On a Mission

I'm currently on a mission to find new bedding for Kendall, something that will hopefully downplay all the pinkness. I'm at a loss, I've scoured Pottery Barn Kids, Land of Nod, Target and even some cute boutique like shops online but I can't find exactly what I like.

What I'm wanting is something with three colors, mostly green and (something else) with just a tiny bit of pink to tie in the walls and {cringe} carpet. Here are three that I like. With the first one I could use the green damask duvet cover and then incorporate some pink in the sheeting and use the quilt that she has now under it (reversed) I think it's my favorite. The second one would work well too but it may have too much pink in it. I really like the third one too but I think it is over priced. Any other cute bedding places that I'm missing?

We have an appliance repair guy coming out today and then we're going to lunch with my neighbor.

Apple Goodness

I'm determined to have some visuals on my blog post. I'm hoping our camera is delivered soon.

Kendall wore this super cute sweater vest to school today.

And she came home from school with this painting. Her teacher always tells us in advance what they are making but she hadn't mentioned this so I think that she may have changed her mind when she saw Kendall this morning.

I went to the gym this morning and I was doing really well until the childcare worker came out to tell me that Kate hadn't stopped crying. Poor little munchkin has been having a hard time lately. On the way home we stopped at a place I've been wanting to check out. It is a beautiful bread place. Huge ovens right when you walk in the door and the most gorgeous breads and pastries ever. Kate and I shared the spinach cream cheese croissant and I grabbed a house salad to have for lunch, it had julienned cucumber, pistachios, corn, chick peas, watermelon, honeydew, various lettuces and some other stuff that I can't remember. Very fresh and tasty.

This weekend we went to a local farm and rode a horse drawn hayride through their apple orchards and visited their fresh fruit and veggie market for some goodies. We picked up 3 tiny pumpkins for our kitchen island. I also did a little scrapbooking too and I have a scanner so you get to see them.

Bug Love

Kendall has a very sensitive nose and whenever she smells something suspicious she wrinkles up her nose and creases her brown and says, "What's that smell like?". Last week we drove to visit Great Gram and Aunt Jill, they live near a lot of farms (a lot of the produce in our grocery store comes from their little town). Every time I would open the car door or we stepped outside Kendall's little nose would scrunch up and she would say, "I smell cow poo poo".

She is generally pretty good about making singular words plural but yesterday on our walk she was gathering things off the ground (as usual) and she said, "Look, I have two leaf-fez".

She is constantly making me smile.

A Scenic Dinner

Tonight Brian is staying with Jeff and Jill so that they can run a race tomorrow. The girls and I were sitting at the table having our dinner and enjoying watching Chippy our chipmunk run around the back yard, hiding under the Hostas and scampering to and fro. We were giggling and cheering for him and all of a sudden a cat (that I have never seen before) raced across our grass and pounced. Three jaws dropped, there was silence. Kate broke the silence saying, "Bye bye". I raced outside scatting and yelling, the cat ran off but I don't know what the damage was. Chippy has yet to make another appearance.

Brian ordered our camera, should be 5-7 days.

Kate is either teething, not feeling well or just now expressing concern over all the changes. She has been uncharacteristically whiny and not so nice to be around. My guess is a combination of all three problems...there has been excessive drooling and a bit of a hoarse voice. She has been cracking me up anyway. Whenever you tell her something now she says, "Kay". Love it.

Kendall had a great day at school yesterday, she just walked right in and took her hand. When we pick her up she always runs straight to Kate and says, "It was so fun Sissy!". I have to scrapbook about that.

I should use this non-blogging time to do some scrapbooking but I haven't done any yet. I want to so I may stay up late tonight and do some. I'm exhausted though so I doubt it will get done!

Blog Vacation

Just taking a bit of a blog vacation. Our camera broke this weekend anyway :(
I'll try to get back on the blogging bandwagon in the next couple of days.
Soon,
Ashley

Our Everyday Life

For Aunt Sara:

We've been exploring the town and slowly getting things put back here at the house. I feel like we have come to a screeching hault on making this a home while we wait for the furniture. All the boxes are unpacked we just can't hang things on the wall until all the pieces are in place. Some of it should arrive on Monday so I can get a few more things done then.

