a day at the park

heather and i recently took the kids to the walking park to feed the ducks that are usually there... but when we arrived, we saw that the pond had very little water and no ducks! we were more disappointed than the kids were, of course... the boys were perfectly content to throw bread at the single bird in sight, even though the bird wanted nothing to do with our food offerings. the kids found the playground and enjoyed swinging and climbing. here's a few pictures from our relaxing morning at the park... i can't wait for it to cool off for awhile so we can visit the park more often!

"where are all the ducks? water all gone!"
"c'mon, etho! don't be scared of the slide!"
looks like trouble!
girlie girls a swingin'!

these pictures were worth the trip to the park, ducks or no ducks!




and these pictures will make a momma's heart melt... sweet friends!


we are so thankful for our friends! hope y'all are having a great weekend.

hellooooo, white cabinets!

"let's paint the cabinets." easy to say. sort of easy to do. but there's a million steps in between and around those two realities. like finding a place for all the stuff that is usually in the cabinets.... and scraping white paint out of your hair every day... and explaining to your son, "honey, it's just paint on mommy's elbow" AFTER you've taken a shower... and oh yeah, the cabinets. :) i was pretty set on working on these cabinets every single night until they're done, but frankly, we're already tired after the first week! so brian is happy to hear that i've given up my psychotic "we-must-get-the-cabinets-painted-by-november-for-no-real-reason-except-that-i-am-super-excited-and-slightly-impatient-and-controlling" attitude!

i am really happy with the white we chose. i can't believe how many shades of white there are to choose from... the funny part is that i'd had the red and taupe picked out for a long time, and we were walking out the door to go buy the paint... and i realized that we hadn't picked out a white yet! what were we thinking!?!??! so i said, "brian! hurry! let's pick a white!" and i'm not kidding you, we agreed on one in less than a minute. i think that might be a record. too bad we can't paint that fast!

here's our progress this week.... we could only tackle about half of the top cabinets because we are limited in our space for storing what has to come out of the cabinets.

all of our dry goods without a home... but don't get them wrong, they are thrilled about the renovation of their condo! see? the cans jumped down from their hotel crate to watch the progress... :)


two words: liquid sandpaper.... less dust, less work, but boy does it stink. i tried to hold my breath as much as possible!


1st coat on the inside and primer on the facing.


"daddy's tall!" our little apprentices love watching us paint the "cavnits".


brian squeezing in the painted shelf... don't forget, the walls won't be white when we're done with this!


aaaaand the finished product! well, without the doors.


so then we started putting all the things back on the shelf and realized that we should probably let the paint cure, say, ohhh, at least another week. this realization came no more than 2 hours after my proclamation to brian that i would chill out about our timeline and let us enjoy doing this project while taking time to relax. God does have a sense of humor. i was hoping to relax with things IN the shelves, but it's ok, i'm over it. :) so we're letting paint cure, and next week we will hopefully start demolition on a big unnecessary wood panel & outdated light above the sink. we'll see how that goes! oh yeah, and the doors. we need to start on the doors.

as you can see, we have a lot of work cut out for us, but it will be worth it. if my blog posts are few and far between, it's because i'm standing on the counter at who knows what time painting my hair, uh, i mean the cabinets. but just know that i am blogging in my heart.

the first stroke of paint!

drumroll, please!!!!! i would like to announce that we have officially begun the renovation of our kitchen. 4 weeks ago, we bought the paint. 3 weeks ago, we finally opened the paint cans and painted a few samples on the walls! 2 weeks ago, brian took the first cabinet off the wall to sand, and 1 week ago we got to work on the first set of cabinets! at this rate, we will have the kitchen completed by the time ethan goes to college! haha! so this is the story..... i love our big, eat-in kitchen, but i have never liked the color or overall look of our cabinets. when we painted after we bought the house, we brought color to most of the rooms... but we passed over the kitchen. i guess by the time we finished the bedrooms we were tired of painting. or perhaps since i didn't care for the cabinets, i didn't know what color to paint the walls! anyway, this whole project began when we bought a bigger kitchen table. it was custom stained to my favorite brown, which i knew wouldn't match the cabinets... and it was all a renovation slippery slope from there!

