Light Earthy

Here's the painted walls in the upstairs hallway. This is a bookshelf with the kids books still on it. I cannot bring myself to put them away... this is exactly like they have looked since Lynn was old enough to be read to at bedtime.... long time ago. I will put them in fun baskets now but I just have to go shopping first. The walls are a tan "light earthy" and I decided since Adam took over my fitting room (Lynn's old bedroom) I would bring out all my pictures he stashed in the closet and use them in the hallway. I'm thinking fitting room slash vacation decor with a earthy slash black slash aqua color theme. Should I paint this bookshelf back or aqua?

A closer look at the aqua accent color I'm thinking about. Don't you just love these shoes, I'm a sucker for shoes, even if they don't fit me. Two pictures from my trip to New York City in the aqua stripped frame.

And how about that shabby chic tin cabinet all dressed up in the fitting room decor.

John removed the heater so you can see the patch job that I have to let dry before I paint it. That tin cabinet I bought at a garage sale for $5, it was painted cream but had peeling paint so I took a sander to it and found about 4 different layers of paint and loved the look of it so I never did paint it. Hummm how would it look in aqua? The old dress and hat came from Jeannie's Halloween box and looks perfect here.

And here is my gaping corners all filled in and looking perfect, ready for primer and paint. This sanding is a mess, I do most of it with the water sanding method but some of it needs dry sanding. I can't wait to dust and not have everything covered in white again the next day.

Hopefully soon I can show you the finished living room.

Painting again

With our new skeleton crew at work it's 4 ten hour days and production gets Friday's off so I took advantage of that and used Friday for a vacation day. It's dark during the week when I get home so I can't paint and then we haven't had a whole lot of weekends that we stay home so I used today to paint the upstairs hallway. I stenciled it 13 years ago when that was the cool thing to do, not so much anymore. Even though it's embarrassing to show you the before pictures.

Here is the cool 90's stenciling job, I'm not sure why I didn't paint these walls a while ago because I love to paint walls when I'm bored. I guess it's because no one goes upstairs so no one seen it.

Here's the light switch cover.... yep that's wallpaper wrapped around it to match the wallpaper before the cool stenciling.

So while I'm prepping the walls and priming them we have this electric heater that we used to use to keep the upstairs warm.... yeah right, if we wanted to keep the upstairs warm with this heater we had to have an extra $200 bucks added to our light bill. So the heater was just attached to the wall and never used. So I decided, why have it so I'll just pull it off the wall, well that worked okay until the electrical cord stopped me. Just then the phone rang and it was John, he asked what I was up to and I told him. Just before we hung up

Me - "oh I ripped the heater off the wall so you'll have to unhook that when you get home so I can paint around it".

John - "what? You can't just rip that off the wall"

Me - "why? I already did"

John - "Connie those are live wires"

Me - "yeah so?"

John - "that's 220"

Me - "so that will kill me?'

John - "YES"

Me - "Okay, I'll be careful"

Here's the heater where I decided to not touch it again.

After I was done painting the upstairs I decided to sand and mud walls in the living room. With an old house you have very, very crooked walls so you get lots of gaping between the sheets of drywall that have to be filled in.... here's a picture to show you what the better of the three seams look like. That silvering black area is completely open and needs me to fill it up 3-4 times with drywall mud, sanding between every coat.

To get to the top of the ceiling/walls I have to stand on the top of the step ladder to reach the tallest point. As I'm standing on the very top of a really wiggly old step ladder I wonder how bright this is.... I may not get electrocuted (since I've already been stuck by lightning, I'm pretty sure I don't want that to happen) I will fall off the top of this ladder and hit my head on the pellet stove knocking me out so I don't realize I've landed on top of the stove burning me to 4th degree burns over my entire body until John comes home from work and finds me.... but I do it anyway and I didn't fall. When John gets home I want him to take a picture of me way up on the ladder so I could show you..... this is what I got.

Nice huh? I didn't know what he was taking until I downloaded them. He did take a couple others but nothing that showed me way up on the top step of the ladder. Let guys take pictures and this is what you get, I should have been more specific in what I wanted. I must have been talking on this one.... surprise huh?

