Thursday, January 28, 2010

I'm BAAACCCKKKKK with a CRAZY schedule

Sorry for the LONG absence everyone. I got busy and forgot. Isn't that the classic excuse? Well lots has happened in the past 6 months but i'll just start with what's going on now. I will start with the biggest one. We are going to try and sell our house and upgrade to a 4br/2ba with basement. I met with a real estate agent just to "test the waters" and her response was, "Can you be ready in 2 weeks?" Of course I said "Sure!" then though "How in the world am I going to get this all done by myself??". Thankfully I have a wonderful mom who came out this week to help me while Chris was in Minneapolis for work. Once the staged house pics are ready i'll make sure and put them up. That's the funny thing about selling a house, nobody wants to see how you REALLY live. And right now i'm not sure how i'm going to keep my house in pristine condition with my active 18mo old. With me luck.

The next crazy things on the horizon are my friend's baby shower in Mobile that i'm throwing this weekend, then the women's retreat and youth group ski trip which will take me out of town every weekend until the end of February. All this while coordinating a couple more baby showers here locally and taking meals to other friends who just had babies. I'm tired just typing about it.

So many exciting, fun and stressful things on the horizon. Stay tuned for pics and updates. I'm glad to be back. Hopefully you agree. :)

Monday, August 17, 2009

My Big Girl, Literally

We had Reagan's 12 month appointment and she has shot up into the 95the percentile of height. She was tracking in the 75th, but shot up in the last 3 months. She is now 33 inches tall! She is going to surpass me in height by the time she's 10. And as for her weight she has consistently been in the 75th percentile and is now 22lb 4oz. She's growing up on me!

Saturday, August 8, 2009

Forks, Blocks & Packing Peanuts

Reagan is learning some fun things these days. Her latest thing is handing people objects. Be it a block, piece of watermelon, torn piece of tissue or a packing peanut she wants to share what she has with everyone. Yesterday I got a package for Reagan's birthday (which is tomorrow) and she spent 20min taking the packing peanuts out, one by one, and walking them to me at the sink. It was so cute.

She has also started stacking blocks into towers instead of just knocking down the towers mommy and daddy make. Finally I'm trying to teach her how to use a spoon and fork to eat. She is eating more complex food these days, like corn and mac & cheese and it's easier to eat with a fork than your hands. BUT yesterday at lunch time she found it much more fun to eat spaghetti with her hands and get it EVERYWHERE. It was actually a lot of fun to watch.

Love can be painful, literally

Chris has been very busy these past few weeks and traveling quite a bit so there are things that have gone undone...like mowing the lawn. We are officially "that house"....the house that you drive by and silently scorn for their blatant disregard of their lawn. Well to help Chris out I decided to mow the lawn and pull up some dead trees yesterday. The lawnmower actually quit 3 times because the grass was too tall for it to keep mowing, and is very hard to start so my shoulder is sore. And during the process of mowing I forgot we had leftover roof shingles sitting on the side lawn and tripped over them backwards, had the back end (no blade) of the lawnmower land on me, acquiring a pretty painful knot and bruise.


But the best was when, while yanking out a stubborn dead cheery laurel tree, one of the branches cut my leg. All in all a pretty rough hour and 15min. But worth it to see the happiness on Chris' face when he came home and it was done....well maybe. :)

Monday, July 27, 2009

Reagan's Big Girl Bedding

I love to shop, even when I have no real need for something...and I love getting catalogs at home. They are just fun to look at. Well I have found, and fallen in love with a bedding set for Reagan's future big girl bed. I have a 10% off coupon and I'm torn whether to go ahead and buy it for use in a year, for fear I won't find something I like when the time comes. Thoughts?

The Pain of Home Ownership

We are in the process of re-glazing our old single pane windows. Single pane windows have individual panes of glass held in place by little metal prongs and what is called Glaze. The glaze prevents water from getting into the house and ruining the wood on the interior of the window.

Our house was not well-taken care of and so the glazing had become cracked and was completely missing in some areas, allowing small amounts of water to reach the interior of the window every time it rained. Over time this damaged the wood on the interior. So, we took on the process of re-glazing. This involves scraping off the old glaze, priming, re-glazing, waiting 2 weeks for it to dry then priming 2 more coats and painting a top coat. PAINFUL, but much cheaper than new windows. Below are pictures of the process. We're done with the glazing and are now waiting the 2 weeks for it to dry.

The PHYSICALLY PAINFUL part came when I had to use mineral spirits to glaze the windows and didn't wear gloves. I had no idea mineral spirits could burn and crack your hands....but it can. Note to any DIYers.....wear gloves when working with chemical!


Our New "Office" Setup

As we began the countdown to Chris starting his evening MBA at Georgia (T minus 1 week) the need arose for Chris to have a home office to use for school. Because we have a 3-bedroom house, and all are in use, I had set up our large laundry room as my office about a 8 months ago. The dilemma was, where do we put another desk? We tired the play room, but Reagan was WAY too fascinated with Daddy's computer and obviously wanted to play with Daddy if he was working on a Saturday in that room. The solution: cram both desks into the laundry room. We had to block off a door to the backyard in order to accomplish this, but we never used that door anyway. This way when Chris is working I can work or goof off beside him and at least occasionally throw things at him to get his attention. :)



A fun feature that Chris built for me when I moved into the office were these floating bookshelves of a sort. We didn't have the floor space for a traditional bookshelf, but i still needed space to store my design books.