i already had the white/red/taupe color scheme in my head (thanks to my red dishes and uhhh... my living room! can you tell i love red??), so when i found these pictures in cottage living, i was able to see my idea already on paper! i can't tell you how many times i've looked at these pictures! of course our windows aren't that cute (yet), and our appliances aren't even close to sleek... but when we are finished, i hope our kitchen will be as cozy and inviting as this one is... oh i just can't wait!



i contemplated posting some "before" pictures, but i think i'll wait till i have the "after" pictures to redeem the originals! it just didn't seem right sharing pictures of my kitchen now in the same post as the beautiful kitchen above!

so here's the plan... we are painting the cabinets white (behr's snowy egret), and we are adding a 2-inch shaker-like frame to the outside to give the door some character (and to hide these unfortunate scrolly etchings, or"diddly-do"s, as i call them!). we're also adding this hardware to the doors & drawers. we're planning on painting the existing hinges to match, which will save some money & time shopping for the perfect hinges!


my ideal pictures above gave me the idea to install floor-to-ceiling beadboard on the walls instead of just painting them. brian installed beadboard on the bottom half of ethan's walls, and we love it, so we were excited to find this idea for the kitchen. since the kitchen is a pretty large room, and we are brightening up the cabinets so much, we can afford to go darker on the wall color. i think it's darker than what the picture below depicts. it's more like the shade of our tile grout, if you look closely at the picture. we will extend the crown moulding that is already above the cabinets around the rest of the room. next is the fun fun chairs! instead of shelling out $100 per chair to match the stained table, we are painting our existing chairs RED! to coordinate with my dishes and the red that is always swirling in my head! here's a close up of the color scheme...


here's brian brushing on the first bit of red. my flash washed out the red, but the picture is still exciting to me, nonetheless. and you can also catch a glimpse of the diddly-do on the cabinet in the background.



well, i planned on posting pictures of the white cabinets so far, but this post is already entirely too long!!!! so hold your breath, white cabinet pictures are coming up!

a prayer for healing

i ask all of the believers who read my little blog to stop what you are doing, get down on your knees, and pray for this precious little girl. maddie is the 3 year old daughter of a friend of my friend, wendy. she has been through more in her short little life than most of us can ever imagine. she and wendy's two babies were born with HLHS, which is a serious congenital heart defect. she has had a very rough week to say the least. here is the email wendy sent to me sunday morning:

I only have a few minutes, but I wanted to ask for prayers for a dear friend's little girl. I met this family while Colin was in the hospital, and we've been close friends ever since. Maddie, age 3, had a Fontan (the last in the 3 part series for HLHS) on Jul 24. She's been in the hospital ever since and has recently taken a turn for the worst. She is in ICU on full life support, including a ventilator and heart/lung bypass machine (called ECMO). The usual survival rates on ECMO are about 10 days, though some have survived a month or more. She's been on about 6 days now, and so far the doctors are stumped as to how to get her off. They have attempted a couple procedures to improve her lung function, and they almost lost her yesterday after she began bleeding. They had to replace about 2 to 3 times her blood volume.

I felt it upon my heart to get here as fast as I could. I got back from Vegas on Tues and flew out here on Thurs. I left Clayton with Ryan. He leaves for survival school tomorrow, and my mom and sister came down to keep him until I get back on Tues. You know God must have really laid it upon my heart for me to leave Clayton. As I was getting on the plane I couldn't help but wonder what was I thinking. I've been so very glad I came though. I feel like Cindy, Maddie's mom, really needs a friend right now.

We are all very exhausted here and are praying continuously. Please help us, and please pass on the message to your most faithful of friends.

ok, folks, if that email didn't bring tears to your eyes, read the testimony of maddie's parents at the bottom of their website... here's an excerpt.

