the difference a month makes

exactly one month ago, our house was put on the market.

one week later, we had an offer! (thank you, God!)

another week later, we'd finally agreed on a selling price with the buyer. (nothing short of a miracle.)

and now, here we are...two and a half weeks from handing over the keys to our first home.


so. it's been a busy month to say the very least. lots of praying and house-hunting and praying and number crunching and praying. we've found a house that we absolutely love. it's charming, it's spacious, it's in a beautiful neighborhood... and it's a short sale. so we are living the saying "hurry up and wait". i expected the house-selling to be the part that would take awhile. boy was i wrong. we've jumped through several of the hurdles involved with selling, and now we are so close to our new house that i can just taste it. i can picture my dishes in the cabinets (that um, need to be painted. yeah.) and my food in the pantry (cue hallelujah chorus). i can picture my grandmother's dining room table next to the fireplace with room to stretch. and i can picture my children grinning from ear to ear as they ride their bikes up and down the quiet street. i can also picture us with our new list of projects to make this house our home. :) don't worry. we are not going to touch the kitchen cabinets for a long, long while.

if i had the phone number of the short sale case manager, you betcha i'd be calling him every week to see where he thought my couch should go or to ask what color he would paint the bathrooms. by week 4, surely he'd stamp "approved" on that paperwork, don't ya think?! we have no idea how long this short sale process will take, or even if it will be approved at all. we are praying for patience and God's guidance through these unchartered waters... and praise the Lord our realtor is awesome. to quote her, she is a bulldog, and she is not letting go of this bone. :)

we are still working on where we will live as of april 29. i ask for your prayers with that as well. i know God will provide. my heart knows this. but my head freaked out just a little bit this afternoon. i've been the one telling brian, "we will NOT be homeless!"....and then about 2pm today, after several unsuccessful phone calls, i called him, crying, "we're going to be homeless!" God will provide. God will provide. God will provide.

in the meantime, we have lots of boxes to pack. i have lots of memories to go through. we'll start with this one...


7 years ago, april 10, 2004, brian proposed to me in the gazebo in our future backyard. and for the last seven years, God has blessed us in this little house. He truly has blessed us. i hope that in the next two weeks, in the midst of wading through boxes and packing paper, i can take time to enjoy our last little bit of time in our first house. more reminiscing to come...

finally here

this next sentence has been a long time coming. our kitchen is finally complete! well. almost. we still need a light above the sink, but other than that, we can check this project off our never-ending list! this before and after picture just makes me so happy. i've been picturing this comparison in my head since we started this kitchen endeavor in 2007.

before: march 2004, the day i peeked in this house for the very first time (say hi to our realtor, robert!).


after: march 2011, 7 years later. our cottage kitchen! finally!


and Lord willing, before too long, "our kitchen" will become someone else's kitchen. that's right... our house is officially for sale! we'll see how long i can do this make-sure-everything-is-absolutely-spotless-before-walking-out-the-door thing. it is so the opposite of how i operate. i told my mom the other day that this may be the best thing for our family. i have to keep everything picked up. maybe...just maybe this will have lasting effects.

stop laughing, mom.

if you know of anyone looking for a cute 3 bedroom, 2 bath house with lots of updates, send them our way!

the summer that got away from us...

this week, i've read several blog posts about the arrival of fall. they have fall wreaths, fall candles, and even fall crafts for their kiddos. well. they have something we do not yet have. fall weather. so... in honor of our 80+ degree temperatures, i'm gonna write about our summer. october may be quickly approaching, but august's humidity is right outside my door. and i cannot let the summers' events get away from the tenlittletoes chronicles!!!

our summer was full of days at home, being silly and playing at the top of our lungs...




sometimes friends joined in the fun!



we kept up five in a row for most of the summer, and the kids had a ball with the projects. i keep saying i will blog about each of the books we've done, but that's not looking very promising at this point, is it!? some of my favorite pictures from our five in a row books:

playing harmonica in the bathtub and tasting lemons (lentil)



running their own beachside diner (night of the moonjellies)


and this summer saw several firsts for us too.

