wrapping up summer

Audrey is napping and I don't trust myself to make a coherent post with real words, so I'm just going to share some pictures of the things that have been happening in the last couple of weeks!

I had a rollerskating party!

We found a Batman bus.. ?!

We had a Troll 2 party and ate delicious key lime pie!

Audrey went crazy!  And got a ton of new teeth!

Ahh.. It's been busy.  Our calendar is clearing up and the weather is cooling down.  It's fantastic outside, and inside I'm trying to organize my brain and life!  There is a baby who controls my schedule and she won't let me slow down.

birthday week!

My birthday week has arrived!  Last year, when I was pregnant, I didn't feel like celebrating at all.  I was far too excited about the tiny person inside of me to even think about myself.  It may have been, historically speaking, the lamest birthday ever.  But this year I'm planning multiple festivities, and it's going to last for at least 2 weeks.  Party on!

An early present from my sister just arrived in the mail.  This mug!  It makes me so happy.  Yes, Lionel Richie, I WAS looking for tea.  I opened it just in time for my afternoon cuppa, which has become a daily ritual during Audrey's final nap of the day.

Left: before.  Right: after!  So much lighter, up or down!

I also treated myself to an overdue haircut this past weekend.  And when I say "treated," yes, I do mean that I used a $6.99 coupon and went to Great Clips!  My hair is so unruly that you can never tell the difference.  I don't know why I get tricked into trying to grow my hair out every once in a while.  It's usually just a bad idea, and especially so now that I have a tiny person who loves to rip hair out of my head!  It just wasn't working out. This shorter style is a HUGE improvement!

Now, back to my tea...

good morning!

I think Audrey read my last blog post and decided to give us a break.  She's been sleeping through the night since then!  (But PLEASE, baby, don't read this and go the other way again.)  It makes such a huge difference... I've been in the best mood ever for the last few days.  Now when she wakes up around 5 or 5:30 to eat, if she won't go back to sleep in her crib, I put her in our bed and we snuggle a while.  Sometimes she falls asleep for an hour or two, which is awesome.  Sometimes not, which is okay too.  Nothing better to wake you up than a little baby crawling all over you.

Robert got in on the cuddling too, and he brought some of our favorite cookbooks because we were working on the menu for next week.

Here's Audrey loving on the Joy the Baker Cookbook.  It's THE BEST.  (Like, every time we look through that book we go a little bit nuts.  We've made so many of her recipes!)  Do you know JTB?  She's kind of our imaginary best friend around here.  She's just the coolest. We listen to her podcast every Thursday too!  It's seriously entertaining stuff.

Happy Wednesday!

Lovely

Weird story: Once upon a time... I was having a little crafting party with a friend.  This was before the baby came along, so Robert didn't have anything to do.  He decided to do a little crafting of his own, and drew a fabulous self portrait with crayons.  Underneath his face, he used stencils to spell out LOVELY.

We were greatly amused.  Alexandra asked to borrow the picture so that she could make some copies to put on people's desks at work.  (They're co-worker buddies!)  Just one or two people, we thought.  But the following week, nearly everyone at the office had a copy of this bad boy.  Even people that Robert didn't know... they began recognizing him because they'd seen the picture around!  Portraits of other coworkers were commissioned.  It was an exciting time.

One day Robert showed up at work, and everyone had one of these shirts.  His boss decided to surprise him by having t-shirts made for everyone on the team.  We each own one now, and wear them often.  In fact, when I was pregnant I often felt like a little totem pole... under my head was a drawing of my husband's, and then there was the big baby bump.  Robert's coworkers made it their mission to wear these shirts out into the world and go as many strange places as possible with them.  One girl actually got baptized wearing the Lovely shirt.  It's been on camping trips.  It was present at the hospital when Audrey was born.  And this morning...

Someone took it to New York and went to a taping of the Today show!  So Robert's little cartoon face appeared on TV.  What a happy surprise!  For a little inside joke this has really gone far.  It's too bad that the t-shirt doesn't have gold glitter on the mustache like the original drawing...

Happy Friday!

painting detective

I've had a few days off recently, and finally decided to tackle one of the larger projects I've had on my to-do list. We've been in our house for over 6 months, and I'm finally getting around to repainting the baseboards!

Ugly baseboards in our bedroom!

Some of the rooms in our house are just fine, but the bedrooms show evidence of many paint changes that were never quite finalized. For example: the above picture, taken in our bedroom. As I've been repainting, I've pieced together the history of this room, like a detective. Here's what I think is going on...