Most of you already know this, but just in case there is any doubt, the foundation of our strength is not technology or medical wonders or positive energy or karma or the way the stars are aligned. Our strength comes from the hope we have in eternal life through Christ Jesus. You may be thinking just now, "Is David really going to exploit Madeline by an attempt at evangelism?" You bet I am. What is your source of hope if not in the creator of all things? No, we are not strong at all. We do not rely on God to give us strength, but rather to be our strength for us.

what an example of faith. as i look at the pictures of her little body hooked up to so many machines in a cold hospital room compared with the pictures below of ethan happily chasing bubbles, i am speechless. i am full of contrasting emotions thinking about this family and my own. i am humbled, i am sad, i am thankful, i am most definitely unworthy. despite my dueling feelings, i am confident that God is sovereign over maddie's life just as He is over ethan's. i am sure of it. i could go on and on, but we all need to be praying. so i urge you to lift up this family in prayer.

may God have all the glory.

bubble boy

ethan had a blast outside with the bubble blower that my grandma gave him for his birthday! i can't help but giggle as i think about him chasing all of these huge bubbles around the backyard...

my experience with potty training thus far

i'm usually pretty pumped about "new stages" for my kids. solid foods are fun, walking for the first time is oh-so-exciting, and i especially LOVE first words and language explosions. but for me, potty training does not fit into this list!! ethan is sort of potty training, but i don't really know if i can call it potty training. it's like a pre-game warmup or actually more like off-season training. haha. i guess we've been doing this for a few weeks. we started by just sitting on the potty every now and then to get used to it. and one day he peed 3 little drops, and i made the biggest deal i could out of it! now i ask him if he needs to go on the potty, and if he doesn't, i don't push it. if he says yes, off we go to the potty! he often tells me on his own when he needs to go, and he's usually right. he gets stickers for actually going, and when he gets 5 stickers, he gets a treat. but i think he's more motivated by getting to wipe and flush the toilet! oh and i'm sure my "potty dance" throws a little motivation in there. ha! if he goes poo-poo, i usually go straight to the treat and give him a few chocolate chips. (sorry for the bad brown association there! it's what i had on hand!)

like most other things, i have read about potty training on the internet and have asked some of my friends. but i honestly have not approached this task with my usual gusto. maybe i'm finally starting to mellow out a little after baby #2 (as brian laughs). you're right honey, that's probably not it. i think my hesitation to go all-out-big-boy-pants-with-no-diapers is that i really don't want to deal with the mess of accidents. i KNOW, i know... they are inevitable, they are part of the process, i just need to get over it. but i'm not there yet. and he's my first kid. but goodness, if we want a few more children, i'd better get used to accidents, huh?? well, pull-ups are "training" me for accidents. against my most-trusted-mommy-friend's advice, i used pull-ups with ethan during the day for a little while simply for the convenience of putting them on after he's gone potty (vs. laying down to put on a diaper-- lazy, i know). well after two wet beds during naptime and this experience: "what's that?" (ethan pointing to a blob on the kitchen floor) "i don't know ethan, what is it?" "poo-poo mommy!", i am not convinced that pull-ups are the way to go. so i just need to get up the nerve to put ethan in his choo-choo train (thomas) underwear that he picked out and take him potty every thirty minutes. so you can pray about that for me.

here's some potty training ethan-trivia for you:
- in the beginning of this, i was about to change ethan's diaper, and he said, "i need to go poo-poo in the potty mommy. take a picture of me." you know you take too many pictures when...
- he can tell me whether it's a "big poo-poo" or a "little poo-poo". this makes me laugh!!
- he had a wonderful time calling all the grandparents the first time he went poop in the potty. my dad was in a meeting (which he didn't tell me) and when we got off the phone, my dad announced to his meeting about ethan's success.

so for all of you more-experienced moms, please pass on your potty training advice. i am allllllllllll ears!

caroline is 10 months old!

