New Project

So, it's been a while since the kid's bathroom got remodeled. And it's been longer since the den got it's makeover. I think it's high time for some home improvement around here!

This weekend Mike and I are going to tile our bathroom. It's about twice the size of the kid's bathroom and has lots of little corners and nooks to tile around. We'll have lots of interesting cuts to make. Hopefully it will go fairly smoothly. So here's the plan:

Tuesday - take off baseboards
Wednesday - remove toilet and rip up old floor
Thursday - put down backerboard
Friday - nothing!
Saturday - tile
Sunday - grout
Monday - replace baseboards
Tuesday - woo hoo! new bathroom!

This means that all six of us will be using the kid's bathroom for about a week. That's never happened before. It should be interesting! :)

I'll have lots of pictures to post of our progress. I bought the tile today. Very exciting!

Jacob's Birthday Present

My dad sent Jacob a slime making kit for his birthday. This was very intriguing to Jacob and we made one of the recipes for magnetic slime!

Here are some pictures of the slime in action. It's living in our fridge right now, but made its appearance at Jacob's school the day after we made it. Pretty cool.

Pre mixing some of the ingredients.

Mixing the magnetic powder in the cup.

Looks pretty metal-y.

Cool! That's a pretty strong magnet that we wrapped in a plastic bag (the magnetic powder gets all over everything!). The slime "jumps" up to the magnet and then you can pull it up a little ways. Jacob was very impressed. :)

The Camping Trip

So Mike and the kids (plus two boys from Zach's scout troop) went camping Friday night. They had a fun time and the kids really loved the camper. Zach had to sleep in the tent with the other boys (I guess it's a scout thing), so that didn't make him too terribly happy, but we're going to take the camper out this weekend, too, so he and I will both get our chance then. Of course, the camper only technically sleeps 4, but I was thinking that we could probably smoosh all of us in there while Cole and Jacob are still fairly small. Still, we'll take our tent just in case people protest the tight quarters. :)

Here are pictures with captions:

The camper all set up with it's pop top and the fancy bug screen to let the air in, but not the pests.

Jacob and Cole didn't want the egg breakfast that one of the scouts was cooking, so they opted for more hot dogs roasted over the fire.


The wholesome activity of playing poker and using gummi bears as poker chips. :) What you might not notice is the pretzel sticking out of Reid's mouth... they were "smoking" their pretzels while playing poker with gummi bears. :) Like I said, "Wholesome Activity".


And a good picture of the mess in the camper. I'll try to keep it a little more civilized when I go out with them this weekend. :)

VW Vanagon

Last fall, Mike and I (well, mostly Mike) purchased a 1985 VW Vanagon Camper. It has the bed seat in the back and the pop top tent with bed on top, the sink, stove, and refrigerator. It was in need of some repairs, so we took it in to a shop here that works pretty much exclusively on old VWs and Porsches. A mere 6 months later, we have our van back. :) The guy was very slow at getting everything done, but to his credit, it was a long list and there were many decisions to be made along the way.

So, Mike and I went and picked it up today just in time for Mike's camping trip with the boys this weekend. They will be so thrilled. And all the money was just about worth it when I drove in it down the street to meet Reid on his way home from the bus stop (he had an eye appointment to go to) and all his friends were in awe. :) One of them was yelling, "That is so sweet!" :)

I know we will use it for camping. We really do like to go camping. So the only question now is if it will need continual repairs. If it does, we will sadly depart with it and call it an expensive life experiment. If it seems fairly reliable for our weekend excursions (and errand running around town), then it will be a happy purchase for us for years to come.

Here is a picture of our little cutie (this is when I was driving it home after we purchased it).

DDR Mania!

We bought Mario DDR (Dance Dance Revolution) a couple of years ago for Christmas. We danced like fools for a week or two. :) Since then it's been pulled out from time to time, but in the past week, Mike has decided that he'd like to try to get some aerobic exercise and so he pulled it out and started doing it. Now Mike has this theory that if you want your kids to play with something, you've got to get it out and play with it yourself. It does seem to work most of the time. And, it is working this time. And the cute thing is that the kids are so much older than when we first got it. Cole, who never really cared about the DDR, is a dancing fool. :) He's working his way up from easy, to normal, to hard! :) And Reid is amazing on it... young with fast reflexes, I suppose. So, last night when I came downstairs to send the kids to bed, they were down there taking turns on the DDR all nicely and having a great time. Cole keeps saying things like, "I need the exercise." (Yeah... my stick skinny kid needs exercise!)

Now we need to get a second dance pad (which we planned on doing two years ago), so we can have contests. :) You know, take some of the fun out of it by making it a competition!

Happy Birthday Jacob!

Jacob is 10 today! It's hard to believe! Here are a couple of recent pictures of him:

When Kristin and I went out to the movies while she was here visiting, Libby stayed at our house. When we were pulling into the driveway, we saw Jacob and Libby outside together just hanging out. Apparently Mike got a couple of pictures of the two cuties together.

