Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Birthday Plans

Christian's birthday is on December 15th. He has been talking about and planning his birthday party since December 16th of last year. As his party draws near, I am thinking he is reading issues of Martha Stewart Living on the sly from what he is asking. He wants me to make individual pinatas for each of his guests and he wants each pinata to fit the interests of each of his guests. He told me one of his friends likes escalators, so he wants me to make an escalator pinata for that friend. I told him we could go to party depot and pick out a pinata.
I did book the place we are holding the party today, so that is secured. Next I need to design an invitation and get them printed.
Today at church, Christian got to take home the King David action figure (I did not even know such a thing exists). When you push a button on his back, he either says Psalm 23 or this verse out of 1 Samuel. The odd thing is...he sounds like a storm trooper from Star Wars. There are mostly girls in Liam's class and I think they are having a soothing effect on him. When we arrived today, instead of the usual screaming, flailing and escape attempts, he just sat down and started coloring with the girls. Christian justs walks into the church and goes to his class on his own.

Monday, October 29, 2007

Halloween Party

We went to the Halloween Party at the children's musuem today. Christian has been excited for Halloween for a long time and has three different superhero outfits he likes to wear. Today he chose Superman. Liam is not into the whole costume scene right now, so I dressed him in overalls and a plaid shirt to try to do the Bob the Builder thing. He screamed and tried to take it off and then he calmed down when I put a Maisy video on.
They had a man at the party doing balloon animals and the boys waited patiently in line to get their balloons and when it was there turn, this lady came and told the balloon guy he had to take a break because he offended someone earlier and they had to work it out. So he had to leave, just when it was my boys turn. The boys handled it very well. I was almost in tears at how unfair it was, but I swallowed it and took them to get pizza. We stopped on the way home and got a special treat, since the boys handled their dissappointment so graciously. Liam did bring up the balloons and cry a bit before bed. I hope whatever the balloon man did was really offensive and it was not from parents who think their kids are entitled to special treatment since my boys were unable to get what they waited for.
this is a picture of them waiting

Liam working in the wood shop


Even Superman needs to stop for grocieries on the way home from a big rescue.


Chrisitan in his Superman costume.
I used He's a Star - Digital Designs by Jannylyn for this layout

Christian in the butterfly garden at Pacific Science Center in Seattle

Liam caught our cat Bronte the other day.

Baers Garten Designs and Scrap with Niki have a new collaborative kit Butterfly Garden. I used it for the last two layouts
I used Hallowillie by Baers Garten Designs for the framed photos from today

Saturday, October 27, 2007

fighting a cold

I am fighting a cold this weekend. I am taking it easy on David's days off, since he can help with the kids and I hope I will have it kicked by Monday. Liam was asking for things to drink all day yesturday, so I think he might have the same thing.
I did a layout using Leah, a new mini-kit by Baers Garten Designs

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Here is another layout from our day in Hood River using Happy Fall by Baers Garten Designs, Playing with wire by Weeds & Wildflowers and Alpha, Star, Ribbon & Tab: It's a Party by Jeanie Papai & Digital Designs by Jannylyn at Elemental Scraps.

Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Here is another layout I did using Happy Fall by Baers Garten designs the pumpkin template is by Jess Gordon at Weeds and Wildflowers

Sunday, October 21, 2007







Trip to Hood River



Kits can be found at the Baers Garten Designs Store at Elemental Scraps. Happy Fall Kit and Quick Page Brag Book AlbumWe took a trip to Hood River today to go to the pumpkin patch and apple picking for Liam's Birthday. The boys had a lot of fun and lots of apples were consumed.
When I came home, loaded the photos to my computer and checked my teams Baers Garten Designs at Elemental Scraps and the Happy Fall kit up and ready to go. I used the brag book to put together an album for the grandparents to take home in about 30 minutes and printed it for them before they left.

Thursday, October 18, 2007

birthday pictures

Here are Liam's Birthday pictures. The cats are enjoying the balloons as much as the boys are. When our cat Luna tried to take the balloons out the kitty door. Liam kept "Liam's balloons" He also went up to Luna today when she was sitting on one of the kitchen chairs and kept ordering her to get down. It is nice to see the phrases we teach the kids.
Christian is starting to enjoy rhyming and when we were driving the other day he was rhyming words then he got to fire hydrant and kept trying to make rhymes when it, but that one is not so easy.