i think we've skipped a few of caroline's monthly pictures here, but shhhh, just don't tell her and i don't think she'll notice. till she's 10 and she's reading these blog archives!! i'm sure i'll get the 2nd child speech that i gave to my mom so many times growing up... but she definitely can't argue that i never took pictures of her! :) this month's pictures were pretty much impossible. why do i even try? because i have to finish what i started, that's why! :) in the first picture, caroline is signing "all finished"... i guess to let me know that she has had it with these posed pictures?? and did you notice her hilarious ponytail-ish thing in the second shot? it only took about 10 tries to get it to work, and i'm thinking a tiny rubberband might work better than the barrette. but it's so stinking girly!!! we're working toward pigtails, but i don't think i have enough time in my day to get two of those in her hair right now...

so our sweet caroline is 10 months old. in celebration of this month's birthday, let us welcome 2 new members of the family: her top teeth! hallelujah, they have arrived. the teeth have finally cut through, and we are sleeping allllllllll night again, my friends. it is a beautiful thing. at 10 months old, caroline is beginning to cruise along furniture, usually to get to me. she has become more of a snuggler with all this teething (nana, get up off the floor. yes, she's snuggling. i didn't say rocking, just snuggling.). now she might just lay her head on my shoulder for 10 seconds before sitting back up to see what's going on, but i am enjoying those 10 seconds! she is still so giggly and smiley most of the time, and i can't help but kiss her fat cheeks and chubby rolls!! it will be interesting to see what she's like once she's walking and talking. brian and i were just talking tonight about what her voice is going to sound like. i think it's going to be lower than ethan's, based on her vocal performance thus far. but then ethan's voice kicks up a couple of octaves when he's attempting to speak "without arguing or complaining", so basically anything is lower than ethan's voice!

caroline is going to be one tough little girl, as are most little sisters. ethan's well-intentioned hugs turn into faceplants for baby sister most of the time, and then there's the encounters that weren't well-intentioned to begin with! you will be happy to know that ethan's latest memory verse is "be kind to one another" from ephesians 4:32. i put it to a tune, and ethan can be found running in circles around our living room (v-v-vroom) singing "be kind! be kind!" then we add names to the end to personalize the verse... so then you hear him singing, "be kind (to) keh-yine! be kind av-y! be kind joseph! be kind gram! be kind daddy!" so i'm hoping that hiding this verse in his heart will promote kindness on the homefront. add that to your prayer list so that caroline can live to experience the joy of taking her 11 month pictures. :)

have a great weekend!

random fun around the house

though we've been busy around here, we've managed to have a little fun....


caroline has finally proved that she can play in the tub with ethan without sliding all over the place! doesn't daddy do some great bathtime hair-dos?



we do have some pink pjs for caroline, but when laundry piles up, i pull out the reserves... ethan's old bulldozer & firetruck pajamas! it was so funny to see her in ethan's old pjs...but i still had to put on the pink bib!
caroline loves to play on this "laugh & learn" chair! she has figured out how to climb up into it and stand up on it...which is something ethan just thought of a few months ago! ha!

both of the kids love to ride this horse that my dad & joy gave ethan last christmas. caroline just giggles and giggles when the clompity-clomp comes on.



ethan is always ready to lend a helping hand, whether it's assisting mommy in the kitchen or accompanying daddy with his latest project.



the kids love gram's ride-a-little-horsy! it's so fun to see our kids enjoy our parents. today at the grocery store, ethan apparently saw a house on a chip bag that reminded him of brian's parents' house, so for the next 10 minutes, i heard, "pappy's house! pappy's house!"... from a chip bag.



fun fun fun! and the fun just keeps going!

the funniest person i've never met

ok, i have to introduce THE FUNNIEST woman that i wish i knew. she is a friend of a friend, and i am so glad i found her blog. it is simply delightful. if brian hears me laughing hysterically in front of my computer, he pretty much assumes that i'm reading boomama. and tonite i had some catching up to do, so i enjoyed 11 posts in one witty sitting! fun fun! i honestly have not read a single one of her posts without really letting out a good laugh. i only wish i could write like she does... i was planning on linking to some of my favorite posts, but there are just too many to even mention. ok, maybe i found a couple. so click on over to boomama's blog and enjoy.