Belated Birthday Dinner

Last Saturday was Mike's 40th birthday. A big milestone which I did not embellish with black balloons or over the hill t-shirts. :)

Not only did I not embellish it that way, I did nothing for him. Instead, he packed up our van from our week at the beach and then unpacked it when we got home. Poor guy.

So today, I'm making up for all of that. I'm making him Weiner Schnitzel. No one deserves it more. :) He's put up with a lot from me lately and has been a trooper.

So, the schnitzel is in the fridge, the cucumber salad is in there marinating it's little heart out and the potatoes will be cleaned and cooked as soon as Mike gets back from his 11 yr old scout day camp thing that he took Zach to.

I also decided to try making banana pudding last night. I've never made it before, so I found an easy recipe that lots of people said was really yummy and made it. Did I ask Mike if he liked the stuff? No. Hopefully it won't be a disaster of a dessert. But then, no one really cares about dessert when you have weiner schnitzel, so it shouldn't really matter. :)

And now for some things that I really like about Mike:

1) He thinks I'm the most beautiful woman in the world.
2) He works really hard to support our family.
3) He really likes being a dad.
4) He likes it when I call him and ask if we can meet for lunch.
5) He takes all the kids with him every time he does a scout campout for his scout boys.
6) He has never flinched when I didn't feel like cooking dinner or when the house is a disaster.

He's pretty awesome.

Allergies - Horrid Allergies

I remember WAY back in time when we lived in Lubbock and our neighbor, Daniel, suffered from allergies. He lived on Sudafed and talked of not being able to breathe during the night. I remember having no idea of what that must be like. I hope I didn't go so far as to think, "Boy, I'm glad *I* don't have to deal with that!" (You know how we all look at other people at some point in our lives and think we're glad we don't have a brat kid like theirs, or are glad that we don't have as much gray hair as someone else only to have it come back to bite us later?)

Anyway. I am now sad to report that I believe that I officially am suffering from allergies this year. I keep Kleenex with me everywhere I go. Sneeze for absolutely no reason. And struggle at night to breathe. Ahhh, pollen. The green haze all over everything is so beautiful. The pine trees are the main culprits and when it rains, you can see the lines of pollen between the bark on the trees. Nice. Thanks Pine Trees!

So, I'm now entering the world of "How do you begin to deal with allergy symptoms?" My daily hours long headaches are the worst part, so I'm hoping plain Tylenol will do the trick. If not, I've got more adventures ahead of me. How fun!

Small detail

I remembered a small thing about our beach week that I thought I would post. You Tube videos that John and Judy enjoyed with Brian Regan, a comedian. John was laughing pretty good. He has good, clean humor that can be enjoyed by the whole family. I'll put some of the videos up on my blog if I can get it to choose good ones.

The Beach

We love Topsail Beach. It's such a nice place to be. This past week the weather was a little bit of everything (well, never HOT). We had rain, wind, mild, cold. Just everything. It was a nice, slow week. The kids built lots of sand castles and found lots of sea shells. They also watched a lot of cable. :) We don't have cable, so they gorged themselves on all of the shows available. I tried not to worry too much about them. Mike ventured into the freezing water twice. Reid and Zach tried it briefly once. Mike's parents walked on the beach often and found lots of good shells. Judy found some shark's teeth, so I searched for some during a long walk and found several for the kids. I think Jacob found one, too. Just a nice week at the beach.

We had a Wii sports tournament one day and, big surprise, our teenager won. :) Of course, I came in second place, so that was fun. :) Zach creamed me in boxing and then Reid did the same to Mike. I won bowling and somehow came out on top in baseball. Reid won hand's down in boxing and he also won tennis and golf. It was a lot of fun.

I have a big, ugly bruise on my leg from playing some game called "Dead or Alive" with the kids. One of them (Reid) throws a ball (football for us) in the air and calls it dead, alive, or dead or alive. The other people (Zach and me) have to try to be the first to get the ball (alive is catching it, dead is letting it hit the ground first, and dead or alive is either). Zach and I were surprisingly evenly matched. We ended up in a tie at the end. I kind of smooshed him into the sand and he had the ball in his legs, but I tickled him and was able to get the ball away from him. Poor kid. :) Fortunately it was all in good fun and he had a good time. The best part was that I was trying my absolute hardest and I couldn't really beat him. Reid would have beat the socks off of me. He's so fast and agile. Give Zach a couple more years and he'll do the same. My boys are growing up.

If Mike and I can ever find the cord to download our pictures from our camera, I'll post some of the pictures from the beach. It was a lot of fun. We are really looking forward to the big South gathering at the beach this summer. We got a chance to walk on the beach in front of the house and we drove by the house several times. It looks really nice (no surprise there).