done. Yes, I know that right now I am typing but I needed to sit for a moment.

Anyway, back to the chaos...I am surrounded by piles. Stuff to go to the op shop, rubbish, laundry that is being ignored for the moment, dishes that are waiting for the girls to come home, stuff to go in the school cupboard, stuff that goes back in the craft room once I figure out exactly where and why, VBS stuff, etc. It seems that the mess out here is growing in proportion with the tidying in the craft room. And, as always, it gets worse before it gets better. There are decisions to be made--I love to scrapbook and have heaps of pictures and memorabilia to scrap, but haven't scrapped since Beka was born. What do I keep and what do I toss? At this point, I'm keeping all the pics and memorabilia and papers but getting rid of everything else, i.e. stamps, punches. Fabric, I love fabric but it is piling up around my ears. So, unless I REALLY love it or have a specific purpose for it, it's going. Same with patterns. How many shirts patterns (for me) can I have? And why do they all look the same? I'm a creature of habit I guess. Anyway, getting rid of about half of my patterns. I took all my ribbons out and off their spools, then I rolled them and put them in a container. They take a lot less room now. I gave about half of them away too.

I've recycled at least 1 whole tree in useless papers that I keep for no good reason. WHY??? I keep them for ages only to never use them and end up tossing them. So annoying. My motto is SIMPLIFY. If there isn't much in the room it can't get so messy, right?

Well, I'm back to work on the room. I'll try to post later. I have a funny story about Josh and a mouse. =)

senior youth camp 2009

Make a Smilebox slideshow

Shoes

These are Josh's favourite shoes. KT26's in steel blue (or something like that) I think they are UGLY!!!

But I did find something that makes them kinda cute.

Birthday wishes

Happy 3rd Birthday, Nathan!! We love you!

Busy-ness

Well, Josh and I are off to Bundaberg for the weekend. The girls are staying with Grandpa and Grandma. We're off to Senior Youth Camp. Should be a good weekend. We come home tomorrow evening but the girls are staying at Grandma's until Sunday after church. =) So, this morning I have a bit of running around to do to make sure we're ready to go. By the time I got up this morning the girls had already packed their bags. And I only had to add a few things for them. They did a good job. Of course now every ten minutes I hear, "can we go to Grandpa's now?" I am taking them over there at noon and Grandpa is watching them until Grandma gets home from work. Sounds like fun.

Have a great weekend!

Thursday morning

veggie garden

my poor cabbage plants are getting eaten. I already lost my broccoli plants.

tiny cucumbers. The girls ate our first full-grown one last night at dinner.

beef steak tomatoes. We needed tomatoes that were easy to slice and use. still growing cherry tomatoes too though. They just won't die. =)

lettuce~we pick the outside leaves almost every day. We've been eating off these plants for a couple weeks now.

this garden is growing better than the other one. It looks overgrown but is doing well. You can see the two types of tomatoes, the lettuce, some corn and along the fence are snow peas.

In the other garden there are actually 3 cucumber plants, more corn, another cherry tomato, one butternut pumpkin/squash plant that is growing really well and one that isn't =), some silverbeet and my poor eaten cabbage plants.

I need to plant some more lettuce so it's grown when these lettuce plants are done. I'm hoping for lots of corn, the plants look much better this time around. Probably due to the nice heavy dew falling every night and the large amount of rain we've had recently.

crafts

squares for Beka's quilt

nappy bag and some dummy clips~both still need to be finished. And obviously the pink/butterfly one is for Emily. The brown one has classic winnie the pooh characters on it.

blocks for this craft

so, I've been working on some crafts. my chore for the week is to get the craft room organized so I can put Beka's quilt together.

Sunday Morning

Well, the girls asked for curlers in their hair Saturday night. After scrounging around we found enough to do their hair while it was up in pony tails/pigtails. Then we had a couple minutes before we had to leave for church so I decided to take a couple pics. Catie looks like she has to go to the bathroom in most of these but it's because she kept pulling her dress up to scratch her leg and I wasn't letting her scratch. =) (mean mommy!) I know you can't see the pics too well but click on the last one and look at Catie. She isn't smiling but you can REALLY see her dimples. And did you notice her 2 missing teeth? Yep, that makes 4 total. Emma is almost too big to wear the "wedding dress". They love that dress. I guess it's about time for Beka to start wearing it. Speaking of Beka, she LOVES that dress. She wears it almost every Sunday and would wear all week long if I'd let her. So thank you very much, Mom and Tanya!!

22 weeks

pics of the girls

Make a Smilebox slideshow

A lot

okay, so I'm really really bad at communication lately. Here's a quick rundown of the past week.