I LOVE the new gym. It has a lot of good things for us and I took Kendall to the fabulous library today. They have this neat program where you can select a theme in the age group 0-2 or 3-5 and get a bin full of books, toys, and music based on that theme. I ordered one for each of the girls that will arrive next week. I think it will be a fun mommy and me time and I imagine each girl will enjoy the others box.

The other night I had my ideal relaxing night. Now I'm getting anxious to start creating stuff though. I may have to start destroying my newly cleaned office.

Oh, we also have found that we have a little pet that lives in our deck.

We had fun at the Children's Museum with the Mom's group. I think we'll meet lots of people and explore the city with that group.

Life is Good

I've been to our library and gym now and I LOVE them both. Both are beautiful and have lots of great activities for us. This afternoon we're meeting a group of moms at the Children's Museum, I'll try to take pictures.

I've decided that I'm not posting house pictures until we get the rooms complete. But I'll give you little sneak peaks.

The girls' bathroom:

The family room:

Oh, this is the chandelier in my office (previous owners installed it). I never would have chosen this and I would have never guessed that it was Pottery Barn but I saw it when I was flipping through the catalog this week.

Quickity Quick

I'm heading up to bed but felt I should do a fast update (okay, Lorie applied a little bit of pressure for an update).

• We had Gram and Pop here for a few days. They are so great with the girls and we had such a nice time visiting.

• One night we had salad with our dinner. The celery and peppers came from my garden and I had carrots from Jeff and Jill's garden. So nice.


• WE SOLD OUR HOUSE!!!! Officially sold tonight and we close in a week, ha.


• Kate ran full force into the corner of our table--right on her head and knocked her flat.


• We ordered a lot of furniture and I can not wait to get it in. I'll post pictures as things come in. We changed the fabrics on quite a few pieces so they will take a month probably.


• Potential danger --Kate is shorter then the top of the family room fireplace. I saw her walk right in it today.

Working and Playing

You may remember from my Ode to Simple Mom post that I was intrigued by her Home Management Notebook. I actually used one before but had gotten out of the habit. Last night I pulled it all back together again. In addition to my weekly meal planning I'm also going to plan a weeks worth of projects to do with Kendall--one big one each day. It will be our special activity to do together right when Kate goes down for her nap. As Kate gets older she will become more involved too. We all started out at the table today working on our own projects. When Kate was ready for her nap Kendall and I got down to business and made these stamped apple cards. They turned out cute and she had a lot of fun....and I had a lot of fun too. Now we have four cute cards to give to our favorite teachers.

Oh and I wanted to show you a little sampling of the madness that ensues while I try to prepare dinner.

Moving In Day and a Frustration

A little fruit cup snack


Reading our first mail-- cards from Memaw and Gram & Pop


A little break from dress up

Frustration: I have to take a written drivers test to receive my local license.They may also choose to give me a driving test. Let's hope that if that happens there aren't any Lexus SUVs or garage doors near by (I have a history of bumping into them).

Ah, where to start?!

Kendall had her first day of preschool on Monday. I think that she really enjoyed it. She walked right in and started to play and then I had to take her back to the hall to hang up her coat and backpack. She then decided that it wouldn't be a good idea to go back in the classroom and planted her feet on the ground and declared that she wasn't going to school. Her teacher came and picked her up to distract her and I just called out that I would be back soon to pick her up and then I was off. Kate made a few grunts of protest, I think that she was trying to communicate to me that we had left her sister behind but she soon decided that she either didn't mind too much or she realized that I wasn't understanding her attempts at communication. When I picked her up the teacher said that she did great and I have been able to pry little else about the day from Kendall. Tomorrow is day two so we'll see how that goes.

