Other | Page 3

A “New” Desk

Posted by Wendy on July 9, 2013 1 Comment

Hubby is always on a quest for the “perfect” home office. It’s always a very elusive goal, but for the first time in years, we seem to be on the right track in getting him what he wants.

We live in a split-level home; you enter on the landing between the stairs and the top floor is the main living areas (living room, kitchen, 3 bedrooms, & 2 bathrooms). The bottom floor is half underground (the windows, while normal height inside are ground level outside) and has the kids’ playroom, one bedroom, a half bathroom, and laundry facilities.

Hubby took the downstairs bedroom for his office.

When we moved in, it was an awful shade of blue – too light to be “blue” but too dark to be “white” – and had blue trim just a few shades darker than the walls. The light fixture covering was a huge yellow sun, and when you turned on the light, the yellow of the sun combined with the blue of the walls made the room appear green.

Needless to say, the first thing hubby did when he decided to make the room his home office was to take down the sun. The next thing he did was paint. He chose charcoal gray for the walls and crisp white for the trim. That alone made the room about a million times better.

His next task was furnishing it.

Our church was getting rid of this desk. Hubby loved it, so he brought it home.

It was quite nice as-is, but the color didn’t really go with his new gray-and-white office. Our neighbor is a wonderful lady, and she offered to help paint the table. She taught us a technique called “chalk paint” (not chalkboard paint). Basically, you mix up some Plaster of Paris with water and add it to any latex paint to make it a bit thicker, then apply as normal.

Here’s the desk after the first coat:

Tip: If you’re painting something and you need to get all the way to floor-level, lift the item to be painted up on something. In our case, we were painting the desk legs, so we propped each one up on an old spray-paint can lid.

It took a total of 3 coats to get the brown completely covered. Then our neighbor took some sandpaper and distressed the edges of the table.

We polished it up with a bit of wax, and it was like a whole new desk!

Before:

After:

It looks so amazing in the room now!

–Wendy

Quilts for Kids

Posted by Wendy on June 19, 2013 2 Comments

I’ve never blogged about Munchkin’s heavy medical issues from when he was younger – they all took place long before I started this venture – so with what I have to share today, the timing is right now.

About two weeks before he turned 3, he and Seahawk (who was 5 at the time) were playing; I was in the other room sewing. I suddenly heard a thump, followed by screaming. Seahawk came rushing into my room telling me that Munchkin had fallen off the top bunk (we’ve since gotten rid of the bunk beds – even now that they’re older, I don’t trust the safety of stacked beds). As I was hurrying down the hall to the kids’ room, I asked Seahawk if Munchkin was bleeding. He replied, “I don’t think so.” To this day I don’t know if he was lying to avoid punishment (it came out later that he was at fault in the fall – they were playing pirates, Munchkin was at the top of the ladder, Seahawk said “reach for the sky!”, and Munchkin did) or if he’d come to get me before the bleeding started. in any event, by the time I got there ten seconds later, his nose was hugely swollen and his face very bloody. Without further hesitation, I loaded the kids into the car and drove to the ER. Hubs was at a book signing that day; thankfully I’d driven him, so I had the car.

At the hospital, they decided to do a CT scan to make sure he hadn’t done any brain damage in the fall. The scan was inconclusive. There was a shadow there that they couldn’t identify. No one was sure whether it was bleeding on the brain or something less sinister. To be safe, they took us by ambulance to Doernbecher Children’s Hospital in Portland for an MRI. I called my mom to come get Seahawk so I could focus on Munchkin. I also put in a call to my in-laws so they could pick hubby up and bring him to the hospital. As we were loading into the ambulance, the local hospital gifted Munchkin with a quilt.

Two MRIs, an angiogram, and four days later, Munchkin was diagnosed with an arteriovenous malformation, or AVM. basically, he had a clump of “extra” blood vessels in his brain. Eventually, they would have caused him to stroke.

There was a question with the insurance we had to resolve before we could schedule the corrective surgery. The only doctor in the state who was qualified to perform the surgery (he actually invented the procedure!) wasn’t covered under our plan. Dr. Barnwell and his staff took care of talking to the insurance company for us to explain the severity of the situation. The surgery, with the right doctor, was approved. The initial fall had taken place September 5, 2009. His surgery was October 21, 2009.

This is his “after” MRI. I wish I could’ve found the “before” one at the time of this post; the difference is astounding. In the before shot, those white coils on the left side of the image (which is actually the right side of his brain) were a black muddle of misdirected blood.

