Cell Phone shots

I take a picture of something when I want to share part of my day with Chad. I pull out my cell phone, snap the picture, then email it off to him. Here are a few of the things that have been going on in our lives.

WIND - It really got bad around here a while back. Because the genius that added on to our house (it wasn't our house then) back in the early 90's was lazy, we have a layer of shingles put down over a shake roof. You know the rustic-looking wood shingles that are very bumpy? They are still bumpy...under the shingles. Every time the wind blow over 35 mph (which it does occasionally around here), our house has flapping shingles. This time, the wind was strong enough to rip up a big enough section that the shakes were visible. (The guy also put a space heater in the crawl space to keep the pipes from freezing...but no vapor barrier. Genius.)


SLEEP - I had some errands to run one day that completely wiped out naptime. Sitting in front of the TV later that day, Sarah lost consciousness. She eventually had her forehead on the seat, but this was about 20 minutes before that.

MORE SLEEP - I like to squeeze in a 15-20 minute nap when I can. If I don't make Joseph take a formal nap, he usually gets bored and joins me in the bed. He looks so peaceful! He got a pretty good nap this day.

REAL GENIUS - I can decide how much of it is bias and how much is a fair label, but Sarah seems to be showing a few smarty genes. This day I looked down to see that she had arranged my hot roller clips in a balanced pattern. I sent this picture to Chad to ask if he thought it was intentional or lucky.


CONFIRMED - A couple of days later, I sent this picture. I had witnessed her in action and even heard her getting after Rebekah or Joseph for trying to mess her up. I think she would have put one more purple clip on the left but thought she didn't have enough room. I guess her spatial sense is still developing. When she's done, she takes them all off and throws them randomly into the drawer. At least that part of her is on par with the other kids...they leave my stuff in a mess all the time!

PAINTING - We painted the girls' room yellow over Presidents' Day weekend. Since we weren't going to paint the ceiling, I thought it might be worth a shot to pretend we had crown molding up by not painting all the way up. Additionally, I liked the idea of not accidentally painting the ceiling while we were working. When it was all done, it looked more like we had just painted not quite to the top of the wall.

I decided it needed something more after we made and installed new curtains and a shelf/curtain rod for each window. The fabric, while on sale, was a pretty penny. But we got the shelves made for less than $20 total (we already had paint). The curtain rods are 1/2" pvc pipe.

With the colorful curtains up, I thought there should be a way to tie it all to the room a little better. I made a sketch of my idea on my computer and tried it out on the wall. After a few adjustments, we had something we liked.


PRACTICE - I did not want to mess up where it counted, so I practiced what I wanted on the kids' bathroom walls. We will be painting in there (eventually) so I wasn't afraid to mess up anything. I made a stencil from vellum, but was worried that it wouldn't hold up to the moisture of the paint. I learned that I was right, but in the meantime I came up with this.


When the stencil didn't work, I tried my hand and painting...by hand. I was confident enough afterwards that I decided to go ahead.
BORDER - Unfortunately, I had to make several trips around the room to get everything done. The first trip was with another stencil to hold up and mark with pencil. The next step was the purple vines. After that were the millions of pink flowers. (It felt like millions.) And the last step was for the butterflies.

I knew that my artistic talents fell short of free-handing butterflies, so I went back to the vellum stencil idea. This time, I covered the vellum with contact paper, then cut the butterflies from that (on my Silhouette, of course). I used a light tack spray adhesive on the back to make them sticky, but repositionable. I lined them up with the placement marks I had done on my first time around the room and flipped and flopped them as inspired. I had to reapply adhesive only once. I think the end result turned out pretty cute.


It was a lot of going up and down a ladder, stretching and reaching, and muttering under my breath. The boys want their room painted soon and I expect another border is in my future. But for now, the ladder is put away! :)

We have been up to more than this, but I have to find the real camera to remember what they all were. We still have 7 living lambs with one ewe yet to deliver. Leah lost a front tooth and I still haven't gotten used to her new look. My house is a mess, so we must be OK...or at least normal. I have been struggling with some things and am still trying to figure some stuff out. I guess that's normal, too, but it still stinks!