Wednesday, November 26, 2008

It's DONE!!!!

Three days, two trips to Ikea, six bags of garbage, lots of drilling, and assembling of flat packed furniture, hours of reorganizing and Haven's room is finally finished!!!! Just in case you can't fathom how bad it was, here's the before:


Ok, yes, that's actually the aftermath of Hurricane Ike. But her room wasn't that much different!!! Well, I couldn't actually bear to take before photos. It was too much to handle. But here's the after photos!

Pink drawers replaced rickety old wood drawers that were falling apart.

Bed moved from wall under the slant roof to side wall. Shelves for little nick nacks. I haven't completly cleaned the cubbies under the bed, but I made a dent.

This lovely shelf with 16 cubbies replaces a boring bookshelf that didn't match anything in the room. The height fits perfectly under the slanted roof with room for smaller trinkets. Bean bag chair for reading strategically located next to the books. :)

Second half-size bookshelf with attached desk. This is a new thing from Ikea and I love this desk! It is so cool how it attaches to those shelves. Also in this picture, I covered some silver magnet boards with pretty wrapping paper to lighten them up and make them fit the color scheme better. Clever, clever! The shelf on the wall was added today to have a place for the dolls to stand. It will get little vitrine doors eventually.

I am loving vacationing at home! People keep telling me to relax. So today to relax I shopped at the commissary, sans children, had lunch with my boss and colleagues at one of my favorite restaurants, shopping again at the German stores, followed by building and hanging the shelf, hours of cleaning, and then hours more of cleaning the bathrooms. I even washed windows today!!! I love the smell of clean.


Ok, and one last tid bit of exciting news, today I bought a ONE TERABYTE external hard drive for 99 euros!!!!! It's a "green energy" model by Siemens. SCORE!!! I love Media Markt.


So the house is clean, company's coming tomorrow and I have all day to just cook. Ah... Wonder if I'm going to want to go back to work next week... Well, yeah. Can't be this clean all the time! Hahahaha!

Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Family Photo

We finally got our family photo from the photographer! Yeah!

More reasons to love Ikea

I've spent the last two mornings in Ikea. I love that store. Haven's room was pushing the outer limits of my dirty boundaries! So two days and six bags of trash later ... well I'm still not finished. But I will post pictures when I am. Ok, but here's why I love Ikea today... they installed self-checkout! Now some of you may be thinking, ugh, yeah the commissary has that and the lines are longer. Not at Ikea! I avoided the SUPER LONG normal lines, scanned all my items, paid with my Ikea card and was on my way! There was a very friendly young lady helping four self-checkout stands at the same time. No bottle neck, no scale to stress me out, just pure self-checkout joy! You're supposed to only have 15 items or less, but since no one else was in line when I got there she let me in. You can only use a card (EC, Ikea, giftcard), no cash. I would like to say I could limit my purchases to 15 items or less from now on ... but no promises!

Saturday, November 22, 2008

She's giving him away!

My friend Corinnea is giving away "Stuart" in celebration of her 100th post! Just post a comment here if you want to win him!

Pottery Day

Today was girl's pottery day with the youth group. Here's just a few of the girls enjoying painting pottery! We did a big ornament and then some of the girls also did mini-Christmas figurines. Some of the girls made very intricate ornaments! I can't wait to see them after they have fired.



Here's the kitty "helping" me with my pottery!

I also finished a super secret project today. No hints!!! But one very lucky person will be the recipient if we ever decide when our staff Christmas party is going to be!

Friday, November 21, 2008

Whew! What a month!

If you want to know where I've been the last few weeks, just check out the store blog: Patch Crafts. It was Halloween Costume Contest, followed by Art and Espresso, followed by the annual Photography Contest, followed by administrative stuff with my credit card, an award's ceremony today, and a tour of the store on Monday. I'm beat. I'll be taking some time off next week so if you don't see me around here it means I'm sleeping or at Ikea! :)

Wednesday, November 12, 2008

School Pictures


To family: you should be able to click on the photo and save the file in a resolution suitable for printing.

Sunday, November 9, 2008

Happy Birthday Mom!


Technically my mom's birthday isn't until Tuesday, but I don't want to forget to post! :)

Saturday, November 8, 2008

OH MY GOODNESS

OH MY GOODNESS!!! I totally don't deserve this, but look what Jennifer made me as a gift for watching her kids!!! There are a few more pictures on her blog. (I was too excited to take the time to take pictures myself and upload them!) This is the most awesome bag and I LOVE Russian dolls so it's just SO cool!




Monday, November 3, 2008

I Took The Handmade Pledge! BuyHandmade.org

Just a reminder to my family members: if you are inclined to send a gift to me (and please do not feel obligated in any way) keep in mind that I took the "handmade pledge" which means please send something handmade that you bought or that you made yourself. Thanks!

Saturday, November 1, 2008

Kids Costumes

I finally finished Haven's peacock costume just in time for Halloween. The mask has peacock feathers on one side and is covered with green and teal feathers. The beak is made out of a really pretty scrapbook paper and has little swirls coming off the sides. I also covered it with sparkle glue to make it pretty. :)

The dress was kind of whipped together out of this weird fabric Haven got from school. It's a green cheetah print. Whatever. But it worked pretty well. A little clash with the mask, but she LOVES it!


Ethan was Anakin. He has been wanting to be someone from Star Wars all along but it's gone from Darth Maul to Luke to Anakin. It was too cold for him to trick or treat without his jacket and he didn't want to carry his lightsaber! But that's ok.


We also took Emily along with us for a little while. She was like my little Leia fashion accessory! Since no one could see what Ethan was wearing I just kept hearing "oh what a cute little Leia!" We had a lot of fun!

After trick or treating I tagged along with Jennifer and Jon to a Costume Party at the Patriot. It was fun to see what everyone else was dressed as and see some of our customers and some of my colleagues in a social setting. And Jennifer totally won first place in the costume contest! She deserved it since she worked so hard on that dress!!! Click here for pictures from our store contest.

Conversations with Kids

So it snowed Wednesday morning. I'm so not ready for cold weather. Ethan woke up and saw the snow and was SO excited! He came running in saying "Let's go skiing!!!!" Skiing??? How does he know about skiing??? I told him he'd have to go talk to daddy cause momma doesn't ski! Then he told me "Come on... you just put your feet in the skis like this and go!" Saying this as he mimics putting his feet on skis and crouching down. He is unbelievable.

Then today Haven made me laugh so hard. Many of you know the ongoing saga with my car and my husband's hospitalization. So I JUST got the car out of the shop on Thursday and Fri morning and tonight it was STILL dying. Haven said why would they give us the car back when it wasn't fixed? I said it was because they just couldn't figure out what was wrong. And she said, "Oh, so the mechanics are kind of like Daddy's doctors?" HAHAHAHAHA!!! So I'm praying for a car that runs and my husband to be well!!!