So…

How does this relate to “quilts for kids”? That quilt we received as we were getting in the ambulance really stuck me, even though it hasn’t really stuck with Munchkin. Because of someone’s generosity, he received a lovely gift. I want to pay it forward, so to speak. I was given a bunch of quilting materials by a friend of my mom’s a few weeks ago, so I’ve used them to put together these 5 quilts. There’s enough for one or two more. When I get them all done, I’ll take them to the hospital for them to pass out as they deem necessary.

I won’t ever see the kids who receive them, and I’m okay with that. I just want the quilts to be a blessing for them as the one we got was for Munchkin.

A Bouquet for Dad

Posted by Wendy on June 17, 2013 6 Comments

First of all, happy Father’s Day to all the amazing dads out there. I was blessed with two (my real dad and my stepdad, who I lived with full time as he was married to my mom). My children are equally blessed with their dad; I couldn’t ask for a better father for them.

I saw this idea on Friday and knew it was perfect for the hubs this year.

He needed new socks, and since socks aren’t a very “fun” gift, I decided we should at least present them in a creative way. Before we went shopping, I showed Seahawk and Munchkin the picture of the bouquet so they wouldn’t be “bummed” about offering a practical gift. My plan worked; they were super jazzed to help pick out the socks and then to roll them into roses and arrange them into a vase (well, mason jar) when we got home.

We used a paper grocery bag to cover the gift since it wasn’t really something that lended itself to wrapping very easily. When hubs revealed his gift yesterday morning, his reaction was priceless. He’d never received socks in such a creative way before. He’s even decided to leave them wrapped up as roses except as needed, so we’ll have the “beautiful flowers” around for at least 10 days (I found a great deal on a 10-pack of men’s socks).

I hope your fathers and children’s fathers had a blessed day as well.

–Wendy

Summer Wardrobe

Posted by Wendy on May 29, 2013 10 Comments

We went shopping for new clothes yesterday. I’ve gotten a new item here and there, but never a completely revamped wardrobe before, so that was nice :). The kids’ clothes are fine – and we’d shop for them at Goodwill anyway, not Old Navy (since they wear out their clothes so fast, it’s too expensive to buy new for them) – so it was a day for hubby and me.

One slight disclaimer before I post the picture… we are striving toward a minimalist lifestyle. We’re not there yet, but we’ve made huge strides the past 18 or so months. Yesterday was a huge step in the “right” direction.

I have these two dresses, which are the only items from my old wardrobe I’m keeping. They’re only about 2 years old, and I haven’t been able to wear them the past 10 months because in order to breastfeed Small Fry, I had to switch to skirt/top combos.

These are the new clothes. I got those two skirts (which replace 4 old skirts), 2 black camis, and one white cami. The tops replace 2 white ones and a brown one from before. But the Old Navy ones feel much better than their WalMart counterparts.

I also got a Coobie Bra. No picture of that ;). But seriously, if you’re in the market for new bras, I highly recommend them. This is my first one, and I love it. It’s seriously the most comfortable bra I’ve ever worn, and with a price tag of only $22, they’re comparably priced to a traditional bra. I definitely plan to replace all of my bras with Coobies, one at a time over the next couple of weeks.

You may notice something “missing” from my wardrobe: jeans. Outside of my pajamas, I haven’t worn a pair of pants in years. I don’t even think about it anymore. To keep warm in the winter, I just wear tights.

So that’s it :). And if you’re curious, hubby’s gone minimalist, too. I don’t have pictures of his clothes because he left before I could snap them this morning, but he now has 2 pairs of (identical) pants, 1 dress shirt, and 2 t-shirts. His goal is to get another dress shirt and maybe some better casual shirts. He’s a pretty semi-formal kind of guy, though, so it still remains to be seen what his final shirt selection will be. As for shoes, he has 2 pairs (shoes and sandals), and I have 3 (shoes, sandals, and rain boots).

On the agenda for tomorrow: sourdough bread 🙂

–Wendy

Off to the Zoo

Posted by Wendy on May 27, 2013 2 Comments

For Christmas last year, we promised our kids trips instead of buying them toys that would get played with for a week and then forgotten. It’s something we’d always talked about doing but never actually done; in our “poorer” years, it was easier to have a Dollar Store holiday than to make promises we couldn’t keep. We gifted them three trips: roller skating (which we did in January), a trip to the lava caves of Mount St. Helens (still to come – we’ve been told that’s a summertime activity), and a trip to the zoo. We did the zoo last Monday with my in-laws.