At some point in time, our bedroom was wallpapered. Later on, someone painted over the wallpaper with red. Also at some point, the trim around the room was painted green.... and then someone put carpet in the room. Somebody repainted the trim a white color, obviously while the carpet was still in. And then someone came along, painted the room green, and pulled up the carpet. This is where we came into the story! The baseboards are cream with a layer of green at the bottom, as well as carpet fibers still stuck in the corners.

I've been going around sanding down the weird texture where the carpet met the wood (I guess it's glue I'm sanding off?), pulling bits off carpet off, and repainting everything white. After this I'll need to touch up the green paint, because you can still see some red at the edges. The reason I believe there's wallpaper under there is that the paint seems to curl up at the edges, making it really hard to get a clean line. Maybe one day we'll strip everything down and see what's under there! For now, I just want a pretty cover-up job. That's what all of the previous residents tried to do, I suppose. Everyone who's lived in this house for the past 48 years has been really lazy. That's what I'm going to assume. We will carry on the tradition.

P.S. We saw the Pixies last weekend!! Anyone who's interested can check out my pictures here. I'm planning a bigger post for later about it -- I made a few videos too! Robert wants to clean up the sound on them before we put them online. He's a magician or something.

what can i say?

I am obviously being a terrible blogger right now!

I sit in front of a computer all day at work, so when I get home I don't really feel like getting near one. [And, sweet employee that I am, I haven't been using the internet at work to catch up on blog reading... YET] Instead, in my down time at home, I've been hanging out with some newly acquired toys: a hula hoop, a Hello Kitty coloring book, Picross 3D for the Nintendo DS. I can't even use my brain to think about real things anymore. I think I've turned into a 7 year old.

These are some of Robert's toys - Lego space cop and.. a bad guy?

If you walked into my house right now, you would think that there MUST be some children around... but it's just us.

I think it's going to be pretty quiet around here until I get some real time off. I haven't even taken any pictures in the last 2 weeks. I will be back in the not-too-distant future!

pink palace museum

Uh oh, I went a whole week without posting! It felt like a month. Here are the predictable apologies for being very busy. Things have balanced out quite a bit, though: I am way less stressed than I was a couple of weeks ago. I began working for a non-profit organization last week, and it's very close to my home. I was originally going to be part-time, but they've asked me to start out full-time just until I finish up this first project I'm working on. I won't share many details, but the important part is that I really like the work and I feel content with everything!

Here are some pictures from our (anniversary/birthday/graduation) visit to Memphis last weekend-- specifically our visit to the Pink Palace Museum! This was my second visit to the museum, and I believe we really only go there because it's a piece of nostalgia from Robert's childhood. Unfortunately, the museum seems to have very little funding and the exhibits haven't really been updated since the 80s. We mostly just like to pose with the scary mannequins.

At least they have a narwhal tusk!! They also have a shrunken head, but we didn't get around to it this time.

Here you use your imagination to "get small" and then look through some microscopes.

Or just pretend you have shadow friends.

They keep this dinosaur around, even though you can see he's falling apart. In the past he would stomp and roar if you gave him a quarter. He doesn't do anything now.

New friend?

He's a cool guy.

Next up: Early America! This picture always reminds me of Rasputina.

Are you ready for some mannequins? I'm leaving out the guy with the gangrenous foot (being sawed off by another mannequin). It's really gross.

Why, hello!

A pink-haired leprechaun is about to receive a shot from a jovial doctor... ?

This part always makes me cringe. You REALLY don't want to know what those tools are all for.

That's.. it. That's all I've got. Sweet dreams! I'll try to set up some more pleasant / less bizarre posts for this week. I'll also try to come round and visit everyone's blogs! Sorry I've been flaky!

mother's day: a dinosaur story

Today is Mother's Day here in America! Perhaps in some other places, too: it's hard to keep up with all of the different holidays. Anyhow, if it's Mother's Day where you live, remember to show your mom some appreciation! Here is my post from last year, complete with some cute photos of my mom from the '70s. This year I'm going to do something a little different. Honestly, I just want to show you some dinosaur pictures. And I figured this could somehow fall under the category of motherly things.

During the weekend of the great flood, Robert and I spent our indoors time hatching a dinosaur egg that some friends gave to us. What follows is the photo log we made so we could keep everyone updated with the latest happenings of the baby dino. Robert took about half of these pictures. Enjoy!

The experiment began Friday night. Dino egg went into the water.

This is how it looked when we woke up Saturday.

Things began happening fairly quickly.

We ate some scrambled eggs. A little pink dinosaur looked on in wonder.

Around 10 a.m., something began to emerge!

An eye appeared around noon.

Around 3 p.m. we saw what it's head sort of looked like!

Just an hour later we saw a smile!

5 p.m. - nothing much was happening, but Robert started picking at the egg.

