Mother's Day Weekend

I totally forgot to post about our amazing weekend!  It was seriously the best.  Saturday was the neighborhood rummage, so we went out to look for some bargains.  It was kinda drizzly so it wasn't that great, but I did score some vintage kid's stuff for Toadstool Vintage.  Then it cleared up and we spent loads of time in the yard.  Ingrid is perfecting her baseball swing, that kid can really hit the ball!  No tee for her, she is hitting pitched balls and will not stop begging someone, anyone, to pitch the ball for her! 

After nap time we headed to the zoo.  As a family!  Usually I bow out of outings like this and let Brendan have kid time by himself so I can have mom time for myself, but I went and it was amazing.  The perfect weather, the kids were in good moods. We saw the goats, our favorite.  Ingrid couldn't stop hugging them.  My girl!

 Ingrid was super excited to go on the carousel, so of course we had to do it.  She was giddy waiting in line and she kept trying to decide which animal she'd ride.  She chose the ostrich.

 And to end the trip we took a relaxing ride on the train.  It was a perfect trip to the zoo!

Sunday was great, too.  I got to do a boat load of gardening in the new yard.  The people before us did not care about gardening.  They planted a few things but not with much planning.  For example, there are about five peony bushes by the garage, just sprouting up amidst the grass.  No flower bed, just tall grass and weeds all over the place.  So my goal is to get the grass pulled up and make a flower bed, add a couple more plants there, and attach it to the little garden on the other side of the garage, which so far has strawberries and asparagus and tons of weeds.  So  many ideas!!  But the grass is not coming up easily and it's been about three days of trying to chop away at it.  I am going to be so proud of the end product, I should go take before pictures so I remember how terrible it looked before!

Something that will help me in this endeavor is the fact I hired a babysitter!  Alex comes two mornings a week for a few hours, it's awesome.  She is a local college kid and she just jumped right in and took over as soon as she came.  I quietly went downstairs and did some work and she just played with the kids, took them to the park, changed poopy diapers.  Heaven!!  At first I felt a little decadent for hiring a babysitter being a stay at home mom, but screw it.  I am running two etsy shops, and I have two more craft shows lined up for this summer.  Instead of fighting every weekend with Brendan to watch the kids so I can get shit done, I'm gonna have someone play with the kids while I do it and thus have my weekend free for family.  It is amazing.

Also, gramma is coming today for Ingrid's birthday!  She'll be here a few days, allowing Brendan and I to go out for our six year anniversary.  God bless grammas.  It's gonna be a great weekend!

Settling In

We are slowly settling into our new house.  I got some things hung up in the kids' rooms.  I have tried finding places for the random things still in boxes.  It's a work in progress.  Otis' room was super easy, we just took what we had from his old room and hung it up here at the new house.  Viola!  A finished room.

Ingrid's room is almost done, I just need to hang a shelf for her Brewers bobblehead collection.  I hated the green when we looked at the house but man, her stuff just fit in with it so well, we're leaving it!  I just need a curtain rod for her other window so I can hang up her other curtain.  Last weekend I had a craft show and across the way from me was an awesome booth from Man Vs. George.  I had to get a couple prints for the kids' rooms, a whale one for Otis and this Eiffel Tower one for Ingrid.

 And here, just for good measure, are some pictures of Otis playing on the stairs.  Making a cute face.  Because he's adorable.



Back in Action!

Well, we did it!  We moved into our new house!  What a week it's been...First of all, we've been without internet for a week, which has not been fun.  I felt very out of touch, and not a bit relieved to be away from things.  I do like a weekend here or there without the computer, but a whole week was not fun.  I had put my Etsy shops on hold but of course got about ten orders, which I found out when I lurked in the Starbucks parking lot and used their wifi with the iPad.  Cable I can do without, internet not so much...

But we're here!  Every day I find something else about the house I love.  We were able to move right in and unpack and are now trying to get settled.  Things are not the exact way I want them but it's nice to know we can do things here little by little because we're here for the long haul, not just a year!  And we don't have to ask a landlord if we can do anything, it's our house!  So happy about that.