There were the “normal” animals…

Bears…

Monkeys…

Cougars…

And my personal favorite, elephants.

The baby, “Lily,” was born just last year. This was our first time seeing her. Even though she’s an elephant, she definitely had “baby” qualities. So adorable!

The African exhibit (which is my favorite, outside of the elephants – our zoo has Asian elephants) had giraffes:

There was a body of water (lake? pond? puddle? I’m not sure…) in the giraffe enclosure that, as Seahawk pointed out looked a lot like a giraffe head and neck, so I snapped a picture of that too.

There were also the obligatory sleeping hippos:

And flamingos. Yes, flamingos! I’d never seen them before; they were absolutely gorgeous birds. They even stood on one of their spindly legs like their stereotype. I suppose they’re stereotyped that way for a reason.

When they opened their wings, I was surprised to see that the tips were black. The black wingtips on the pink birds was absolutely gorgeous.

In the mongoose exhibit, they had a tunnel that kids could crawl through and be part of the exhibit.

There was a model of a bald eagle’s nest you could climb in. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t life size, though.

The zoo also boasts several statues for kids to climb on throughout.

I remember playing on some of them when I was a kid!

A lunch in the zoo cafe let me know why my mom always packed a picnic when I was a kid. Whew, that was overpriced! Lol!

That’s a pretty good overview of our trip :).

What’s your favorite zoo animal?

–Wendy

A Trip to Fort Vancouver

Posted by Wendy on May 21, 2013 5 Comments

We didn’t really know what we wanted to do on Saturday other than have a Family Day. So we got in the car and hubby started driving. We ended up in Fort Vancouver. Neither hubby nor I had been there in years, so it was a fun experience for all of us.

The day we were there was a great day to have gone; almost all of the attractions were open and staffed by volunteers in period clothing from the 1840s.

The kids loved seeing real (though no longer functional) cannons. We studied the Revolutionary War earlier this school year and are studying the Civil War now – plus they’re boys – so cannons are fascinating to them.

Both Seahawk and Munchkin reminded me as I was taking their pictures, “Don’t ever do this!”

Munchkin was fascinated by the old-fashioned wheelbarrow.

At one point in history, John McLoughlin lived at the fort. His house has been recreated for people to look at. The dishes behind the rope (so the ones in the photograph) are the real ones from the time; the ones the volunteers use (not pictured) are replicas.

Here’s the bastion. This is what I always picture when I think of an old military fort, but I now know there’s much more to it than this! We were actually able to go inside the bastion. It’s a 3-story building that’s empty except for the top floor, which you can tell from picture is much bigger than the bottom floors – the top houses several cannons.

I didn’t take pictures inside the two main “lessons” we had, but we learned all about 1840s medicine and the fur trade in the area at the time. The military fort was actually built to protect the assets – the furs. It turns out it was never needed; they were never challenged.

Just outside the fort was an amazing garden. They had loads of flowers, vegetables, and herbs growing. These are used for a summer camp they host: for a fee, people (kids and adults) can come to the fort and learn about the time, eat period food, wear period costumes, and stay the night.

Outside, there was a huge anchor that was drawn out of the Columbia River. They don’t know much about it except that it was made sometime between 1815 & 1850 and it is so huge it was from a ship likely weighing around 1,000 tons. What they don’t know was whether this ship was a freighter, a passenger liner, or something else.

To end the day, I bought a triangle that was actually made on the grounds by a real blacksmith (as opposed to a fictional one :p). I love that it’s made from completely natural materials – cast iron with a leather strap – and not plastic. I plan to use it to call the kids in from outside when they’re playing, like a dinner bell. It’ll be a real voice saver!

–Wendy

The Best Things in Life Aren’t Things

Posted by Wendy on May 14, 2013 2 Comments

I hope all you mothers had a wonderful Mother’s Day with your children and mothers! My kids were super excited to wake up early and give me the gifts that our neighbor helped them make: little clay magnets

And they each painted a terra cotta pot and planted a flower.

Then, at church, their teacher had all the kids make paper flower bouquets for their moms.

Mine are now proudly hanging the sewing room :).

After church, hubby took us all out for lunch and then to JoAnn’s where he bought me a new sewing machine :D. Mine quit working about a month ago, and since there are no Singer authorized repair shops in my state, our only real option was replacement (which accomplishes one of my May goals). The no-waste side of me hates that it came to that, but on the other hand, it was only $100 and lasted through pretty heavy use for over 4 years. I’ll donate it to someone who can fix it if I’m amble to find such a person.

