It's Time for a Change

Kembia and Truitt share a room.  It was formerly the office, so no closet, but we have a dresser tucked behind the door.  It looked like this from the previous owners.



We basically tossed in bunkbeds and called it a day.  The good news is that the walls are not wallpaper.

Every single day I look down the hallway and see this green.  And it drives me crazy.  I finally bit the bullet and painted the back wall black, and here is some of my inspiration for where I am going with it.


We definitely want to do some type of banner.


Crosses with electrical tape on the white wall?  yes, please


It's also going to have some type of science-chic (chic as in cool, not chic as in girl, because Truitt has to live in it too) theme going on.


We totally have room for feathers, wood and leather!

Stay tuned, I am hoping to have it done in the next week or so.

Those Dumb Cats

They would be Claire (white one) and Sherlock.  They do kind of look like one big cat blob in this picture.  Or maybe one cat with two heads.

We call them dumb, but we love them a whole lot.  They love this tree, specifically, the top of it. Two seconds after I took this picture they were "fighting" in it.  Then they saw us and came shooting out of the tree to get loved up.

Their life is really tough.

Sherlock hated people when we first got him.  He would hiss and attack you all the time.  Claire was so tiny we didn't know if she would make it.  The runt of the litter at 8 weeks, she was way smaller than the palm of our hands.  She'd run away from us and be super reclusive.

I don't exactly know what happened, because you would think with the three littles in our family, they would have continued their "fight and run for their lives", but I am thinking that Moyz smothered them with love (literally smothered them, I am kind of surprised they are still alive), that they just eventually decided that people were awesome, especially the closer they were to you.

We've tried dogs in the past, more than I care to admit, but I think we really are cat people.

Free 2016 Calendars

I print off a yearly calendar every year about this time and organize my life.  Kind of.  At least I try to organize my life.  There are some super fun ones that recently came out on Pinterest.  And they are all free.  My favorite kind.


This is the one that I printed off for 2016.  Super cute colors.  Get it here.



I like the simplicity of this black and white calendar, but the kiddos like color.



Love the bold graphics of this one.  If I hadn't already printed off the calendar I think this would have been my choice.  I still might succumb to it.

And just in case you didn't see anything you liked above, this lady put together 20 different calendar options!



 

E is for Eczema

You know how when kids are learning sounds and how to read?  A is for apple, etc.  Well to Truitt, E is for Eczema.  That's because Kembia developed severe eczema over the summer, and our days and nights have been filled with medicine and wet wraps.



It started with some itchy bumps in her elbow.  Which quickly spread up her arms onto her chest and back.  When it migrated onto her face, I knew we had a major problem.  And she was super conscious about the bumps on her face.

I'd tried all sorts of salves and balms to help her but nothing worked.  We finally took her in where she saw a fantastic team of doctors and was diagnosed with what we already knew to be eczema.

We now have 4 separate medicines to use, two for when she's really bad, two for when she's sort of bad, and a fifth internal medicine that's kind of like Benadryl on steroids.  And we should probably be buying stock in Vaseline.

And then there's the wet wrap.  Or the baby burrito as we affectionately call it.

It goes something like this:  spread medicine on child, in the mean time have towel in the dryer, and long sleeve shirt soaking in warm to hot water.  Wring out shirt, put on child, wrap child in warm towel, sit for 30 minutes, slather in vaseline.

It sounds like some sort of elaborate beauty ritual.  Kembia loves it, which I think is so weird.  But it helps a lot.  We've gotten the eczema under control, but if we skip a wet wrap two days in a row, her eczema starts to come back very quickly.

We're a tad bit nervous about winter and all the dry weather coming up since eczema tends to be the worst then, but at least I feel like we have a fighting chance.  And finally good health insurance to help us along the way....

But It Can Buy Me A Boat

Flipping through the radio stations on a long drive we heard "the boat song".  And our children have been obsessed ever since.

We finally watched the video because they thought a "Yeti 110" was a gun because the lyrics then said it was filled with "silver bullets".

Nope.  Turns out a Yeti 110 is a cooler, and silver bullets are beer.

Oh well.  We still love the song.