The other night I was doing dishes and looked out the window to see this:

What a cheerful little family picture this is!  Notice the new grill?  We have been to the store a million times picking up things we need.  Grill, dehumidifier, lawnmower, shelves, broom, new mailbox.  The list never seems to end.  But it's great!  Otis agrees.



It's OURS!

We have keys in hand and have already moved a couple boxes in.  Our house is our house!  Yay! 

Here's our bare kitchen.  The cleanest it will EVER be.

Here's our bedroom, not sure about the color, we'll see.

Here's Ingrid's room.  Definitely not the color we want, we're painting it yellow.

Here's Otis' room.  Already blue.  Perfect!

Here's my favorite, for some reason.  I love the staircase!  It's so sunny and curves a little.  Love it.

Here's the bathroom.  Again, the cleanest it will ever be.

And I got to see the basement again without any gym equipment and it will be perfect for my sewing area and possibly a little play room.  Just have to get some carpet down there. 

We have a house and it's all ours!  Our kids will grow up there, no more moving! 

Ugh...

We all got horrible colds.  Yesterday instead of packing, we had pjs on at noon and layed around watching cartoons all afternoon.  We also played a game Ingrid made up, kind of like basketball, only you try to throw the ball as crazy as you can and see if it still gets there.  You get extra points for hitting someone on the face with the ball on accident (we use Nerf balls) and there was much giggling involved.

Today is another rainy, sick day.  I keep thinking I should be packing and then looking around and not even knowing what I'd pack anyway.  I am pretty darn glad this is the last time we're moving.  I can't believe we did this every year for ages.  Screw that.

The kids are actually in pretty good moods for being covered in snot and sneezing every five seconds.  My head feels like it's puffed up five sizes too big.  I want to go to bed and I have to go pack.  I have to, don't I?  Damn.

Mass Destruction. Or, the Week Before We Move

Want to feel better about yourself and your homemaking skills?  Take a look at our house as it is right now.  Seriously, I just took these pictures a minute ago.  And instead of cleaning anything up, I'm blogging. 

There, don't you feel better about your house now?

We closed on our house yesterday!  We had to wait around forever for the paperwork--they put the wrong sale price on the papers and when they went to go fix it, they found out we'd have to get another appraisal, another something or other with the interest, lots of junk that would take another week or so.  I was super pissed, but what can I do?  Nothing.  So we figured it out and signed our little hearts out and we now own a house.  In fact, for this week we are landlords.  The sellers need some time to move so they are renting from us.  Fun!

I have been trying to get things packed/thrown away/cleaned out but it's really hard with kids around.  I wish someone would take them away for a couple days so I could magically get shit done.  But instead, I do load after load of laundry, pick up toys, give baths after someone whose name starts with O and ends with -tis gets into the yogurt.  And in between all that I pack a box here and there, I start another bag for the thrift store, I throw out another thing that has been sitting in a corner somewhere collecting dust.  And my house turns into a chaotic mess.

I'm hoping to get all this packed up by Friday so we can spend the weekend at the cottage in peace and quiet and then move on Monday. Our official moving day is Tuesday but I feel like I can cram some mattresses in and on my car and move us there Monday, what do you think? 

Baseball!

We went to our first Brewer's game yesterday.  I forget how cold the first games of the season are!  The kids were not impressed with tailgating in the wind, so they ended up in the back of the car.

We got to our seats and I kind of freaked out for a bit.  I've been up that high before but not with such wriggly kids, I guess.  We were a row behind the very short railing and then there was a huge drop off to the next level.  I was just imagining Ingrid tripping and falling and somehow making it over the railing.  Stranger things have happened...Luckily both kids stayed put and we watched the game for a few innings before having to leave and take them to the play place.  I hate that play place.  It's a zoo of kids running around screaming and Ingrid usually gets stuck up in the big plastic hamster cage things and ends up crying for someone to get her down.  But thank God, she's big enough now to do it herself, she was so proud of herself for getting to the slide and getting down herself!

