Can you resurrect the dead (blog)?

Ok...ok...I know...it's been 4 months.  Go easy on me.  So what has been going on in those past 4 months?  Well, a lot of work....and plenty of other stuff, too.  But it would take days and days and days to get it all down on paper (or in electronic format, no matter how fast I may type).  Suffice it to say that I've been catching myself coming and going a fair bit of the time.  Even now...I have the possibility of going to 3 births in the next week and a half.  That's a lot!!

So I guess I'll recap big things....children are growing.  Well.  I measured Liam's foot and hand against my own last night, and his thumb is really not much smaller than mine.  His toes reach the bottoms of my toes....and I wear a size 10 women's shoe.  So the kid's got a solid foundation to work from.  Jonah's build reminds me of my own...and my father's.  All limbs with a shorter torso.  He may not be as tall as a result, but the boy is definitely wiry.  And little miss C is just ablaze with vocabulary and is venturing into the land of potty learning.  I won't call it training, because you know who's really getting the training around here...and it isn't her.

The house is coming along.  It still doesn't feel finished, but I've decided that it never will.  I need to start a list of projects for each room so I can start to tick them off one by one.  The outside is getting the most attention at the moment with some serious relandscaping going on.  I've gone through 17 yards of mulch....and I'm not done yet.  The compost pile is growing at such a rate that I don't think I'll be able to turn it all, but the plus is that there's plenty of stuff to burn at bonfires over the summer.

My great-grandmother passed a couple of weeks ago at the age of 92 (and I was there, which was an experience in and of itself), and the day of her funeral, I left to go to a midwifery skills workshop, where I got plenty of hands on...but also managed to leave my camera.  Which sucks, but I've got a blackberry now, so I can at least get a few pictures here and there for you until the Pentax returns to my hot little hands.

The boys have 2 weeks of school left (6 days for Jonah, 10 for Liam....how quickly it goes!) and will be on break.  I will be glad for the break, but also sad, as this is likely their last year at the Waldorf school.  Finances and lack of family life just won't allow us to be able to keep sending them.

I seem to spend more time on Facebook and Twitter these days...but I'm trying to wean myself back away from that so I have more time to write here and journal what's happening in our daily lives.  You know how that goes.  I'm better off to say I'll see ya when I see ya.

Happy Birthday to Roo!

Hard to believe that two years ago I was welcoming a little baby girl into our lives.  What a difference two years makes.  She has a lot to say for just being two, and she keeps up well with her big brothers.  Here she is blowing out the candles on her ice cream cake.  J-man lends a hand with support.

She's not a girly girl much at all.  Not that it surprises me much.  Despite the sea of pink and purple clothes, she hates to wear anything in her hair (forget barrettes and pigtails for now...), and would rather be digging in the dirt and running with her brothers than playing with dolls.  Which, honestly, is fine by me.  At the same time, there is a certain tenderness to her that the boys didn't have at the same age.  She loves the kitty cats and tries to pick them up or smother them with hugs every chance she gets.  I'm looking forward to seeing where this sweet little personality goes.

Jonah waiting ever-so-patiently for his ice cream.

Liam got some snap circuits for Christmas, and he 's been counting down the days until he could use them to play Happy Birthday for his sister.  

What, snow!?

We are getting lake effect snow.  I had to clean a couple of inches of wet, heavy snow off the car this morning.  The boys were stoked about the prospect of making snowballs except that by the time we got as far south and west as the school, there was no snow.  Drove back home...it's snowing gangbusters up here and accumulating.  It is October, right?!?  Oh, yeah...I forget, it is Northeast Ohio.

Corinna says: Where are my boots!?  Snowballs, anyone?

Traverse City in October

Went to the MANA (midwives alliance of north america) conference in Traverse City a couple of weeks ago.  Had a fantastic time, met lots of great midwives, and really cemented my purpose and where I'm going.

Our room was on the 15th floor at the Grand Traverse Resort and Lodge.  What a really cool place!  Outdoor hot-tub, indoor water slide, jacuzzi tub in the room.  There were 4 of us in the room, but there was plenty of space.