We had strawberry pancakes for dinner. YUM! I could eat breakfast foods for every meal. Sometimes I do.

Just before we went to bed Saturday night... we'd been chipping at the egg again. Impatient!

Next morning: you can see his neck grew longer!

Sunday, 2 p.m.: A little more peeling away at the egg revealed his lumpy legs.

2 hours later: we finally took him out of the egg shell and let him just soak some more, hoping his tail and legs would get longer.

His legs got a little chunkier, but never longer! And the tail stayed stubby. After a couple days of extra soaking, we decided he was done growing. He's all dried out now!

In other news, I began working on Friday! It's just a 2-week temporary position, but already it feels so nice to keep busy all day. A little hectic after not working full-time in almost a year and a half... but I'm enjoying it! I'm still adjusting to the time constraints and not being online all day, so I may be a little scarce around here. Just a warning-- If you don't hear from me for a bit, you know what I'm up to: getting paper cuts!

As far as post-flood updates, things are going fine around our house. Still may need some roof repairs, and we're still under water restrictions [which is still driving me crazy because it means cutting back on doing dishes and laundry], but things are otherwise fine! That's just my case, however. Can't forget that there are still people in the Nashville area (and other places) who are without homes because of the flood!

spring is really really here!

I hope everyone had a nice weekend! Despite the fact that our water heater has been busted since Friday (and will not be replaced until tomorrow...), this weekend actually turned out to be quite nice.

I found this duck in our front yard a couple of weeks ago. I like him, even though he needs a bath.

This is as close as we got to Easter eggs: naturally green & blue eggs from Araucana chickens!

Can I tell you a secret? I met some more baby goats yesterday. Robert got to meet them too! Oh... I guess one picture won't hurt! Any more and I might need to change the name of this blog to "baby goat."

I love you, baby goat.

I have baby goat fever. You can probably tell.

I have a big backlog of photos that I've been meaning to post here for a couple of weeks - all sorts of things! I'm going to try to get them posted this week. Sometimes my priorities just get messed up, you know? House pictures are overshadowed by the urgency to show you baby goats...

quick update

I know I said I was going to schedule some blog posts for later this week, but I lied. Or forgot. Or was too busy.

So what you get now is a quick update and a "I'll be back later!" note.


Spring is here! The last two days were beautiful. Short sleeve weather, no jacket required - call it what you will. Of course, today is a big rainy mess. The kind of rainy day where you have to get up early and go get a new windshield wiper for the car at the last minute because you should have done it before a rainy day when you have to drive a long way to pick up your mom at the airport. Robert deserves a trophy for his help with that.


Look at my rabbit friend. Look at him eating a leaf! I'm so in love.

Okay, that's about all I have time for! I have a couple of hours to finish cleaning the house before I've got to head to the airport. My mom and I are going to have some fun adventures over the next couple of days-- I hope! I hope the sun comes back and we get to visit some baby goats on a farm.

I hope you all have a wonderful rest-of-the-week and exciting weekend! I will probably not be online much until the beginning of next week.

bits of the weekend

I hope everyone had a wonderful weekend! Mine was pleasant and busy. Before I get to other things, I may as well show you a few more house pictures. Robert didn't believe that I could get the house into shape for our first guests, but he was wrong!! Do I get a prize? [Joking.. he was quite appreciative of my hard work!! But I did really hear him tell his dad on the phone that it was going to be messy. Psh!] Compare to these pictures if you wish!

Finally got some curtains (at Target) to cover up the back door!

They create a nice glow during the day. Now we can control the privacy and lighting in there.

More of the front room... Updated for the essential magician poster & paper lantern.

I think things are coming along really nicely here! There are still a few rooms I haven't shown around, either because they're slightly cluttered or slightly boring. But we're getting there. I'm totally in love with this house and I don't mind taking the time to clean it. I lived in 5 different apartments before this, and never put much effort into decorating because I knew I'd be moving on soon [and I am sincerely lazy]. So this is quite refreshing!

Now, here are a few pictures from the weekend. I'm glad that Robert's family likes to go to thrift shops and estate sales; I haven't been doing much of that on my own lately! So we did some fun shopping and exploring around town, along with eating too many yummy foods.

We found a robot. The person who lives here must be exciting! They also had 2 vulture sculptures in their yard, made out of old tools.

Look what we got at an estate sale for $5...

A box full of records from the 40s! Haven't listened to any of them yet.

Thrifted dress. I didn't get my tripod out, so all pictures of the full thing were unsuccessful. It's bright and happy.

Thrifted shirt + hilarity. I heard Robert coming and knew he was going to walk right into the picture, and it apparently just DELIGHTED me.