Anyway, here’s the new one:

The excitement of my kids and hubby in blessing me in such huge ways was worth way more than the things themselves. They (my family) are truly the best things in my life…

…even when they (*ahem* Small Fry *ahem*) aren’t totally happy.

–Wendy

Win $100 in Free Gas at Shell!

Posted by Wendy on May 8, 2013 Leave a Comment

No, not through my blog. I’m not even close to big enough to be able to get those kinds of perks, but Kristen at The Frugal Girl is and she’s giving away a $100 Shell gift card. You want it, don’t you?? Head on over there and enter her sweepstakes. You have until June 2nd to enter.

disclaimer: I am getting an entry in the sweepstakes for this blog post.

Good luck!

–Wendy

May Goals

Posted by Wendy on May 2, 2013 3 Comments

Finish 2nd grade math with Munchkin.

Make sure Seahawk is prepared for his 3rd grade standardized test.

Schedule said test.

Work hard to limit our waste output by shopping in bulk using cloth bags or jars in lieu of the plastic baggies the stores provide.

Finish weeding the flower beds (they’re pretty bad…) and plant flowers and/or vegetables there.

Repair or replace sewing machine (it won’t turn on anymore :() and continue work on my “Sunbonnet Sue Through the Year” quilt.

Take the kids out for a walk at least once per day.

Lose 5 pounds (gotta start somewhere…)

That should do :). Do you have any goals for the month? Share them here! Accountability is a big motivator, and at the end of the month, we can chat about how we did.

Movie Review: The Host

Posted by Wendy on April 30, 2013 6 Comments

I’m a big fan of Stephenie Meyer’s works. If you read my about page, you’ll know that I used to write Twilight fan fiction; you don’t do that unless you’re a fan of the original work! As much as I liked Twilight (my obsession – and it really was that at one point – has waned greatly, which is why I used the past tense there), I thought The Host was a much superior story. I’ve said more than once, when asked which I liked better, “The Host is a better story; it just has less memorable characters.” And I truly mean that. Melanie and Wanda and Jared and Ian are great, but they just don’t have the staying power of Edward and Bella. I can’t really explain why, either; I think they’re better characters, just less memorable.

Anyway.

In case you don’t know the premise, it’s been said that The Host is a less gruesome, romantic version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I’m not familiar with that movie, but based on its title alone, I’d say that’s probably pretty accurate. A group of aliens, called Souls, have come to Earth. The catch is that they can’t live on their own (except for inside the special transport containers); they must have a host body. Most of Earth’s population has succumbed to the Souls, but there is a pocket of people who are still human. Melanie Stryder is one.

The film opens with Melanie’s capture. She attempts suicide (there’s another suicide later in the movie as well, which contribute to its PG13 rating), but is rescued by the Souls and healed. An old soul called Wanderer (given this name because she’s been hosted by creatures in several planets) is placed in Melanie’s body. The trick is that Melanie is too strong to relinquish control.

What the story amounts to is Mrs. Meyer’s go-to: a love triangle of supernatural proportions. Instead of vampires and werewolves, this time it’s two minds in one body, both in love with the same man (Wanderer falls in love with Jared, Melanie’s boyfriend, thanks to Melanie’s memories).

I’m going to leave my synopsis there so as not to spoil the whole thing for you, should you decide to go see it.

Compared to the book, I think the movie did a fine job. Some of the scenes I would’ve like to have seen weren’t there; looking back, though, I honestly don’t know how they would’ve done them without it becoming silly looking, so I forgive the filmmakers for leaving them out (lol). The makeup artist did an amazing job making Melanie/Wanda look dehydrated and nearly dead out in the Arizona desert. The special effects team did a great job with the mirrors that reflect light down, allowing wheat to grow in the depths of a cave. The actors were fine; I don’t think they made or broke the film. The props were not at all what I imagined while reading the book, and yet upon watching the movie, they were completely natural in the setting. The cars with the mirror paint jobs were pretty cool.

Those were some of my favorite things in the movie, as well as my main critique. Oh, and in case you’re wondering, the scenes I wish they’d included but understand why they didn’t are Wanderer’s descriptions of the other planets she’s lived on. Great imagery in those pages.

Overall, I give this movie a B+. Or 4 stars (on a 5 star scale). Whichever you prefer.

Have you seen The Host? Do you plan to? Or read the book? I’m interested in your thoughts; leave them in the comments below :).

–Wendy