I had an opportunity to practice suturing (on a chicken breast, not real people!), but it was still fun.

what a steal!

100% cashmere sweater.  Perfect size.  $3.  Really.  Man, I love thrift shopping.

yay crafting!

Dressers for all!

Ok...got some pictures of the goodies I got last weekend.  I'll split it up into multiple posts, since it would make an enormous post to do it all at once.

First, everyone has a new chest of drawers.  Our closet is really not a closet at all but a set of stairs that gives access to the attic (at the top of which is a door lying on ceiling...trippy!).  There is a hanging bar that goes across just inside the door at the bottom, but it's really not much hanging space, so we needed more drawer space.  I really want a wardrobe, and I found a beautiful antique one, but I'm not sure I want to send the money on it when it needs to have the hanging bar made lengthwise instead of widthwise.  But, man, it was a neat piece.  The only place I've been able to find wardrobes is at IKEA, but they are all very modern in style and would clash with our dressers...not to mention the fact that I don't want another particle board piece of furniture.

The boys were sharing a dresser, but between school clothes, socks, undies, jammies, and play clothes, the drawers were running over.  So now each boy has a dresser.

The baby had a dresser in her room, but it was a changing table/dresser combo, and two of the four drawers would fall out when you pull them out to put clothes in them.  She's outgrown the changing table portion of it, so she really needed a dresser with more space, and I was tired of catching the drawers each time I put clothes away.  I've gone through and cleaned out her room for the most part, and all of my craft stuff is now in bins or on shelves.  I used my labelmaker and labeled all the bins (except the big ones), so I know what's in them (even though they are clear...I still need the extra prompt).  The only things left to do in her room are to hang the shelf that our Boyd's bears collection will rest on, clean the diaper stuff out of her closet and store her other cloth diaper stuff in the attic (in the chaos that has been our life lately, I haven't kept up with cloth diapering like I had intended to, and I'm hoping she'll potty train soon), and get her a ceiling fan.  Currently there is one single can light, and given the location of her room, she really needs a fan, as her room is on the southeast corner of the house and gets plenty of sun.

The bears on her dresser are tea-dyed bears that came from a garage sale of one of my MIL's friends.  They have such personality!  The lamp is another vintage hurricane lamp that I found at the secondhand store.  Both top and bottom light up, and I love the flower detail on the body of the lamp.

I also found a day bed for Roo's room at the second hand store that has a trundle underneath that expands to be about the same height as the daybed for when guests come.  My grandma on my dad's side is a wonderful portrait artist, and she did a painting of a couple of girls dressed as princesses blowing bubbles, and I've always loved this painting.  My mom let me have it not long before we moved, and I've been wanting to hang it in her room since.  It really needs to be framed, but I couldn't wait any longer to put it up.

wooly bears

Fall is upon us.  The wooly bears have invaded, which is a sure sign that the weather is about to get cooler.  I'm really not ready for it.  It seems that this spring and summer just flew past with all that we had going on.  First it was getting ready for the spring auction (and I didn't make anything :( ), then it was birth stuff on and off all May, June was all about getting ready and going to Germany, July was getting caught up on painting that really needed to be done and then my great-grandfather passing away, August was about Liam's birthday and going back to Indiana to bring home some of my great-grandmother's things and then getting the kids ready to go back to school, and so far September has been all about surviving getting my LSAT teaching prep done.  To say I miss having my old rhythm would be an understatement.  I haven't done any crafting in months, partly due to the fact that it was all in boxes and not accessible in the disaster of Miss C's room and partly due to the lack of time.  I didn't feel comfortable taking the time to sit and craft when there were rooms to clean, things to organize, stuff to purge.

Things feel like they are a little closer to coming together.  I've decided that this is a process that will never feel finished, but at least I'm almost to the point where I can feel like I can do something other than obsess about what needs to be done on the house.  I'll be posting a room by room synopsis of what has been done and where we're going with things over the next little bit.

I've learned a little about the things I really like in terms of style, and I've also learned that I've inherited the second-hand bug from my dad's side of the family.  In addition to the wonderful vintage goodies I brought home from Indiana, I've been picking up some here and there at the second hand store.  I'll have to share those with you too.  I've realized that I really like vintage, which I guess makes sense considering some of my favorite bloggers do too.