Kendall on her swing

The house is great, I couldn't be happier. The girls have a fun play room in the basement. Since they have a sand box outside I turned their sand table into a bean table and they will play there non-stop. We also set up their outdoor playhouse in the basement and their kitchen and 8 million other large toys are all down there too. I'm continually amazed at how big this house is. I always thought our other house was roomy but here I can easily lose any member of my family. Precautions are taken of course. The baby gate is moved up and down the stairs with me to keep the kids on the same level as me but to find Brian can sometimes be a challenge. Three levels of living space creates a lot of room to hide. The lighting in the house is interesting. Three of the bedrooms don't have overhead lighting so we have to rely on lamps and windows right now (and our lot is incredibly shady so not a lot of light there). The bathroom and kitchen have all been recently updated and they have WAY too many "lighting options" not kidding the kitchen has six different switches in various locations that light different areas. I'm still experimenting but I have been using different ones at different times in the day. My favorites are the under cabinet lights. The bathrooms are the same way.

We've been able to get a LOT of stuff done but today I stalled out a little.

The girls have been handling the change really well. Kendall has had a rough time at bedtime every night but tonight she went to bed flawlessly. What a relief I am not a fan of night time dramatics! Kate has been absolutely her self and mellow about the whole thing. She LOVES to spin in circles now and for some reason she always wants to do this in Kendall's room. She walks into the room and starts spinning immediately. Oh I forgot to tell you about Kendall's room. One of the bedrooms has a very bright pink carpet and pink walls. Before moving in Brian and I discussed changing the carpet. I had decided that would be Kate's room just because Kendall's bedding would clash (too much pink). When we arrived Saturday morning we were doing our tour throughout the house and we made it upstairs into the pale blue room. It's beautiful with white trim and a wall length closet with great shelving. All of a sudden from the other room I hear Kendall in a very loud voice, "MY ROOM, I HAVE A PINK ROOM WITH PINK CARPET! I LOVE MY ROOM!!!" I wonder if I will ever get used to it enough that I don't cringe when I walk into it? Na, probably not, ha.

Oh well. That's all for now. I'll try to take some pictures tomorrow to include.

More to Come....Until Then:

A complete update coming soon but I just wanted to post these two videos from our travels.

Kendall had a new favorite song, "Tomorrow". Aunt Lorie couldn't resist and bought her the movie Annie while she was here.

Our drive up had lots of giggles and some crying too, sometimes all in the same breath

Move Update

Kate is exhausted and she only slept about 30 minutes. I refuse to go get her in the hopes that she will go back to sleep.

Those of you that know Kendall know how particular she is about order. Order is especially important to her in her room at bed and nap time. Everything has to be in it's place. Well, her room is far from being orderly. Boxes everywhere, everything out of place. Sleep will not come quickly but sanity for me may go quickly. Ha, no really we're holding in there. Things are moving faster then I thought they would.

As with any buying, selling, and moving of households there are glitches. Please say prayers for us that things go as smoothly as possible.

They're Heeeeeere

I don't know why I was surprised to see this pull up in front of my house today. It made it very real and it made me a little sick to my stomach. But they're here and working. I'm interested to see how much of this truck we can fill, we don't really keep a lot of stuff!

So She Says

We had Brian home this weekend, it was fun and productive too. We had lots of last minute things to do before the movers come. Tomorrow is my last day in the house before they arrive to pack everything up so I have lots of things that I need to get done before they get here (get all our stuff packed for the car and have it separated so it doesn't disappear in a box...) and to further push me towards that loony bin I received a text message from my realtor that there is a showing tomorrow. I was amazingly able to get a ton of cleaning done tonight and get pretty much everything packed and ready. Tomorrow after the showing I'll clean out the fridge, remove stuff from walls...yadda yadda yadda. (I know that this is rivoting blogging but stick with me my life is consumed with this stuff).

The other day I went to throw out our Pottery Barn Kids magazine and at the last second I changed my mind and cut out all the little baby pictures in it and put them on cardstock to make a little book for Kate to look at (again for my Busy Kids on the Trip mission). Tonight Kendall saw them and we had this conversation:

Kendall: "Aw he's so cute, I want one of those babies"
Me: "What would you do with one of those babies?"
Kendall: "I would just kiss them around"



Humph, that's funny because to her own little baby she just pushes her around.

This morning Lorie and the girls came over for a photo shoot and we ended up at the playground at a nearby church. At one point we hear Kendall yelling and see Kate stuck like this:




Please note that Aunt Lorie, who to her credit made a fast run to the stuck baby, stopped to take a picture before rescuing her.

Kendall was yelling, " AHHHHH, my baby!" Love that kids.