i took my first trip without the kids! it was a quick college girls' weekend, and it was wonderful. some of us usually bring our kids, and some of us just can't make it every year... but this year everyone was there, and no one brought their kids! we stayed up way too late chatting, ate way too much dessert, and did not change one single diaper between the 8 of us. we celebrated babies on the way, swapped silly kid stories, and hit each other up for free professional advice (speech, medical, education). we cried, we laughed, we reminisced about anything and everything from our college days 10 years ago. i love these girls, and it is always a blessing to pick up right where we left off.



brian had a great weekend with the kids while i was gone, so i was told. when they all came to pick me up at the airport (as i was holding back tears from missing them!), brian looked no worse for the wear. he'd done a fabulous job holding down the fort. no major injuries, only a slight mishap with the ant farm, and the kids even ate their broccoli. at some point during our exchange of weekend stories, though, brian conceded with my favorite statement of 2010: "now i know why you need naps all the time!" amen.

ethan's first dentist appointment was not quite as exciting as my weekend away, but it was definitely a milestone not to be missed. it was really one small step for ethan, one giant leap for our family. we have been delinquent dental patients since saying "i do"... no particular reason other than um, we hate going to the dentist. so we put it off for a little while, and then it just got easier and easier to put off. till ethan's pediatrician tells us that we should take ethan with us the next time we go to the dentist. i nodded and said "mmmkay!" that was at ethan's 4 year well-check visit in 2009. so when his 5 year check-up was comin' round the corner in july, i knew i needed to have his appointment made! i was a good girl and made appointments for me and brian as well... but ethan's "happy visit" was first. this was a no-pressure visit to see how he'd do. if he was at ease and was willing, the hygienist would go ahead with a cleaning. if he was unsettled by the whole shabang, no big deal. well. that boy just hopped right up in the chair and did everything he was supposed to do. i think i was more nervous about it than he was!


as you can see, he was loving kathy, our awesome hygienist. she was so great to let him touch all her tools and feel the suction of the sucker-tool. he was thrilled beyond words to get to pick his flavor of toothpaste (mint! they had mint! he has no idea mint is the default flavor.), and the cool glasses he was given to wear were just the icing on the cake. (sorry, i guess i shouldn't use sugary analogies when talking about the dentist!!) he came away with a "no cavities" report and was happy as a lark.


this was pretty much a "happy visit" for me too. i must say that i was not quite so anxious about my appointment the next week after having met kathy. she did not let me feel the sucker tool or let me choose my toothpaste flavor, but i was a big girl. and i even made my 6 month appointment to go back.

the next event is not really a first as much as a finally! (and a key player in my lack of blogging in august!) we finally got around to painting the rest of our kitchen cabinets!!! remember when we started these way back when?? seriously, it was 2007. life with little ones just does not leave much time in the evenings to fix up your house. end of story. after filling our evenings with dinner and baths and legos and dress-up and stories, wow. you just want to get yourself some oreos and an ice cold glass of milk (brian), prop your feet up, and waste 2 hours on facebook (me). but we got a wild hair and thought, "hey! let's make our cabinets all actually match!" so we took a couple of weeks in august and got all the insides painted. and as we painted, i'm almost sure i saw a family of pigs fly by my kitchen window. here's the cabinets with the blue-gray primer on them. apparently, this primer helps the color of the paint stick better?!?!!?? it also makes three coats of white paint a necessity. i am still not sure why we used it...


all my pretty glasses and dishes survived several weeks on our kitchen table. i just about went crazy with nowhere to eat... the kids had to sit waaaay too close to one another through all of this.


and here are the white shelves i've been waiting for!!


we're all pretty happy about them.


