Paige's Party Update

I'm way late posting this, but since I posted about it weeks ago I figured I'd better follow up.

Paige's 10th Birthday party went really well. We started out at the pool - we had drinks, sandwiches, fruit kabobs, chips & salsa, and cupcakes. All 'decorations' were in lime green and turquoise. The baskets for sandwiches and pails for chips and fruit were from the dollar store, and the drink tub was from Party City.


Here are the yummy cupcakes... chocolate rasberry, chocolate chip cookie dough, and apple cinnamon with honey buttercream. Paige requested the apple cinnamon as I'd made them before but the others were new. I think everyone loved the chocolate chip cookie dough - they were delish!

I don't know why... but this picture just cracks me up. I think it's because A) Blake's mouth is full and B) Erika is eyeing him awfully suspiciously...

The kids all had a lot of fun. While we couldn't reserve the pool for exclusive use, there were only about 6 other people when we arrive and 4 left shortly after. It was a lot of fun!


Paige's highlight of the night.... a Jacob Black T-shirt. We won't tell her I'm just a little bit jealous. Yes... I know he's 16 years younger than me, but he sure is nice to look at....

For the decorations back at the house, I did end up making several of the large tissue pom poms... but not as many as I'd planned. I also had streamers around the den where all the girls were sleeping.


They were up WAY too late, but it was a really nice reconnection for them right before school started. Not sure if you can see them, but as a party favor for the girls who came to the sleepover, I made sleep masks from two layers of soft fleece and leftover blackout fabric in the center (as the fleece was still allowing light through). There are a few of them to the left of this picture, right behind Paige.

And just so you know... this is how you can tell who the first one to fall asleep at a sleeover was...


Thanks for checking out Paige's Party! She really had a lot of fun and it was relatively stress free for me! Love it!

Quite a productive weekend...

I took a few days vacation from work - had a nice long weekend - and got several projects that I've been meaning to do for a while taken care of. There are actually a few other small things finished, but I haven't had a chance to take pictures yet so that will have to wait.

We installed a pet door leading into our garage. We never really had a good place to put the cat litter boxes and we really don't park in the garage very often, so we decided to move the litter boxes out to the garage and install the kitty door. The younger cats are already in and out of it, but we're still working with 14 year old Custer. Dean was pretty fascinated with it as well...

If you haven't heard of Ana White and Knock Off Wood then you need to go check our her site NOW. I believe her inspiration was furniture from places like Pottery Barn and Land of Nod but the prices are insane. She figured she could build it herself and she did just that. She's since posted plans for many woodworking projects, using standard and easily attainable materials, and she's inspired a lot of people (like me) that were intimidated with building anything... to give it a try.

We have a long, narrow kitchen table in the long, narrow breakfast area of our kitchen. It does fit, but it can sometimes be hard to maneuver around especially when people are seated and their chairs are pushed out. Also, when we inherited the table... it only had 2 surviving chairs so we've been dealing with mismatched Craigslist chairs for a while now. We've been wanting benches for the long sides of the table for a while, but I wasn't finding anything within our budget. So, with Ana's plans for Modern Farmhouse Table Benches I made the first of two benches:

I'm pretty happy with it. It's way far from perfect, but I'm proud of it as my first (of hopefully many) furniture project and it will definitely serve it's purpose well. The kids like it and it's very handy to just slide it under the side of the table and get it out of the way.

The other major project was painting our front door. It was stained but had weathered quite a bit, so first we talked about sanding it down and just re-staining it. I'm sure that would have looked nice, but I've always wanted a red front door. Isn't is supposed to bring fortune or prosperity, too?

I'll post the rest of the weekends' projects tomorrow... I made some curtains for my step-daughter's room (she recently moved in with us) as well as painted/recovered two chairs. Oh, and maybe I'll also post some pictures of the other kids. It's not that I take more pictures of Dean, it's just that pictures of Paige and Blake usually look like this:

That's cousin Jayson with her feet. What happened to my sweet little kids?

Domo Arigato, Mr. Destructo...

It's been way too long since I've posted, I know. We've been busy, though. I have lots of projects to show over the next few days.

The biggest news, though, was that my little man turned TWO! We didn't do anything big... just had cake at home with family. He enjoyed blowing the candles out so much, we did it several times - even on just his piece of cake.

DISCLAMER: You'll notice that in every picture I post of him, he is shirtless. He's going through that independent, 'I've learned I can take my own clothes off' phase. He is often seen running around in just a diaper not 5 minutes after we've gotten him dressed. Yes, he's also discovered he can remove his diaper as well, but thankfully he brings it straight to us so we can throw it away (and get another one on him).

He's such an.... ummmm... trying child. This boy can make more messes and get into more stuff than I've ever dealt with before. Just for a bit, probably 15 minutes, I took pictures of everything he got into:

Digging in the bookshelves in the living room...

Climbing up on tables (after clearing them off, of course)....

Climbing the stairs... the WRONG way....


And even though this was 'destructive' and something he probably should have been told not to do... when I found him sitting in the windowsill, behind the blinds, with our cat Opie... it's just too cute to be upset about.

He's talking really well, but is going through that phase where he gets really upset and frustrated when he's trying to tell us something and we can't understand him. He's also having a VERY hard time with sharing... or having to give up something he wants but we have to take away because it's breakable or doesn't belong to him.

He's definitely a sweetie, though. That smile... those eyes.... I know he can melt my heart.