A vacation day in pictures

Watching the Lorax first thing in the morning. Bill discovered the secret to getting Genevieve to stay. Just put a pillow on top of her and she'll chill for a good 20 minutes watching the movie. :)

Jumping on the newly assembled bed.

A little bit of wrestling thrown in the mix. 

I love these stockings so much. I have another one finished besides other than the name that is a tin solider, so I guess that means this next baby needs to be a boy. :) 

We don't have that many Christmas decorations yet, but I have a few I brought home from Russia and I love this matrioshka nativity.

I like to collect one of these santas each year if I can swing it. They're not cheap outside of Russia, so I've actually only bought one since we got married. The two on the left I bought while I was there. But I plan to keep that collection growing over the years.

The kids love that bell tree. I showed them how to shake it to get it to ring and they both think that's the best thing they can do. It's so loud and hilarious.

Advent calendar just waiting for the Andes mints to fill up all those ribbons.

Someday I'll get the willow tree nativity set that I just love, but this is a cute little one we got a couple years ago that does just fine.

That started out on a table and swiftly went higher when the kids nearly tore it apart on first touch.

The whole front room.

Bathtime! Finally a good smile from Spencer. Nothing from Genevieve.

Crazy eyes.

Oh, smile from Genevieve!

OMG, is it possible? Yes! Both kids are smiling in the same photo! That may be the first photo I have ever gotten of both of them smiling. lol

I never thought we'd finish, but the bed is done!

This project has dragged on longer than any other building project I've done. That might be because it's also the biggest one I've ever done, but then there was morning sickness and two kids under foot and let's just say it took a really long time to finish all the details. Today was the day though and we did it! I ended up doing most of the work on the bed, and I built the headboard, but Bill took over doing the finish on the headboard and it turned out beautiful.  It's a little darker than the frame because I didn't mix the stain well enough when I first did my staining, but it all looks great put together.

We made lots of modifications on this thing. When I originally built the base I discovered after it was completely done that it was a few inches too long, which was horrifying, but turned out to be no big deal. Bill did a good bit of reassuring me that it would be fine, and indeed it was. I just modified the base of the headboard so it sat on top of the frame instead of connecting to the front, which worked out fine. It is a bit away from the wall, but nothing that is a problem.

I wanted to make sure I could have a bedside table, so instead of having two big drawers on the sides, I did a little cabinet and then two drawers. That should leave enough space if I build some in the future. We used to have some, but they're in the living room now.

 And here it is all put together and made up. We got new bedding for Christmas, but it won't come for a few days and we'll probably wrap it up to open on Christmas. We went with almost the opposite of the black cover we have. It's white with black flowery things and little green accents. It's going to look great.

So my building itch has been completely filled for the moment. This was a crazy project to do without a garage or workshop, but hey, we did it and it was awesome and it is going to last for years and years. Woot!

Enough about me, let's talk about my kids

I kind of hate when I have one of those weeks where I can't even come up with anything noteworthy to talk about here. Nothing was bad about it. There just wasn't anything of note. Probably a big part of that is that I have an awesome combination of off and on, more often on, headache that combines with a touch of nausea that I wouldn't even be bothered with on its own, but together it packs a pretty mean punch. I'm only seven weeks along, so I foresee it lasting until, oh I don't know, New Year's? Yup, that sounds about right, which is a tad depressing during the times of day when I don't feel so hot. Currently I feel fine so it's not so such a big deal, but let's just say I don't feel my normal chipper self for now.

But hey, I still have two cute kids that do lots of fun things, so let's talk about them instead! Genevieve is getting more and more mischievous the older she gets. She is such a chip off of her dad's block. :) It's hilarious and at the same time makes me want to pull my hair out. She will get this look in her eyes that we all recognize now and then be off to cause trouble or pester someone or get into somewhere she ought not to be. Like this morning she started crying and I came in to find her sitting on top of my four-drawer dresser in my bedroom pulling out all the jewelry she could get to in my jewelry box. It was scattered all around her on the floor, but she was stuck without a way to get back down. That's due to our new bed giving her access to that particular dresser, but her not being quite capable of getting back off. It was pretty much the last place we've been able to hide non-baby-friendly items.

If left to it she will pour gallons of water onto the bathroom floor while she's in the bathtub and then laugh and laugh and laugh.

She likes to steal Spencer's things just to get a rise out of him, but then she'll usually give them right back. She'll chuck her food at him too just to get him to laugh, then they both start laughing and she keeps throwing food and they have a grand old time, but my dining room is trashed. :)

She loves all her dolls and switches among which one she wants to play with. Today she was pretending to feed her doll bites of food before she ate them herself.

She loves to play in the toilet. The toilet paper is officially off limits to both her and Spencer because unplugging toilets is just not something I care to do on a regular basis. Hahaha!

She has very definite ideas of what books she wants to read and she always wants to be sitting on top of us while we read them to her. I say it like that because if we're laying on the floor she will bring a book to us and then promptly sit on our head. But she prefers laps if they're available. Haha!

She loves her stuffed dog more than life itself, as I've mentioned many times, and she now will give us hugs with it, consisting of smashing it in our face for a few seconds and than grunting like you do when you squeeze someone hard in a real hug. Again, it's utterly hilarious and Spencer absolutely loves it. He's even started grunting sometimes when he gives hugs.

Speaking of Spencer, he has turned into such an awesome helper lately. He's getting more and more imaginative in his play, and the other day he brought all his blocks plus cloth letters into the kitchen and dumped them in my kitchenaid mixer because he was making bread and cookies at the same time. He went through the list of all the things he needed to make them, and tossed the "food" in. "Gluten! Dry milk! White coconut oil! Oatmeal! Flour!" He's got such an amazing memory. I never get over how fast he can learn new words and ideas and retain them.