We made it all the way to the Sausage Races, and even heard Take me Out to the Ballgame on our way out--much longer than I expected to last!  Kids and baseball are fun but exhausting.  No drinking beer, no sitting in your seat comfortably, no actually watching the game.  It was a lot of carrying kids, eating really expensive horrible ice cream (or "ice cream" as I'm pretty sure there was no dairy in there at all) and chasing them around a stupid play place.  Ahhhhhh, the things we do for our kids.  They better appreciate how much we love them :) 



Cottage Time!!

On Sunday we made our first trip of the year to the cottage.  I love that we have a place like this to get away from the city for a day or a weekend.  We packed some food for lunch, a couple games and diapers for Otis, and took off. 

We had to measure the kids on the door.  Otis has grown a whole foot in the past year!  And, as always, it's fun to see the marks from the past.  Grandpa as a two year old in 1947, Daddy as a two year old in 1980.  And Ingrid as a two year old in 2008.  Family history on this door!

The kids had fun just hanging out, getting into the croquet set, coloring, and going to the parks.  It rained a bit so we made some muddy sand castles in the sandbox.  Fun!

Yesterday we had a great morning, too.  We took a nice long walk along Lake Michigan with the dog and enjoyed the sun and the sparkly lake.  Have I mentioned how awesome it is living three blocks from Lake Michigan?  Our walks are gorgeous, and the view from the park is amazing.



Breakfast with Benjamin Bunny

We took the kids to a fun little Easter event this weekend--breakfast with Benjamin Bunny at George Watts.  It's a cool shop downtown that has a tea room upstairs.  This event was a fun morning with coloring, food, drinking out of crystal goblets, and meeting big stuffed bunnies.  Oh, and Jemima Puddleduck made it, too! 

Daddy and Otis, before the crying began.

Jemima Puddleduck!

It's funny because we never have taken the kids to get pictures with Santa or the Easter Bunny or any theme park characters before.  Ingrid did not like the idea at first, she kept asking with a hint of terrror, "Is the bunny going to be at our table??"  But once she saw they were just big stuffed animals that walked around, she couldn't stop hugging them! 

Mrs. Watts herself reading a story.

Otis, however, cried whenever they got near.  Taking their picture with them was an act of child abuse, according to him!  But who doesn't have a picture of their screaming kid with some huge dressed up character?

It was so fun, definitely something we'll do again next year!

Kids, Thrifting, Sewing, Life.

Four words that sum up my life.  Well, the word life itself sums up life, but you know what I mean...

Kids are good.  Otis is getting a buncha molars at once and has been crabby.  Like this:

Ingrid has been busy drawing again.  She just loves her drawing board!  She'll sit there and talk to herself and tell stories as she draws pictures.  The other night she drew herself and Otis holding hands.  Oh jeez, that's cute.

I have been sewing like mad to get ready for a craft show coming up the week after we close on our house.  And I started selling at this cool local shop called The Waxwing, and she already sold most of the bibs I'd given her.  I really cannot wait to have my space to sew and organize all my junk, but right now having it in the middle of the dining room can be pleasant--look at all the sun that pours in!  I had to hang this bunting up so Otis couldn't get to it while I finished the rest of the order.  It just looked so cheery and bright!

And we popped in a thrift store I never go to, because they try to only put out current stuff it seems like.  And they don't even have a baby section, they just have boys and girls stuff and they toss the baby stuff in a big bin and you have to literally dig through.  So we just looked at toys today and found this gem!  A 1979 Chutes and Ladders game!  This is totally the one I remember having as a kid.  Awesome.

And that's life.  (I do have a husband, too, I swear.  He's busy working and by the time the kids are in bed we both crash with the ipad watching Battlestar Gallactica.  You don't really want to see that picture.)