Anyway, I miss posting about what's been going on with all of us, and hopefully you've missed reading about it.

Oh, so the title is wooly bears...guess I should share about them?  I've always been a caterpillar kind of girl.  Loved the wooly bears when I was a kid, and I can remember ending up with itches in the webs of my fingers from spending so much time picking them up, holding them, petting them, and making them my wiggly little playmates.  So imagine my delight when while weeding yesterday I found a few of them curled up in the tall grass.  I wanted to share my excitement with the boys, so I gave a holler for them.  Jonah was Johnny-on-the-spot and couldn't get a hold of one fast enough.  He carried it around, petted it, and took it in to show Daddie (who promptly hollered for him to take it out, which is how I knew it ended up in the house in the first place!).  So now my little J-man is a wooly bear guy too.  Miss C. couldn't be bothered to touch one, as she was a little afraid of the fact that they move when you do.  Liam thought they were neat but didn't think he liked the tickly feeling he got when they moved.  Jonah, however, couldn't get enough.  Since yesterday, he's been on the lookout.

What are cousins for?

Went down to C-bus this weekend for a meeting about birth, and we overnighted with Auntie M. and Uncle K.  Cousin R. is getting really big...

Quit growing, would ya, kid?!  Don't make me put a brick on your head.

Really!?!

Lovely flowers sent by my best friend

Ok...so I totally was snowed (well...both literally and figuratively over February and March!) when I thought I was going to be able to get here to post more often.  Work has been crazy over the past few months, and with all the changes going on here, I'm lucky to keep up most days.

Liam is back at the Waldorf school (long story), so I've been spending a bit more time in the car and hanging out at the school than I did last semester.  Many weeks I've been teaching 5-6 days, so hubby and I have been ships passing in the night...or the evening as it were.

We're trying to get settled in at the new house.  We have most of the boxes unpacked, and there's still a lot of purging left to do.  We have the downstairs mostly purged and fairly organized.  It's just the laundry, dishes, toys, and paperwork piling up that we have to get under control.

The upstairs, well, it needs a little work, shall we say.  I always feel more inspired and energetic once the sun starts lingering longer, so hopefully I can make some progress there soon.  With the weather finally breaking here for a week or so, the kids and I have been out in the front yard trying to get our 3/4 acre under control.  Wow...that's a lot of work!  We've managed to edge along the front bed, get the sticks into a few piles, pull a few weeds, and reassemble some of the outdoor toys.  Our back yard is pretty swampy still, so there hasn't been as much done back there as I would like.

Jonah makes like a cat and catches a nap

Hubby has been busily working on papers to submit for two conferences abroad.  One in Vancouver and one in Berlin.  So Roo and I will be making the trip to Berlin with him this year. Ich spreche ein bisschen Deutsch, so es wird gut sein. (I speak a little German, so it will be good)  Two international trips before the age of 2 for the baby.  Pretty lucky, that girl.  Too bad she won't remember a lick of it.  Good thing we have cameras!

I'm planning on uploading some pictures that I took of the snow, ic

e, and blizzard we had over the winter.  Just so we can be glad that it's spring!

And seriously...I need to get the rest of Rome uploaded before the 1 year anniversary of our trip gets here.  That doesn't leave much time!  Miss you all!

Beds are for jumping...but where do you sleep?

The boys have been working on some interesting places to sleep lately. Particularly our little J-man. When we were staying with Cliff's folks, the boys had taken to sleeping under the desk, next to the sewing table, or in the closet of the room they were in. Anywhere but actually on the air mattress or in the bed.

We have two beds for the boys here at the new place. Liam has his old loft bed and Jonah has a regular twin. The beds have been placed on opposite ends of the room so as to discourage bedtime hijinx (not that it works...but you know making effort and all). So under Liam's loft has become the fort and with all the stuff in their room at the moment (bins and things), they've really made some tight quarters. One night I came in and found Jonah sleeping in the middle of the floor on the foam mats under nothing but a flannel sheet. Another night he was under Liam's bed sleeping on the box my wedding gown is stored in.