He is finally hitting the I-want-to-do-it-myself stage. I always wondered when he would get there. His development has been completely different than all the classic steps that people talk about. It's actually been really nice once I realized it wasn't a problem, but that he was just going to do things in a different order than I might otherwise expect. This particular stage is lovely because he's completely capable of doing just about everything he wants to do on his own now, as opposed to Genevieve, who is already partly in the same stage, who just isn't physically capable of a lot of the things she wants to do. So I'm going with the trend and letting him do what he wants for the most part. Heck, if he'll pull a chair over to the counter and get down his own food to eat, who am I to complain, particularly since eating has been such a struggle? He pulled out some pudding from the fridge today and got some graham crackers and made his own snack of dipping them in and chowing down. I thought it was awesome. Because seriously, I get so tired of making food over and over and over and over and over again day in and day out for the kids and then cleaning up after them all the time. I'm teaching them to help, but it's still mostly my show for now. I never realized how taxing that one little task would be when you do it five or six times a day what with snacks and meals. It's no wonder so many people have trouble getting decent dinners on the table. The food from the rest of the day wore them out!

Spencer is super big on order and he always has been, but now it's working to our benefit as he wants to help put the dishes away or make sure things are in their place. Genevieve is a chip off Bill's block, but Spencer is far and away so much like me in many, many ways. The older he gets the more he looks like me too, which is gratifying since he didn't start out that way and Genevieve doesn't resemble me in the slightest. I swear I added to her gene pool, but so far no one would know it. Who knows, maybe this next child will actually look like me when he or she is born, but our first two looked nearly identical and just like Bill at birth, so I'm not crossing my fingers. :)

Okay, well that's about all I can think of to document about my kids at the moment, so the end.

Maybe this week will be the week

One step closer. The bed is back inside. The staining is done. One coat of polyurethane is on. My house is a heck of a lot less fumey, but hopefully after a few more coats it will be all gone. Fingers crossed! Pregnancy nausea hit this week so it's a bit of a battle of wills to get up and work on this, but having my entire living space in my house full of bed is pretty good motivation. I'm getting pretty bad headaches to go with the nausea and the smell is certainly not helping, so that's excellent motivation as well. Here's to having this project done ASAP!

Bed Update

So this bed, it's built now. Well mostly. We did a trial run Friday night of having it put together. We brought our mattress out into the living room and set it up on the frame and slept there. It was awesome and so strange to be three feet closer to the ceiling after sleeping for nearly a year on the floor.

I made one awful discovery when it was all assembled. Somehow, and I have no idea how this managed to happen, but somehow the bed frame is actually four inches longer than it needs to be. I was so appalled when we put the mattress on and there was extra at the top. The width is perfect, but somehow the measurements are for the length of a cal king, not a regular. Yeah, cue thoughts of how I could possibly fix it, realizing there's no possible way without redoing two-thirds of the bed, and Bill repeatedly telling me it's an awesome thing because adding a headboard will work perfectly and make it awesome. The jury is still out for me, but that and the fact that I had a tool borrowed from a friend that I needed to return yesterday, prompted us to buy the wood and go ahead and build the headboard Saturday night. It's a good two inches wide or so, so it will definitely help and I think we'll be able to make it all work out pretty well, but holy cow, I couldn't believe that had happened when I made the discovery. I haven't actually put the bed together with the headboard yet, so we'll have to see how it all works out. We modified it to sit on top of the bed frame instead of being screwed to the end, so that should make a big difference. So yeah, that whole DIY thing sometimes ends up with comedic mistakes that leave me shaking my head.  This thing cost too much money to redo, here's to making it work and being happy about it! :)

This week is going to include building some drawers, which is tricky making sure they are exactly the right size to fit in the tracks, and then staining the whole thing. It's certainly going to take a good amount of time and I hope we'll be sleeping on the finished product by this next weekend. Fingers crossed!

The headboard. I love this thing. It turned out beautiful and I can't wait to stain it and see the finished product. I need to sand it a bit first, but that's it!

All the pieces of the bed, cluttering up our living room. One thing I will really appreciate in the future is to have a garage or even better, a workroom. 

The end section, finished save for hardware, which I'll put on after it gets stained. Those drawers are big enough for my children to comfortably fit in. They're awesome!

11 Months in the making

I have five sheets of plywood in my living room and a whole bunch of miscellaneous small boards on the back porch. I built some super simple sawhorses last night. Three boxes of screws are sitting on my computer desk as I type this. What for, you ask? For our new bed frame!!! That's right, our mattress has been on the floor of our bedroom for 11 months, ever since we moved to South Carolina. We sold our old bed before we moved here and the new one needs a platform bed frame instead of a metal one like we had.

I've been planning to build a bed for so long, however it's taken this many months for it to come up in the rotation of most important things to save for. But the time is now and don't be surprised if I have pictures to share in just a few days. I'm so beyond ready to have a normal height bed again. It turns out building a king-sized bed frame, while it might be cheaper than buying one, is still pretty pricey, so it's taken a bit to save up the funds. I'm building this bed and this headboard. Building furniture has become my creative outlet, so I can't help but modify these a bit to make them just what I want. We'll see how it all turns out, but I'm pretty excited. The storages bed style was picked particularly because we can use the extra storage space without taking up more footprint in the bedroom. I'll build nightstands eventually to go with the bed. Right now we have dressers serving that purpose, but I'll give them to the kids when I have nightstands built. Can't wait!