A while back I told you I’d show you the new art work and rearranging I’ve done in our family room.  I did show you my new pillows, framed quotes, and my mantel.  Here’s the rest of it.

You can see what it used to look like here.   We moved the piano into this room and moved the big kid drawing table into my art room.  This has worked much better for the flow of our days.  Every morning we gather after breakfast with some singing and a prayer.  With the piano in near my desk, sewing machine, and spinning chair it was often a tradition that caused me more stress than pleasure.  Someone (read Logan) was always spinning in my chair, turning on my sewing machine, crashing into things, climbing on furniture not intended to be climbed on, being completely distracted by a book.  We haven’t eliminated the book distraction with this set-up, but there is no spinning chair or sewing machine.  Much better.

I splurged on some new alphabet art I’ve long been wanting.  I love Ida Pearle’s paper cut illustrations and thought the alphabet cards would fit well in our learning space.

I also gifted myself this wooden laser cut alphabet from bookhou.

Inspired by this homeschool space I found some fun field guide posters.  We use the bird one quite a lot.  Ian has been really interested in the human body, so I thought the skeletal system poster would be fitting for us now too.  Someday I think I’d like to add a small one with some more color — leaves or mushrooms or backyard bugs.  Or maybe a colorful embroidered alphabet sampler.  Something colorful, anyway.

I spruced up the curtains that hide the deep shelves crammed with extra school stuff and a couple of toy baskets with some patchwork stripes.  They make me happy.

Here’s another view of the old piano.  Every time we’ve moved the movers are incredulous.  It is in pretty sad shape, but it works pretty well, I think it’s pretty, and it’s ours.  Barry wants to paint it this summer.  I’m not sure how I feel about that.  It could be fun, but I also like that it is big and dark to balance our big and dark couch on the other side of the room.   I don’t know what color I’d want either.  I think maybe I’ll paint the bench and see what I think from there.

So, there you have it– our everything room.  Always a work in progress.

First off– I want to be a better blogger.  I’ve really been slacking lately.  I have a goal to write here every day this week.  (Week long goals are the most realistic for me– anything longer and I’m bound to fall off the wagon.)  What do you want to hear about?  What makes you hop over here and read what I write?  Any questions I could answer?  Anything you want to know my thoughts on?  Please, please help me out with suggestions.  I’m sure my week of posts will be more interesting if you do.

Anyway…

I have birthday posts for both Jonah and Brenna to catch up on, but I’m trumping those with this one first.  Every year on the week of my birthday Barry travels to be an Air Force judge for the International Science and Engineering Fair.  When Hunter was tiny I went along and last year Brenna joined him for a day.  This year the plan was just for him to go on his own but be home for Brenna’s birthday, leaving late that night, then be home in time to take another day off for my birthday.  That’s the plan I was in on anyway.  Meanwhile, he was cooking up another plan which included finding an overnight babysitter and purchasing plane tickets.  On my Mother’s Day my card was a printout of MY flight itinerary.  What a fun surprise!

I shopped while he perused the science projects, then we went to the beach.

(We packed light and just used my phone for a camera.)

We rented bikes and rode at a leisurely pregnant lady pace.

We rode the Ferris wheel on Santa Monica pier.

We braved the traffic and wound our way through Beverly Hills in search of trendy food from a truck to get an authentic LA experience.

We had an all around great time!  I know I am so spoiled and lucky to live this life I live.  Happy birthday to me!  (33 is still early 30s, right?)

Hope your day is a happy one!

I’ve been having fun redecorating the family room walls, but I’m not quite ready to take pictures of it all and say I’m done.   I decided today that I need to do something different in my fireplace mantel/ cubby thing so I’ve been looking for inspiring mantel arrangements and dreaming up what I could do with what I already have instead of the family photos that have been there for a year and a half.  (And, to be honest taking photos of just one corner of the room is much easier because I can keep the baskets of unfolded laundry and explosion of k-nex behind me.)

What I can say is done is the sewing of these pillows and some quotes to hang on the wall.  I have a friend who had a pretty quote printed as a photo at Costco, framed it, and gave it to me for Christmas– and I thought it was genius!  So, I took some sayings I’ve wanted displayed in my house somehow, made them into big images using Inkscape (which is kind of like Adobe Illustrator, but free), printed them as photos at Costco, and framed them.  They’ve been done for a while.  I just decided they should go here.