I'll give you completed pictures of the upstairs hallway tomorrow. I love vacation days like this.

Who was here?

Last night Adam came home and immediately said, "who was here"?

Me - "why?"

Adam - "I know someone was here"

Me - "who do you think was here?"

Adam - "Josh, Jake or Jett"

Me - "Which one do you think it was?"

Adam - "Jett", "He always picks this truck when he's here"

Here is where Jett left Adam's truck, he didn't try to hid it at all, he leaves it right in the middle of the steps.

As soon as Jett walked in the door he is repeating "Connie, can I play with Adam's trucks?", he's such a cutie how could I say No? I could listen to his stories and stare at his facial expressions all day long.

Adam then runs upstairs to make sure he didn't mess up the other rows of cars, you know one tire out of line puts him over the edge!! I think Jett knows that too because all the others were safely in their rows yet. Poor 3 year old has to carefully pick out a toy to play with or Adam will never let him play with his trucks again. :) All Jett needs to learn is to put them away and Adam will never know, Josh and Jake already do this....

Adam you'll never know how often those cars are moved without you knowing, they are good.

Elly and Garrett were here again and Elly wanted a snack as I'm playing with Garrett so I told her to find one. She has her own snack cupboard here but this time as I'm not there she decides to find something else that she always gets at Grandma's house. She hollers.... "Grandma, I made a mess". This is what I find. "Elly, Grandma is not making you pancakes for a SNACK!!"

And she is backed up against the table and wouldn't turn around for me to get her picture, the backside of her was white with pancake mix. How she did this is beyond me. Such a goofy girl.

And just a picture of Garrett starting to play with his toys.

Super bowl party

We had the super bowl party at Lynn and Jesse's this year. It was so nice to be able to have a party at their house and not have to travel 3 days or 3 hours to get there. Garrett showed off his giggling, he is now a belly laughter and is really ticklish under his arms. Grandma had lots of fun playing and making him giggle. He is 3 months old today.

Elly and Tia coloring, El asked Tia if she could paint but Tia told her no the table was full of snacks...... that didn't last long, she used her big ole' blue eyes and her flashy eyelashes on Tia and Jesse to bring up a coffee table so she could paint.

As you all know there would be one commercial that was in 3D, Elly put her glasses on for every commercial so she didn't miss it. She was so darn cute because she didn't even know what she was looking for.

When the commercial finally came on we backed it up several times as we passed the glasses around the room. Here is Jason and Lynn (with blueberry kicking) checking out the bouncy ball. I'm not sure what's up with Elly... maybe her eyes hurt from wearing those glasses for so long.

The super bowl was okay, the commercials were better but Lynn's guacamole dip was fabulous. Steph's chocolate covered peanuts with whatever the sweet crunch was (thanks Steph's mom) were a close 2nd, I ate my share of both of them.

El weekend

Took me forever to post these pictures.... sorry

Elly spent the night with us and she is a mover a talker and a learner, she knows Grandma will do just about anything with her so she tries to fit it all in while she's here. She loves to cut and color. She will ask me to find her pictures to cut out and color. We did that about 3 times already so I decided to entertain her with a new project. I had my Christmas cards so I decided to let her cut them out however she wanted. She loved this since there were sparkly ones, round ones, and lots of fun stuff to look at. She decided to play teacher and I had to be the student and she would tell me the story of each and every one of her projects at least twice. Here she is telling the story, she can make up quite the stuff with one picture.

I loved the facial expressions she has, I took the picture of her holding these up but got her mouth that shows how into this she is.

And once again check out the expressions

Here is Miss El with all her stories and her trusty scissors. She uses Lynn's scissors from when she was little. It has the initials LH on them and she just doesn't understand what the LH is for since her name is Tia Frey

Now she talked me into a snack, of course it had to be a chocolate brownie with the fudgy frosting on my pink flower plate with my baby spoon. The drink of choice was a hot chocolate with marshmallows of course.

Here is her duck that she cut out and colored, it won first place in our pretend school so it gets to hang on my frig.

