Around the house

mudroom

Our mudroom will have a heated floor! How cool is that?! I think we’ll spend the winter in the mudroom. :)

hugs

Somebody loves her daddy!

blue table

Our little blue table met it’s untimely demise this afternoon. After surviving two generations and six years of a third it fell to a 65lb force atop it. Sigh. Eve proposed we just build a new one, paint it blue, and write “all the stuff on the bottom.” She insists it would be just the same. Somehow I doubt it.

living room

Since the blue table is no more I decided to give our grown-up coffee table another shot. It takes up a lot of space in our narrow living room. We’ll see how long it lasts.

New neighbors

We seem to have a family of yellow jackets living in the compost pile. I was hoping they were just dining there, but there are A LOT of them and they never seem to leave. :/

yellow jackets

Sorry for the close up of the compost pile. These are yellow jackets, right?

This is my consequence for neglecting the poor compost pile for so long. I have spent hours today reading about how to get rid of them. I have learned that they swarm when agitated, apparently loud noise like the lawn mower can agitate them, and reading all that makes me itchy and twitchy all over! Ugh. I was painting on the back porch and swatted three of them with the paint brush! Good thing their buddies didn’t swarm!

On another note, the kids found the dirt garden again this evening. They went outside to play tag, wore themselves out, and settled in the dirt.

dirty birds

Dirty birds!

eve

Eve found a worm and was eager to show me.

lex

Playing with trucks in the dirt. Still a little boy.

They both came in covered with bug bites! Maybe not covered, but they each had six or seven swollen bites. I was worried they were stings at first, but neither of them noticed getting bitten and I think they would have noticed if they’d been stung by yellow jackets six times!

Weird afternoon. New neighbors and new stairs… we’re movin’ on… up?

Any advice how to remove yellow jackets?

What do you think?

Is this mirror too big for this space? The lady on freecycle asked if it fit my decor. That made me laugh. :)

mirror p1

It would hang, of course, but it could hang so it's at or just above the mantle.

mirror p2

It's a little dirty :)

The kids prefer it on the hearth instead

kids

They have been enjoying it at eye level.

New curtains in the kids room

Check out my snazzy new curtains in the kids room. I’ve been thinking about it for awhile now and slowly, slowly finally got around to doing something about it. We used to (until about an hour ago!) have a dark blue fleece blanket nailed up over the window and hanging down weirdly, but now there is a nice smooth curtain covering the window and a nice smooth curtain covering the ugly brown and painted door into storage.

new curtains

A big thank you to Julie for making the window curtain. It has 100% light blocking material on the backside so hopefully it will keep their room dark when needed. I had no confidence in my ability to sew multiple pieces of fabric together, sew on velcro, and make it all straight and perfectly measured. Good thing Julie can do all that!! As it was, it took me nearly forever to make the door curtain. Measuring, pinning, sewing (mostly) straight lines… hard work!! But doesn’t it look awesome!? The colors look much better in person, so next time you’re around remind me to show off the kids room :)

While I was taking pictures of the curtains Lex wanted me to take pictures of him. OK! He did some “super hero poses” for me. I’m not sure what kind of super hero this is, but I love it anyway!

Crazy Lex

Crazy Lex posing for the camera. These are his super hero poses :)

Painting the bookshelf

After much delay we finally, FINALLY got around to painting the bookshelf.  But “we” I mostly mean “me” because the kids have been dying to do it almost every day, but it took me awhile to gather the materials and motivation.  I mostly wanted to do it while Lex was at school and Eve was napping, but it didn’t quite work out that way.  In hindsight I’m glad it didn’t!  We all had a really fun time and the kids did a super good job of listening and being careful.  Hopefully it will dry tonight and we can do another coat (or two, I didn’t use primer) tomorrow.  Maybe by next week it will actually have books on it :)

painting the bookshelf - p1

painting the bookshelf - p2

The trees are gone!

missing trees

See the two stumps just right of center? One has a rather large rock on it. There used to be rather large pine trees there. Now we have sunshine.

wood pile

I don't think this wood pile is properly stacked. That will be a project for another day.

from the backyard

From the backyard, looking towards the street, with our new sunny patch of lawn in the front right.

maple tree

He also trimmed many limbs from this maple tree. Leaves on the limbs were gently resting on the roof. For some reason insurance considers that to be dangerous :)