• Thursday we were supposed to paint Beka's room. We took the girls to the park for a pancake breakfast and a play on the playground. They got completely soaked going for a walk along the beach. Had to strip them down and wrap them in blankets before we'd let them in the car. Took two wash cycles to get all the sand out of the clothes. Ended up not painting.
• Friday we had a church service in the morning and then Josh slept all afternoon as he didn't feel well. no painting
• Saturday we spent the morning getting the paint lightened with more white paint and doing some shopping along with the entire population of Hervey Bay. WHY were they all shopping on Saturday??? Then we started painting Beka's room at about 2:00 in the afternoon. We went out for dinner to KFC and ice creams at McDonald's then dropped the girls off to the S's while we finished the second coat of paint.
  
• Sunday got up at 5:45 to get to the beach for the 6:00 Sonrise Service. Helped cook pancakes for the breakfast following. Came home, slept for an hour (girls watched a video) got up, went to church. Went to friends' house for a birthday lunch. Came home and all 5 of us took naps. Went to church in the evening. Then over to S's for dinner.
  
• Monday did some cleaning around the house. was mostly lazy. went to S's for dinner and Mexican Train Dominoes. The kids played Cootie bugs.
  
• Tuesday took the laundry to the laundry lady. She did 4 loads and I still had 3 loads of towels, jeans, non-dryer stuff here at home. Also went grocery shopping and to Big W. Spent a lot of money. But it doesn't happen often. While at the grocery store Josh talked to the real estate agents. The rental guy came out that afternoon and evaluated the house as a rental.
  
• Wednesday Josh worked at the school. The girls painted. (I've got pictures to post). We cleaned the school room and worked on laundry. Had Bible study at the Shellard's.
  
• Today Josh took the van in to be serviced. Had the sales guy come out and meet with us for an hour evaluating the house for sale. And now Josh is back at work and the girls are down for naps and I am getting caught up with communications.

So, as you can tell we are again talking about building a house on the land we have in town. We've talked about it before but have never gone so far as to talk to real estate agents about this house. In a perfect world we would get enough money from rent to basically pay off this house in 20-30 years. That's as long as everything goes to plan. Or we could sell this house and probably have enough money to build the new house and owe the bank less than $50,000. Guess which option I like and which option Josh likes!! Either way the timing could be an issue. We could do the minor touch-ups needed and have this place rented out in the next month. Of course then we would have to find somewhere to rent while waiting for the new house. And hope the bank would give us the extra loan for the new house. Or we do the slightly more major touch-ups needed for sale and put it on the market in the next month and around here the average is 3-4 months for sale. Which would mean moving either in the last month of pregnancy or the first few months with a newborn. And still needing to find a place to rent until the new house was built. (unless this house sold to an investor and we could rent here as needed.) Anyway, lots of things to talk about/decisions to be made.

I've got pictures of Beka's room but since we don't know what we're doing at the moment I haven't put up the wall paper border yet. So the pics are boring. =) I'll post pics of the girls painting though.

Holidays Day 2 & 3

So, I don't have pics at the moment but yesterday Josh mowed the lawn, used the whipper snipper/weed eater, trimmed hedges, etc. And I got started on Christmas presents!! I know, I know!! But I might as well do them while I'm feeling the urge to be creative and while I have a bit of time as I'm thinking I might be a bit busy after August. (also, this way I can indulge my cheap side and send them back with mom and dad. ;o) )

Today Josh built a computer, mowed the school/church yards and stripped the wall paper border from Beka's walls. (which turned out to be surprisingly easy considering back when we put it up Josh didn't trust my years of wallpapering with mom and wouldn't believe that pre-pasted meant wet it and stick it up. Instead he used glue. Should be interesting if he'll trust me this time when we put up the new border. Anyway, I read on the internet to use hot water mixed with vinegar and soak the wallpaper before peeling it. It worked. I should add that to my uses for vinegar post.) And I cleaned out our linen cupboard. Now half of it is empty since I gave/threw away so much stuff. YAY!!

Tomorrow is painting day. Anyone want to babysit?? =)

Fall Holidays Day One

YAY!! Josh installed my new cooktop. Isn't it beautiful?

After dinner last night he asked if I had used it. I said yes and that it had gotten dirty. He said "I hope you got a picture of it before you used it then. You know, for blogging purposes." =) He knows me well.

Other holiday projects include finishing the painting on my closet doors, stripping wall paper from Beka's room and then repainting her room, organizing the shed and the computer work area in the school room, cleaning/organizing my craft room, etc. We'll see how we go.

Vinegar

Just thought I'd share a couple uses for vinegar that I'd heard about and have now used and recommend.

1. in place of rinse aid in your dishwasher. Just fill that little compartment up with white vinegar and it works exactly the same with a much nicer cost.

2. use 1/2 to 1 cup in your washing machine. I had been using "hygiene rinse" but found it was clogging up my drains. But it was the only thing I could find that got rid of the wet undies smell. But now I just put some vinegar in as the washer fills up with water. No smell!! I hear that it also helps take the "op shop smell" out of clothes and linens too. I'm planning on using it when I wash the newborn size clothes in a couple months. No matter how I store clothes they get a bit of a sour smell.