and now we just need to get the doors finished (as in... start them). one of these days. :)

the end of august was our 6th anniversary.the day started off with beautiful flowers and a surprise present from my sweet husband: a cafe frappe' maker i really really wanted but had only mentioned one time. wow, i was excited!! brian snapped some (silly) pictures of me opening it, and those would have been perfect to include in this post.... had i not deleted them off our memory card. :( yes, we tried recovery software. there were 500+ deleted pictures that could've been recovered (including ones from last thanksgiving)... but the ones i really needed were nowhere to be found. yes, my IT-genius brother-in-law took it for a spin. no such luck. so i'm trying to get over it. just know i was excited about my cafe frappe maker, and the flowers i took lots of pictures of were just beautiful. our anniversary was off to a great start.

the actual day of our anniversary was filled with ethan's soccer game and plumbing problems, so we did not end up with a date night as we'd hoped. the plumbing problem turned out to be a major problem that only got worse over the next couple of weeks. we knew we eventually needed new sewer lines out to the road, but we did not realize that needed to happen sooner rather than later. the combination of repeatedly backed up toilets, contemplation of finances for the new sewer line, and recent family events was plenty of stress for one week. (and the kick-off of our church's wednesday night program and our homeschool co-op... just to throw a couple more things in there.) so really, it's not all that surprising that pictures got deleted off my camera the following week. i'm sure some brain cells got deleted as well!

so while i don't have any picture from our anniversary, here's the ending of our plumbing issues, which reared their ugly head on our anniversary. for better or for worse, for flowers or for plungers... right!? one guy... yes one guy...dug a trench for 70 feet of piping from our house to the street. he worked all day by himself. the same guy came the night of our anniversary. i told him he was nice, and he did great work... but that i never ever wanted to see him again. check out those roots. they really like eating through cast iron pipe.


and we'll end this post with brian's birthday... 'cause who wants to end on an expensive plumbing note!? we celebrated brian's special day with cookie cake, which is no surprise to anyone who knows him. here are the cousins helping with the candles...


i surprised brian with david barton's american heritage series dvd set, which our church is doing on wednesday nights. i miss it because i'm busy with the kids' program then, but brian has just raved and raved about it. i found the dvd set for an amazing deal over labor day weekend, and i could not wait to give it to brian for his birthday!! he was so excited about them... and even more thrilled that i got them on sale! here's our very tired family celebrating brian's birthday.


ok, so this post doesn't really seem very "summery", i know. i already wrote about our love of the pool this year, and we took a break from the beach for most of the official summer (intense heat+crowds=we'll come back in september, thank you very much.). i am happy to announce that our 3 month beach hiatus is coming to a screeching halt tomorrow!!! we are looking forward to a beautiful day at the beach... a smidge cooler and hopefully not many fellow beach-goers! i think we can squeeze in a few more beach days before fall officially takes over. but fall can come...now that i've caught you up on our summer. :)

the cutest little beach cottage...

staying in this adorable beach cottage was like stepping back in time to the 1940's (well, with a/c and other modern-day amenities!)... i loved all of the old characteristics of the house, like the hardwood floors, the wooden front porch, and the vintage clawfoot tub and old sink. besides the white paneled walls, my favorite thing about the house was the bathroom door that had a little bit sliced out of it so that it would clear the big sink!! only in an old house! i smiled everytime i shut that door! :) kristi's friends were more than generous to offer their house up to three families with a bunch of kids! i don't think they knew what they were getting into! ha! it was such a blessing to stay right across the street from the beach. that was a first for me, and we sure did love it. if i had to choose between staying in an older cottage like this and a new beach condo, i would choose this cottage in a heartbeat!






below is the bedroom that i shared with ethan.

lydia and steven slept in this room and shared a bathroom with us.
(i love these comforters!)

caroline and meredith shared this room,
which made for some early morning parties!

kristie and karina slept here.

i forgot to get a picture of eric & kristi's room...
but you get the idea of the cottageish-ness of it anyway. :)

i will end with the view from the front porch. isn't it beautiful!? the houses you see across the street were built in the 1990s. they sure did have a marvelous view of the dunes and the ocean before all these houses were here! it's still a great view, and at least the houses are tasteful!


i hope we'll be able to return to this cottage one day! we may not all fit quite as well as we did this year, since our numbers are growing, but it would be worth a try!

more vacation fun on the way....

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!