more pictures of the kids are coming. but until then, boomama will keep you entertained.
i promise.

cool in the pool!

these pictures are actually from last month, but they are just too cute to not share. kristie & i took the kids over to our sweet friend nancy's house to go swimming when it was still blazing hot outside about a month ago. we had a fun time relaxing, and i especially loved that nancy sang caroline to sleep! check out the girls' matching swimsuits. :)





now that's starting to cool off a little (woohoo!!!!!!!!), i guess it will be awhile before we hit the pool again. i love summer fun, but i sure am ready for some breezy walks!!!

ethan braves the baby sprinkler

most of you know that ethan is not the most adventurous of boys... now he likes his boyish toys...his cars and his ba-ket-ball and his bulldozers... but he doesn't exactly branch out. so we were quite tickled with him the day he wanted to play in his sprinkler...AND GET HIS HAIR WET. as you can see, he went from washing the rubber duck...to getting his hair wet (because daddy suggested it, of course!)... to getting his entire face wet (and loving it!)... to surrounding himself with the sprinkler. we were doing yard work (yet another amazing feat around our household!), and we heard him say, "yook mommy! i'm IN!" he was so stinkin proud of himself. :)





(it looks like he tested things out by putting the balls in the middle, and when they survived, he figured it was safe! haha!)

thanks, aunt kristie & uncle jeff, for the sprinkler! we'll have to get karina over here to play in it soon!

still celebrating :)

when i was last chatting with you all, it was the morning of our 3rd anniversary. (it's been so long, i thought i'd remind you!!) what a sweet day it was. :) brian had 2 dozen roses delivered, which remained absolutely beautiful for over 2 weeks. they are still pretty-- they're just dark purple and a bit crispy now. but they're still arranged nicely with no drooping! i am sorry to say that i only have this first picture of the day they were delivered. i can't believe i didn't take another picture of them- they opened up so well and were just beautiful. thank you for treasuring me, honey! flowers definitely speak my love language, and i'm pretty sure i know how to get straight to his heart....with a cookie cake! the kids and i snuck up to the mall to bring home this cute little cake. (and of course, i loved helping him eat it-heehee!)


we knew that the actual day of our anniversary (tuesday) was going to be a busy one (more on that later), so we planned for our date to be that weekend. for dinner on the night of our anniversary, we waited until the kids were in bed, and we set out our china, toasting glasses from our wedding, and our honeymoon candles... we dressed up and enjoyed a romantic, candlelight dinner. i was planning on cooking, but i actually felt horrible that day, so stouffers cooked us a delicious lasagna dinner that night! it was a fun little adventure having a homemade date after 8 pm. we didn't have to share our bread with ethan or pick up caroline's cup off the floor one time! :) oh the little things.... here's the scene from our candlelight dinner...


later that weekend, my hubby and i enjoyed dinner at carrabba's (YUM!), a trip to home depot, dessert at TGIFriday's (2 words: brownie obsession!!!), and then on to books-a-million. i know, i know, we're party animals! haha. you'll see why we went to home depot in just a few posts... (hint: our kitchen chairs will not be white much longer! or the walls!)

what a blessing to celebrate another year with a God-fearing man who is committed to taking care of his family. thank you, honey, for your sweet dedication and your unconditional love. i praise God for you. iloveyou!

well....

i sat down to finally write about everything that's been going on around here since our anniversary 2 1/2 weeks ago, and whaddayaknow, the kids just woke up from their nap! so i'll have to try to get back on here again soon... maybe tonite? we'll see. we are all doing great, just super busy and super teething (well, caroline anyway, but sometimes it feels like i'm teething too!). hope you're all doing well. don't give up on me. i'll be back soon.