Candid Classroom

This is how we mostly do school- at the dining room table. Sometimes the kids go out on the deck but with the walnuts dropping off it's not worth the risk right now.   Moyz was outside and Ava did not want her picture taken.

Moving to Florida to Avoid the Imperial System

Huh? Don't worry, I questioned Owen's logic too.

See we learned about the Imperial System (ounces, pounds, feet, inches, etc.,) vs. the Metric System (kilometers, millileters, liters, etc.)

Turns out the only countries in the entire world that use the Imperial System would be the United States, Liberia and Myanmar.  No wonder people hate Americans.


A visual for everyone.

Owen's way to deal with this is "I'm moving to Florida to get away from the Imperial System."  Lord help that child.  He thinks Florida is a country.  Since we homeschool and Owen is currently going through the 50 states, we may have to spend slightly more time devoted to this!

Moyz Ate His Nametag

I went back to our previous town this past weekend for a funeral.  It was the first time I'd been back since we left.  It was pretty emotional, not just because of the funeral, but seeing everyone again, and going back to our awesome church.

In hindsight, I probably wasn't ready to go back yet.  We had such an amazing group of friends and we are still finding our way at our new house, so today I am feeling slightly depressed thinking of all the things that we don't have here, like an awesome group of people to do life with.  I know it takes time but could someone just be my friend, quick like?

At least I have my highly humorous children to lift my spirits.

Chris took the kids to church on Sunday and out doing errands afterwards.  They stopped to get some french bread and sandwich meat for lunch.  Which was then that they discovered that Moyz, instead of waiting for something yummy, decided to eat his sticker nametag for Sunday school.

The child is 5!  I feel like eating your nametag is something you should have grown out of by this point.  So Moyz had to watch while everyone else ate their yummy sandwiches before he could have any.  Which I think was an excellent parenting choice.  I think they also had a discussion about how there's probably something really disgusting in glue that could make you sick, or die.  Nothing but the truth at this house.

Alice In Wonderland Turns 150

I love Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.



Ava just finished both for the first time.  She came upstairs and said that it was kind of crazy and not really a kids' book.  Good insight.

I think I will hold off telling her about how Lewis Carroll quite possibly might have been a pervert that was actually in love/obsessed with the real life Alice Liddell who was a child.

Somehow the books don't seem like they came from the 19th century.  In honor of 150 years, there are all sorts of Alice books out right now.  I want this one below.


So pretty.  Illustrator who did the Puffin in Bloom books.

Or this one, which is annotated.  I love annotated books but they take forever to read because you are constantly reading the notes about the text.


150th Anniversary version.

A couple of other pretty options:

     
Both of these are at Barnes and Noble

And then I came across this book.



It's an Alice in Wonderland spin-off.  I didn't even know they had these for Alice in Wonderland.  I haven't read it yet, but the reviews are pretty good, so I may have to give it a whirl.

2015 Goals- Running Out of Time

For New Years, I always make resolutions.  And I always suck at them.


Pretty much sums up how they typically go.

But for 2015 I wanted to read 100 books in a year.  I counted last night and I've read 73.  So 27 more books to go in the next three months.  It's kind of a lot, but I think I can do it.  If I can focus.

I have this little problem called starting-too-many-books-at-one-time.  And then I can't figure out which one to focus on and so I bounce back and forth and almost paralyze myself.  I've tried just reading one book at a time, but it's so against my nature I can't do that either.

I had other New Year's Resolutions but I can't remember them.  They must have gotten lost between moving and not knowing where that was going to be, starting over in a totally new place, and in general, just feeling frazzled.  That's okay, I'll just focus on the books.

Harvest Time

It got down to 39 last night.  Finally, fall is here!  Yesterday, Ava made Puppy Chow in honor of it being fall.  She also cleaned just about the entire house, because according to her she "can't bake in these conditions."  I don't care what the reason is.  If she wants to clean, be my guest.

We brought in our squash last night just in case it gets colder than what those always-accurate meteorologists say.

Here was our haul.

 Owen likes to showcase thoroughly the produce.

 What the girls were doing while we were in the garden.

 I am totally out of it.  Adjusted at the chiropractor yesterday and wasn't feeling all that well.

Moyz in his bike helmet.  Probably one of his favorite things.  Literally, the helmet.