The top one is from Doctrine and Covenants 29:34 where the Lord says “All things unto me are spiritual.”  It’s a good reminder when I’m cooking dinner, picking up toys, helping with math, ignoring laundry that even all the mundane things that need my attention have a purpose–  they’re spiritual.  The second is a quote from Charlotte Mason that says “Education is the atmosphere we breathe, the envelope of wonder that surrounds us, held by the gravity of our daily habits.”

The 2 colorful pillows were so fun for me to make.  They’re basically 4 little quilts, pieced and quilted and turned into pillows.  Here’s one side of the first one:

I used the Joel Dewberry Modern Meadow fat quarters I had been saving to make another quilt like this.  I never was really going to get around to making that quilt, and I decided this is a much better way to enjoy the fabric anyway.

This is the other side.

I got a little crazier with the second pillow.

This one is just quilted with straight lines.

I loved making these because I got to do everything involved in making a quilt, but on a much more immediate, instant gratification scale– and I can see and enjoy them every day.

I also used some home decorator weight fabric I had in my stash to add one plain pillow.  It took all of 20 minutes (invisible zipper and all).

Here’s all 3 again in a different corner:

Obviously these are usually on the floor being jumped on or laid on, but they looked pretty here for a little while.   I’m hoping at some point this year I can get a few Rollie Pollies made for jumping and rolling and reading.  We’ll see.  I probably really should be replenishing my supply of baby girl things– and will probably be more excited about doing that as the days go on.

So, anyone have some favorite mantel photos they want to send me links too?  Feel free to leave them in the comments!

Want to see into my art room?  I tidied it last Saturday and it’s stayed in pretty good shape for a whole week!  I am certainly organizationally challenged and always have been.  In high school, my best friend always bought me some containers and went through and decluttered and cleaned up my bedroom for my birthday.  Now I live with a different best friend and he generally has a big hand in helping me keep my space under control (like throwing a quilt-in-progress over my drafting table to cover the mess).

But this time I did it all by myself!  This is huge!

This is the view from the front room of our house.  Our creative space is what would normally be a formal dining room, but I need to be able to work on making things right in the heart of our home throughout the day, so this is the perfect place to have my craft space.

I’ve got a big Expedit shelf from Ikea with a desk attached.  There’s plenty of room for bins of fabric, boxes of precious metal clay stuff, printmaking supplies, knitting stuff, other crafty odds and ends, our little Tivoli stereo, and some pretty things too.

I’ve got some other Ikea cup things to hold pencils, markers, scissors, pliers– you know, all that stuff that needs to be right there for the taking.

In the big window is my drafting table.  It was a dumpster find of Barry’s when we were in college and I seriously could not imagine life without it.  It is easily one of my very favorite pieces of furniture in our house.  My gecko lives in the corner over my Gocco and block printing stuff.  Underneath my drafting table are rolls of paper, interfacing, contact paper, and baskets of mending, batting and foam.  Oh, and a couple of quilts destined for Humanitarian Services.

Look up, and there are the birds!

Opposite the window wall is the kids’ drawing table.  One of these weekends we’ll make a big magnet board so that Ian won’t need to tape his paintings to the wall.

Here are a few more pictures for good measure.

I love the old Singer from Barry’s aunt.  It needs rewiring to work, but it’s really fun to look at anyway.

A shelf of pretty stuff.  I spun thread and then needle punched the fabric for that little bear years ago.  I still really like him.

I love these under-shelf wire baskets I found at the Container Store.

And here’s a sneak peek to another room I’ve been rearranging and hanging new artwork in.  I think I’ll be ready to show it to you next week.

Barry surprised me with a new phone on Monday.  The one had was from 2003– but his is the one that really needs replacing.  We got it when we lived in Albuquerque– so 2001 probably?  It has a greenish screen with pixelated gray text.  He had to hold the battery on with tape for a while until he found its discarded twin in a box of junk and switched batteries with it.

Anyway, as I was saying, I got a new phone.  It’s pretty cool.  It’s an iPhone 4.  It can do everything but fold laundry.  If you find the app for that make sure you let me know.

I’m having fun with the Hipstamatic.  Changing lenses and flashes and film with a flick of my finger is so fun.  I’ve never been much into technology and games (except for tetris while I was supposed to be writing papers in college), but I have to say this gadget is pretty cool.  I mean, it reminds me when it’s time to take kids to karate– my hand written paper planners could never do that for me, so even things that were written down in multiple places would get forgotten.