I had John take over a few of the never-ending games of Guess Who. She could play this forever if you let her. And she's good at it. "Does your person have big fat lips?", "Does your person have skinny eyebrows?"

I took her outside to have her brain stop learning and just have fun. We made trails in the snow and she had to follow me, then she took over and I had to follow her, except she wanted me to crawl like her.

Adam was in the house taking the pictures so he got the window instead of us but for some reason I really like this picture.

Of course she has to make snow angels. Adam was taking this from the diningroom and then he gets and idea.... "Bang, bang, bang... Mom keep her there".

He goes up to my bedroom to get a better view.



Here she is eating her waffles, she is pretty darn special to us.... and she knows it. It's not too often you'll see her with her hair down, she looks so much like Shan when it is. That morning when I got her dressed, teeth brushed, bed made, jammies folded and then I said "Okay time for your hair" she said she wanted it down. I told her that her mommy tried the same thing everyday but she never got her way either, when you have this much hair it's gotta be tied up.

We can't wait till she spends the night again, we really can't wait until all the grandkids can spend the night. There's nothing better than being a grandparent.

Last Vacation Day

John and I took a few vacation days over the last 2 weeks to spend time together and with the kids for the holidays. Today is a holiday for me and John used a vacation day so we could go out for lunch and spend the day together..... well the day turned out differently than we had planned. John got the flu and we spent the day together..... at home. I make a horrible nurse and he makes a horrible patient. We do so much better the other way around and we both will admit it. Every move he makes I ask "are you okay?", "what's the matter?", "what hurts?" and he gets annoyed with my questions. We both hope he feels better by tomorrow

John wanted to play with Garrett in the worst way so I put him on the floor next to the couch so Grandpa could talk to him. For Christmas we bought "blueberry" a rainforest music box for his/her crib and Garrett loved it. So..... Grandma bought him one too. He's trying it out right now, "blueberry" should love it, it's been Garrett approved.

I played lots of games of Go Fish and Memory with Elly after school. She loves those games and she beat me in all the games except for one. The last game of memory as she was making all the matches she tells me when the last two cards are on the floor "Grandma I'll let you have a turn if you want?" She's so cute.

and here is Garrett giving me a big ole' smile. He already knows Grandma's voice (that is if Mommy isn't in the room).

Christmas

Christmas morning was pretty quiet here. Adam woke up early but wasn't real excited about opening his gifts from Santa or his stocking, he could just pretend. We always get our picture taken before going to Gayle's but my boys really would rather skip it, they still humor me but when I run back to get into the picture they do something silly, drives me crazy!! This is the best we got this year.

Here's my dad relaxing in the Christmas chair.

Adam and Uncle Brad have a very special relationship.... when the first snowflake falls to the ground Adam is bugging Brad to open the trails. This is his attempt to talk Brad into opening them up by Friday night. When Adam was in grade school he called Brad to ask if he would open the trails and Brad asked Adam if he thought they were ready and then he said "okay if your sure I'll open them up tomorrow". Adam was so proud that he opened the trails, he told all the kids at school that he did it and listened to the radio just to see if Brad mentioned his name. Good thing Brad has a sense of humor with Adam because he can be somewhat of a pest.

This is Whoville. We all eat in the garage, Lynn calls it cafeteria style like in school. We have 5 pans of lasagna, 1 ham, cheesy hashbrown potoes x5, lots of salads and tons of deserts. Gayle goes through a ton of work for this day and we all appreciate it. This is the right side of the garage.

And here's the left side. This year there were 43 of us... there are 16 missing.... don't quote me on these numbers I may have missed someone.

Troy even made it from Iraq... we had a live feed for awhile.

Here are the brothers... missing 2. All the boys live right here in the area and they are never all together for a picture. Dad, Wally, Brian, Rusty and Randy

It seems this post is all about the boys so here's Garrett with his new hat made by Aunt Peggy. It's Alpaca fur, hair, fuzz.... whatever they grow. These are the warmest hats ever and so cute.

Christmas was great and ended with a bit of a snow storm. Here is John using his polish snow blower on the patio.

There was too much snow that he had to start a trucking company to haul the rest of it away.