Today he's been asking to sleep under the kitchen table. When I said that maybe on a night where he doesn't have to go to school the next day, he seemed to concede. So this afternoon I took the baby up for a nap. I may have dozed for a minute or two but I woke to the phone ringing. I came down to answer, and while flipping through the menu to look at the missed calls, I couldn't help but hear heavy, even breathing. I looked in the fireplace room -- nothing. I looked in the family room -- nothing. I came back to the kitchen and it got louder. Under the table, on the hardwood floor with nothing but a flannel sheet and his pillow, snoozed Jonah.

I didn't catch it on film before he woke up (the phone rang a third time and I actually got it...). Our new schedule of getting up and driving to school every morning (more stuff for another post) and getting used to being in the new house is wearing our little man out. Just the other day I caught this:

Just a few minutes previous to this picture, he was humming jingle bells to himself and pushing the trucks on the table. Maybe we all need a little more afternoon napping.

Wildlife

Now that we're in the new house, I'm still getting adjusted to the feel of the place. The kitchen is definitely the heart of this home. When you walk in the front door, it's directly ahead, welcoming you in. I've felt the need to be cooking and baking more now that we have appliances, which means there may also be inviting smells to bring you in too.

Our kitchen and dining area face the back of the house and our lovely back yard. Just before we first moved in, I was moving things around and glanced out the dining room window. Four deer moved in quick procession along the side yard and through the back yard off into the neighbors trees. Since moving in, there has been a repeat performance in the opposite direction of five deer. I love that I can look out the window and I just might see some wildlife right outside. We also have many of the birds typical to this area. It seems there are more chickadees here than the cheeky little house sparrows that I'd grown to love at our old place.

The view out our kitchen window

The snow has proved to be very interesting in all of this. Something of the four-legged variety with paws (seems bigger than a cat), makes a daily trudge through our yard, always following the same path right up near the dining room door and around the deck. I keep hoping I'll catch a glimpse but no luck yet. The only way I know that it's been through are the fresh tracks in the snow. It doesn't take long for fresh, pristine powder in our back yard to become riddled with tracks and paths made by little creatures. A bunny left little paw prints in the snow on our front porch last weekend and before the snow started melting yesterday, there were tracks going along the back trees, through the yard, and along the fence. I know for certain that they all belonged to quadrupeds and not my little bipeds, as their activity has been restricted to shoveling the snow in the front of the house.

What are you sneaky little thing?

Cute overload

Getting ready to leave to teach, so gonna have to be short. Went to the thrift store last week and got a few things for the girl. Little corduroy jumper dresses and a pair of pink leather mary janes that were just the right size. One of the jumpers matched a tee that I'd gotten the last time I thrifted for her. She's got 4 teeth through now, and it seems she may have my gap between the front two (well...like I had when I was little anyway. I'll have to dig up the pic.)

Been playing with the new camera some too. So here are some cute pics to brighten your day. Well...they did mine, anyway. Have other things to post about but not enough time to do it. Go figure.

Big girls get cake

Back again for my once monthly post. I'm hoping now that posting will start to become more regular. We are officially in the new house as of last weekend (I was adamant that we were in before the new year) and finally starting to get settled in. Still many boxes to move around, much purging that has been done (and more to do), but all in all, it seems to be turning out.

Christmas was not as great as some years past, as I came down with the that killer cold virus mere hours after scoring my first two goals in soccer the Saturday before Christmas. I was completely down with fever, chills, aches, cough, etc., for 4 days before I felt even halfway human. By down I mean must lay down all day can't even knit sick. So I got it on Saturday, Liam got it on Christmas eve, Miss C. came down Christmas Day, Jonah had a variant of it the same time Liam did (though it didn't slow him down as much...something about the orneriness of that boy), Cliff had a variant of it the day or two after Christmas, and MIL also came down with her usual upper respiratory stuff after Christmas. We all managed to get through thanks to everyone chipping in. Needless to say, I was so sick that being in the house before Christmas wasn't going to happen. But now we're here and all is well.