And my kids can’t keep their hands off of it.  I told them I will not put kid tempting games on it because it needs to be a PHONE– but maybe I could find a good knitting app…

Oh, this baby of mine, this rambunctious, adorable, hilarious, busy, fuzzy, chubby little person had a birthday.  If you ask him how old he is he says, “numbuh doo.”  Saying it any other way is just not right.

He is obsessed with snowmen so he naturally wanted a “mo-man cake,” so we gladly obliged.  The siblings did the decorating.

Though he really is the center of attention most of the time I think he was happy to be the center of it for his little party.  Granny was still here from our weekend away.  (Why do I not have any pictures of Granny?)  But all he really needed to make everything special was a cake with a candle to blow out

and some ice cream.

I love 2!  I think it is the funnest, cutest stage.  He can talk– but still in his own way.  He plays interactively with his siblings.  He makes me call him “Big Mo-man” or “Good Guy” or whatever it is he decides to be.  He asks one word questions and the question mark is the look on his face.  It’s just fun and cute all around.

Happy birthday bub!

(There’s something hand made in that present I’ll show you tomorrow.)

{this moment} – A Friday ritual. A single photo – no words – capturing a moment from the week. A simple, special, extraordinary moment. A moment I want to pause, savor and remember.

On December 22nd Barry was promoted to be a Major in the Air Force.  It was a big day and a really inspirational event.

For well over a month the kids sang the national anthem as our opening song for school just to get ready for this day.  We even divided the parts up– Ian starting with a solo on the first line, then Logan on the next line, Jonah and Logan together on the third, Jonah solo for the 4th, Brenna alone on the next two high lines, and then the grand finally with all of them together.

I know I’m probably a bit biased, but it was the cutest thing ever.  They didn’t seem a bit nervous and all sang their parts perfectly.  From where I was at the piano I could see the audience full of the biggest smiles and even a few tears of joy.  It was the perfect start.

The Wing Commander Colonel Crozier agreed to do the promotion, which was a big honor.  He really exemplifies a leader in the way he carries himself, how personable he is, and the skill with which he engages a crowd when he speaks publicly.  He pulled our family aside just before the ceremony began, introduced himself to the kids and I and to Barry’s parents, and got the scoop on how Barry and I met.

Before Barry got all the new rank pinned on his uniform and renewed his oath of office Colonel Crozier spoke for quite awhile.  He didn’t hold a single note in his hand, but went assignment by assignment through Barry’s career citing all the cool things he did– test fired an oxygen-iodine laser a record number of times, ranked #1 Company Grade Officer at every assignment he’s had, pioneered really cool computational fluid dynamics stuff I don’t know how to say, won awards, got into the super elite engineer honor society, gradutated from AFIT with a 3.77 gpa, performed really essential stuff for the Defense Satellite Program– with perfect knowledge and specificity.  It was impressive to hear how amazing my husband is in such a formal way.  I hear about things casually from time to time, but never all at once in this context.  The kids all left saying, “We knew Dad was super awesome, but we didn’t know he was THAT super awesome!”

Then we all got to help but the new rank stuff on his uniform.

When Colonel Crozier administered the Oath of Office he didn’t just say, “I, state your name” and then pause– he said the ENTIRE thing

and then Barry repeated the ENTIRE thing.  It was really moving and really got the meaning of the oath across to those of us watching and listening.  And that was it!

Barry spoke for a little bit and gave each of us little gifts, then we ate cake with all the people that came to watch.  (There were between 50 and 60 people there I’d say.  Maybe more. ) Really, the main thing he insisted on having was THE cake from Whole Foods with layers of real berries.  It was good cake.  Really good cake.

The end.

Oh and there are a few more photos on my flickr here.

Barry had been dreaming of getting a GoPro for Christmas– but I don’t think he thought he’d really get one.  I gathered up some of my SweetPod money and splurged on one for him.  He’s made videos of himself uni-cycling, jumping on the trampoline, and sledding.  He also had the bright idea as he was leaving the house one day to set it up in time lapse mode in the living room just to see what really goes on when we’re not at home.

Ellie is NOT allowed on the furniture and never is on it when we’re in sight.  I guess when we’re gone she rules the roost.