Wednesday, October 17, 2007

Liam's birthday

Today was Liam's 3rd birthday. He had his first socceer class this morning and then we did a family birthday party for him when Christian came home from school. The problem we had was that Christian wanted to get into the presents, take the balloons and when I told him it was Liam's birthday, not his, he did not take it well.
Liam really liked his Thomas train aqua doodle and played with it most of the afternoon.
I will get pictures and a layout up in a couple of days.

Saturday, October 13, 2007

first open house

We have our first open house tommorow. We have had enough rain that the front lawn is green again. I spent a bit of time cleaning up the weeds that have also grown in during all the rain and and sweeping the front driveway. I know that when we look at a house I never look at the front driveway and see how clean in is, so I don't know why I feel that sweeping it myself will make a difference.
I alsor remember being told that the smell of fresh baked cookies is good when people are looking at the house. I do not want make the mess of making dough when I am trying to clean up, so I bought pre-made cookie dough to throw in the oven.



Tuesday, October 9, 2007



here are a couple of layouts I have done recently.
I took the boys to the park to get some autumn photos. There were happy to explore, but did not want to work with me. Liam had fun collecting acorns, but Christian wanted to play in the leaves. When I took Liam with us to an area that had more leaves, Liam freaked out, so our stay was not too long.
I threw away all of Liam's sippy cups as well yesterday. He has this wonderful habbit of taking his sippy cup and dumping it out around the house. I was crawling on the floor cleaning up another one of his messes when I crawled through the milk, so I threw all the sippies away and now he has to drink from a regular cup at the table. I am hoping this will help him potty train soon since he will be taking in smaller amounts of liquid.

Sunday, October 7, 2007

the hunt is on

We were not able to make an offer on the one house we liked because they decided they could not afford to sell the house at this time, so we are back to the drawing board. We have decided to put together a top five list and if a house sells before we sell this house, we will scratch it off the list and add another house, then we will be ready to start writting offers as soon as we accept on offer on our house. We have four houses we will look at this week and I think I might have found #5 to add to the list.

Our neighbors down the street are selling their house and they had an open house yesterday so that brought some buzz to our street and people stopped and grabbed some info on our house since they were here and our house is much cheaper then the other house, but is about the same size.

Our house so nice and clean, it is wonderful to live in. When we our realitor brought over the flyers for our house, the pictures were amazing. We were joking if we saw the flyer in a random pile, we would grab it and want to see the house.

When I took a break from house cleaning and house hunting yesterday, I made a huge 32 oz tub of pesto and cut up all the green peppers we picked on Thursday and froze them. We had about 12 cups of peppers. We still have the red and yellow peppers to roast. I will try to get that done tommorow. It is hard to get involved in large projects because someone might want to see the house at any time during the day.

Thursday, October 4, 2007

tomato picking

We went to a farm and picked 40 lbs of tomatos and bell peppers today. I cooked the tomatos today. We have about 5-6 gallons of stewed tomatos now. I am going to cut up and freeze the green peppers and roast the red and yellow peppers and freeze those as well.
The boys always going out and picking anything, so they had a lot of fun. It was quite muddy, but the weather was nice while we were out there.



Wednesday, October 3, 2007

Today was our appointment with the realitor so of course at 3:00 am this morning I woke up and Liam was in his room with the lights on playing with trains. After two hours he finally went back to sleep.
So both David and I were quite tired when we got up this morning and we could not sleep in since we have so much work to do. We got Christian to school, I took a load of stuff to storage then I came home and we did the final cleaning and organizing. I was so tired from a lack of sleep and physically exhausted from cleaning and packing for the last several days. I thought I might burst into tears by the time the realitor got to our house.
When she arrived, she was very impressed with all the work we did. We got all the paperwork filled out to sell this house and wrote a coningency offer on another house. We will know whether the sellers accept the offer in the next couple of days. We just have to sell our house in the next couple of months to hold on to the house.

Here are some pictures I took. The first one is of Liam sleeping outside his room. He cried and went to he hall and I ignored him and after he had been quiet for a while and went out and checked and found him like this.

Our cat Luna

Our living room with the boys watching TV

The boys room

Monday, October 1, 2007

getting close

We have been busy re-arranging the house and packing our non-essentials to go to storage. I went and got a storage unit for us to put all the boxes in. We just have our spare room and some of the kitchen to organize and pack and we will be done.
It is nice having so much space. I think it is better to ditch a bunch of furniture and other things and just have space then spends thousands of dollars on a remodel. We looked at the house we really liked an were thinking about putting an offer on it, but our realitor called today and said the someone else might be putting an offer on the house, so we will just have to wait and see. We will fill out all the paperwork and put our house on the market on Wednesday.

Here are some layouts I have done the last few days