Because I'm Still Pregnant...

(Due September 25, by the way)

Pictures from August and September

Grandpa Dodds stopped by our ward on his way driving across the country with one of his daughters.

Dancy gets to be a big girl sometimes and eat at a kid table with Tom and Katie.

On our way home from Beaver City, NE from visiting Brittany and Ryan's housewarming party, we saw these gorgeous skies.

Excuse the mismatched horizon; I'm new to panoramics.

Clouds like this typically bring hail, and we saw it just a few minutes after this picture was taken. Heard it start down the street and blow its way over to our house.

Tom's a puzzler. He loves putting together his puzzles daily, and always insists on doing so without the picture.

My first time growing hot peppers in the garden turned out really well! My first picking of the chili peppers yielded 3 trays worth for my dehydrator. I dehydrated them overnight, then froze them and threw them in my food processor to make ground chili powder. Oh, I need to get myself some good food processing gloves, and a dust mask! I wore dish gloves when handling the peppers, and still had burning skin. Someone suggested I wash my hand in milk, so I got a canning jar and soaked my hand. It did work. And then the dust mask...when I opened the lid of that food processor, I caught a whiff of powder that puffed out and almost died. Still have more growing out on 4 plants in the garden.

Dancy playing dress up! She put the yellow shirt on all by herself and wore it all day. Tom and Katie were being Captain Hook and Tinkerbell, and Tommy needed a Mr. Smee, so we had to help Dancy.

And then Katie found her Batman costume!

Dancy always saves her food in her hair at the back of her head. Yay for spaghetti dinners...

I started buying milk from Rose, who has a cow. Trying to bulk Dancy up so that she can be front-facing in the van. Rose leaves the cream on the milk, so we either have nice, creamy milk, or we have butter and buttermilk. Oh, that cream makes good butter! Scoop the cream off the top and throw it in the mixer until it looks like this. Then just separate your butter from the buttermilk.

We shared our anniversary with our kids this year. We've gotten to the point of being tired with our eating out options here in town, and figure that for the money we'd spend, we'll just stay home and cook something for ourselves. So Shad and I cooked steak, artichokes, honey-ginger glazed carrots, and rolls. We spent a little less than we'd have spent at a restaurant, plus had drinks, dessert and leftovers. Dancy got a roll ahead of dinner, so Tom and Katie wanted one too. When Tom asked Shad for a roll ahead of dinner, Shad responded with this. Vern, he's your son.

Our movie options at the theater were Expendables 3, or Dolphin Tale 2. We had been asked to help with concessions and said yes before finding out the movies. We had Shad's friend Tim come watch the kids for the hour of us doing concessions, and then we came home and played games with him.

We have a walker!

Tom and Katie love helping her walk.

And they were all good treasure hunters this weekend!

Every year on the 3rd weekend in September, Highway 36 does a Treasure Hunt across the entire state of Kansas. People sign up to have their address and brief description of their garage sale listed on the "treasure map." I picked up my map Thursday morning and studied it, highlighting and color coding. I had my list all compiled on the tablet, and we found just about everything on it! This year we found a fire pit, 4 waffle iron, 2T pants for Katie (I had none in my 2T box for this winter!), ceramic flower pots, Christmas lights (Tom is sooo excited to have lights on our house this year), a carpet cleaner, 0-3 month winter outfits, a full summer and winter 3T wardrobe for Katie for next year ($15!), pumpkins, 200 ft of fence, loads of legos, paper shredder, bags of stickers and foam pieces for kid crafts, leggings and thick stockings for the girls, a beautiful tall wood cabinet, random decorations, books, games, movies, etc for Christmas gifts, and a shotgun. We also found a wood burning stove and exercise bike that were on our list, but passed on buying them. Not the right stove, and not the right price for the bike. Shad and I gave Tom and Katie each their own ziplock bag of coins to spend from their piggy banks--$2.50 for the weekend. They spent well, did a good job conducting their own business and making deals, and still have coins left in their bags. Shad and I came in only a little over budget, and I blame that on the gun. It was on our list, but not for the garage sales and thus, not accounted for in our initial weekend budget.

Now that I'm done treasure hunting, Thora is officially allowed to come any time she wants to:)

A Summer of Rearranging and Painting

After a year in our home, we painted the basement and laundry room. Last summer we painted the kitchen, dining room, living room, one bathroom and a guest room. This year, we finished up EVERYTHING by painting the upstairs stairs and hallway, the office, 3 bedrooms and two bathrooms. So considering that that all just got finished, we've spent a month of our summer on the road, I'm 38 weeks pregnant, have 3 kids 4 and under, and my time is currently being spent canning, dehydrating and pureeing, and inventorying 11 boxes of kid clothes, shoes and coats, I didn't think it was necessary to clean up every room for the pictures. Instead, you get a reality of my life. The rooms are not fully decorated, but they are painted, and with that, they are free from hundreds of pinholes in a 3 inch square, knife marks, scars from a dart board, and endless fist-size and head-size holes. Hooray! And I didn't take before pictures, but here are the ones from when we moved into our house.

Laundry room before

Laundry room after:

Greek! I just need to get a calendar of Greece to add some pictures to the walls.

I saw this cool idea on Etsy selling for $40, and I loved it. But I found this saloon door in a trash pile and used the hooks from the previous coat rack, so my cost was $0!

Shad added a shelf for me.

Main floor bathroom before

Bathroom last year after being painted:

And now after some decorating work:

Dining room before

Dining room after:

I think I wrote about this last year--it took us a full week to paint this. We worked each night after the kids went to bed and each of the 3 colors needed 2 coats. Exhausting, but so worth it!

One thing I've learned from decorating cakes (and with some idea help from Pinterest) is to cover unsightly blemishes with decoration. So...on this wall, the HOME decor plate is covering the doorbell chime, and the bottom picture is covering the thermostat.

Shad built a box to hinge this picture frame onto.

 Office before:
(Also, imagine this with wall to wall bookshelves)

Office after:

It's half and half grey and turquoise, with two solid walls and two diagonal walls as shown below.

The office is one of my rearranged rooms. We moved 3 bookshelves to the basement so that the room could be repurposed as my creative room. It's now got my sewing desk so that I don't have to share a room with babies, or clean up a project when guests come.

Living room before

Living room after:

(But these are the pictures I took last year. It's totally not clean like this right now!)

Basement before

Basement after:
(We scraped the popcorn ceiling off so we could paint it gray)

We rearranged from having the couches and tv at the back and empty spaces in the front, to having the tv space in the front with the couch creating a barrier for the schoolroom at the back.

Our schoolroom! Complete with puzzles, books and dress-up clothes on the floor...and a popcorn table:)

 Upstairs hallway before

After:

(Okay, so this is the stairwell and not the hallway, but it's one and the same)

Master bath before

After:

(I had a really hard time getting the color to show right on the camera. This is as close as I got. It's an ocean teal.)

Kids' bedroom before. 

To give an idea of how bad these walls were, observe the star and cloud decorations in the picture below. All those stars are covering holes or spots that were unwashable. It was the very first room I decorated in our house.

Tom and Katie each picked a color. I'm sure you can guess who picked which ones.

The former sewing room

After:

Kids' bathroom before:

After:

Guest room before:

After:

Master bedroom before: 

That corner is where the air conditioner drains (not supposed to) and so the ceiling was falling in.

After:

 

We didn't intend to do red and black, but we didn't buy our red paint knowing how much red is needed to get a solid wall. We had to buy black to cover where the red would be lacking. We love how it turned out! I'll post again in a few months when I have these rooms more decorated and put together, but for now this suffices.