The new year has been ushered in with plenty of excitement. Our little baby is not such a baby now. Our Roo turned 1 yesterday, and to celebrate, I whipped up a cake. I've only ever once before tried to make a cake from scratch, and the last cake I made was less than stellar. I thought I'd try my hand at a red velvet cake, so I scoured the internets for a decent recipe. Luckily, I had most everything on hand, though I didn't have enough red food coloring to get the truly red color. I frosted it with cream cheese frosting (yum), and here is the resulting cake...with one candle for the girl.


She seemed to enjoy the cake, even though it wasn't the best cake ever. It was good, don't get me wrong, but it wasn't fantastic. It was all about the process for me. Miss C. never did get all covered in cake, as she was very carefully eating it with one hand (and fork).

Mmmm...might have to go have a piece....

So what has our girl learned to do this year? Well...all the usual baby things like rolling over and sitting. She's been walking now since the beginning of November and has added dancing to her repertoire. Dancing involves spinning in a circle with hands outstretched while clicking her tongue. Sooooo cute. She can wave bye-bye and use her hands to tell you when she wants more. She's said mama, dada, can call for the boys, and generally gets her point across despite her limited vocabulary. She loves oatmeal and hot showers and she's not allowed to date till she's at least 20. All around she's this energetic, sweet little person that we're all growing fonder of each day.

Second-hand finds

I'm on the once a month posting kick at the moment. Not because I'm not thinking about you all, but because I can't manage to scratch together the time it takes to really put together a post. So here's the quick 'n' dirty lowdown. No, not in the new house yet. Yes, counting the days till it does happen (and literally...could be days now...electricians finish next week). Kitchen is almost finished. Only thing keeping us out is the fact that the only appliance hooked up is the fridge.

We arranged the furniture for the downstairs, and the futon was going to be too big for the space, yet we needed more seating than just our sofa, so off to the secondhand store I went. Actually, I was really going to look for a wardrobe as we don't really have a downstairs closet. Instead, I found these:

A vintage 1950s sewing cabinet complete with functioning machine. I initially fell for the table because it was a great size for our front entry, and I loved the color. I realized on closer inspection that it had a door, and when I opened it, voila!

It has the original attachments, a vintage pattern for a blouse, and some thread. It needs a couple of the rubber parts replaced, but other than that, it actually does sew.

It also came with a chair that looks pretty beat up, but if you pull the seat off the top, there is storage inside. Makes a great chair to go with something else I found.

Second find is this hurricane lamp. My great-grandparents (who are in their 90s) have some in their home currently, and growing up my mom had a couple that we eventually broke the glass in, but I've always loved the style. I was on my way out of the store when I saw this one and how perfectly it matches the blues in our bedroom and had to have it. You can light up the bottom only, top only, or both.


Third find is this little desk. It's now residing behind the sofa (show you in a minute) with the chair that came with the sewing table, and is a perfect place for me to work downstairs. I'm working there as I type this. The lady who had it before painted dark paint over top of the glossy finish, so the paint is coming off in places where things have rubbed against it. I actually think it adds to the charm of the piece, and when I finally do get around to refinishing it, I'll probably keep it a darker color.

Last find is a loveseat that was priced at $100. It has fantastic bones, feels like it's barely been used, and really only needs a good steaming (it's really not that dirty!). The true color is an ivory/cream. The shape goes well with the pieces we already have, and I'll likely make a slipcover for it.

Needless to say, I didn't find the wardrobe I was looking for, but I spent under $200 for everything I showed here. The thing I love about shopping this way is finding interesting pieces that have a history behind them, that have some life in them, and even though I don't know what that history is (I know a little about the desk, as there were some old bills shoved in behind the drawers), it is fun to speculate about who had them before I found them. It's very easy to go into the secondhand shop and be overwhelmed by all the stuff (much of it is junk). I always make sure I spend a lot of time, and I go through the entire store several times very slowly, because it really is easy to miss a great find if you go too fast.

Look who's walking...

She's really decided in the past day or two that two legs are the way to go. Sometimes anyway. Crawling is still faster at the moment, but she's getting braver by the minute.

Vacuum cleaner dance

She's got a new groove going....I think it will catch on, don't you?