Happy Birthday, Emma!! 2 days late! =)

Okay, I'm a slack mama. I didn't get Emma's birthday post up on her birthday. And I didn't take hardly any photos of her party. Oh well. I made cupcakes for the kids to frost themselves. They played carnival type games and watched a Boz episode that had to do with a carnival. We painted faces and had a great time. We also had an Easter egg hunt because Emma has been wanting some chocolate eggs but we didn't want to do that on Easter. I made a cake for Emma but it ended up totally flat (like an inch high!) so we bought a cake for her party and ate her other cake for her birthday dinner. And I forgot to take a picture of it. See! slack mama! Oh well, Emma had lots of fun. Thanks, Grammy and Papa for the Fur Real Puppy. She's been carried around non-stop! Thanks for the card games we are learning and the notebook too. Thanks to Grandma, Grandpa and Uncle Matthew for the new digital camera. HEAPS of photos have been taken already. Should be fun to look through. Thanks to the Sauvageot's for a big echidna to be the mommy to the little echidna. And thanks to the Challacombe's for the hours of fun provided by Lego. I never would have thought of buying Lego's but the girls love them. Catie gave Emma an Australian flag towel, Beka gave her a Cars bouncy ball that has flashing lights and we gave her a doll and a sticker book. Lots of fun toys for a 5 year old.

Make a Smilebox scrap pages

An interesting afternoon

okay, this post will probably fall under the heading TMI but oh well. I've been running around today getting stuff together for our carnival game themed youth group. (I'm very resourceful. We decided to use this theme for junior youth and then leave it set up for senior youth tomorrow night. So I decided to leave it set up for Saturday and use it for Emma's birthday party. :0P) Anyway, I've had a bit of a sick stomach all day (possibly from eating pork chops and rice for breakfast??) Well, after most of our shopping (only face paint and apples left to get) we took some lunch to Josh. I knew the girls needed naps but thought I could just swing by the grocery store to pick up the apples and facepaint. Well, as we stood in the party aisle Beka says "I need to do a poo" which was immediately followed by "Oops! I got poo on the floor!" Yes, my child had diarrhea without warning on the grocery store floor. And of course since this was just a five minute trip I had no wipes, no purse (just a wallet) no nothing. I told a passing store employee that my child had just pooped on the floor, I didn't say anything that I wanted to in response to her "How dare you let your child do such a horrible thing" look (you know that look don't you?) carried Beka to the parents' room and proceeded to wipe her down as best I could with toilet paper. I am so glad she had a dress on. I took her shorts and undies and socks and threw them away because as stated before I had nothing to put them in to get them home. And they were a mess. I rinsed off her shoes (dawgs, thankfully). We walked out to the car and came home. She's had two more episodes but 1 was actually in the toilet (YAY!!) and one in her pull-up (much preferred to undies). She's had a nap and now we are off to youth group.

And I just have to say that God is good. As I lay beside Beka in bed and she slept I tried to figure out what to do. I still needed to get the paints and apples. I told the other workers to be at the church at 3:30 to set up. That meant I needed to leave around 2:50 to miss the school traffic at the entrance to our little housing development (2 schools + lousy traffic signs/roads = horrible to drive in or out of our development at 8am and 3 pm.) And that would mean Beka only having a 45 min. nap. Just as I was getting to the point of waking her up so we could go (2:40) Susan called. She was just done with uni and wanted to know if I needed her to get anything. YES!!! So that worked out wonderfully. And now Josh is home to shower before we head to youth group. So I'm off.

Tuesday busy-ness

Tuesday was a very busy day. I must have some energy back and/or doing some nesting. I decided to paint the dresser that is going in my room for the baby's stuff. A drawer is missing because the screw holding the knob in is threaded and Josh is taking it to work to drill it out. After painting the dresser I decided to paint the basket that is on top. I love spray painting. So quick and easy.

While that was drying I decided to make some tie onesies for the baby. I've seen them around on the internet. They're so cute. At the moment they are just on with iron-on stuff. I need to sew around them. And even though they look yellow the two outside shirts are white. The one with the frog "tie" is a size bigger than the other two.

I also cleaned my room. Mainly so that I could put the dresser in there. But also because I haven't slept well for the past 4 days or so and hoped a clean room, fresh sheets, etc. will help. And I did 3 loads of laundry catching up from the weekend. It may not sound like much but it made for a very busy day for me. And I finished off the evening working on a doll for Emma.

The girls started the morning off with a big colouring-in session. Then they cleaned their rooms, watched a video (thanks for the new Veggie Tales dvd, Grammy!) played, had rest time, cleaned the school room, etc. We have Bible study tonight at the house and don't have hardly anything to do to get ready. What a nice feeling!!