DWTS Update

Last Night's Favorite Female: Again, Brooke Burke....that girls got some moves. Misty May came in a close 2nd.
Last Night's Favorite Fella: I'm still going for Lance Bass, although the beefy Warren Sapp is growing on me.
Last Night's Female Flop: Poor Cloris...your time is ending soon, we hope.
Last Night's Fella Flop: Ted McGinley. Some men are not born to dance, or act for that matter.
Last Night's Most Improved: Rocco DiSpirito....a guy that can COOK and DANCE...what a combo!!

How Time Flies

Just as I was announcing my blogging block, I have thought of so many things to blog about. This one will be the last today, I promise. Today is the first day of fall. It is also my sister Katie's birthday. She would be 27 today! I can't believe how the time has flown. I thought of her alot today and really alot in the past few weeks. Even though she would be 27 today, I will always think of her as that sweet little girl with the gray front tooth. She was so unselfish and kind to all and really a great example to my entire family. I love her still and think of her often. Happy Birthday, Sweet Sister.

** I have spent the last half hour trying to upload a picture of Katie...unfortunately the only pictures I have of her are scans and I am not able to get them to upload.

Fall Favorites: Addition

As soon as I finished the previous blog entry, I went to the TV to wee what my wonderful DVR had recorded for me today...and low and behold I have now discovered a 6th Favorite about Fall: Drumroll Please....

#6: Fall TV Premieres!! Hello!! Dancing with the Stars premiered tonight and it is the official beginning to my fall TV lineup...Bring it on: DWTS, Biggest Loser (actually began last week), Grey's Anatomy, ER, Lost....my DVR is set and ready.

**As a side note, my Week One Favorites on DWTS: Brooke Burke and Lance Bass. They can groove, baby! And, Brooke Burke has 4 kids!! I'm missing something in my exercise routine, obviously. My Week One Flops: Jeffery Ross (who the heck is he?) and Cloris Leachman. Poor Cloris - the only thing she had going for her was her pushed up cleavage and the cuss words she had to have bleeped out on live TV. Stayed tuned for more Fav's and Flops as the weeks progress....

5 Fav's About Fall

I've had Blogger's Block lately....not really much exciting to blog about. Life remains busy with the daily usuals and nothing really entertaining has happened to tell the world about. The one thing that crossed my mind today is really how much I enjoy the fall season. I read an email today about favorites of the fall season, and so, I sit tonight to un-block my blogging mind and post My 5 Favorites about Fall. Here goes:

#1: The Back to School Celebration: Obviously. Really for me it begins with anticipation as the local Targets and Walmarts start advertising school supplies. I have always had a nagging need to buy new pens and pencils and folders as September rolls around - even before I had kids to buy them for. Also, the celebration is about having a quiet house. Just me and Natalie Sue. She will follow me around for the day, or not. She's pretty good about entertaining herself and has even become quite the helper. I no longer have to fold washcloths or cleaning rags. She has taken over for me. I have enjoyed these last few weeks, just me and her.

#2: Warm Days and Cool Nights: Self explanatory, really. I love that it gets warm during the day and I can open all the windows and then at night it gets nice and cool. No air conditioning needed.

#3: Changing of the Leaves: Not originally being from Utah, I have to say that I have really grown to appreciate the way the mountains look in the fall. The reds and yellows are brilliant. We also have the great task of raking and bagging our own mountains of leaves as we have a giant maple-ish tree in our back yard. Last year I think we counted 21 bags of leaves and several large trash cans full. Enough to play in over and over.

#4: More Clothes: With the cooler weather, comes more clothing to wear. I have to say that I am not a huge fan of summer mostly because I hate being scantily clad. I am all for big bulky sweaters, long sleeves, hoodies, and jeans. The only thing I miss dearly as the weather changes are my flip flops. I can't rightfully wear a full body armour of warm clothing and then wear my flippers. I will - at least until the snow flies.

#5 Fall Smells: It happened today, and really is what provoked my post tonight. I went to put a new smell into my candle warmer and decided on a "pumpkin spice" scent. That did it....I felt the urge all day to make pumpkin cookies or bread. It was even rainy for awhile and it would have been a perfect after school treat. Unfortunately, by the time I had time to think about it, the sun was back out and too warm to enjoy them. Why is it that I only feel the urge to make a pumpkin cookie in the fall months? They are perfectly divine any time of year, but somehow that smell only seems appropriate for fall.

Well, there they are. My five favorite things about fall. I'm off to think of more trivial things to blog about while I pull out my favorite recipe for pumpkin cookies. Yep, I'm makin' them tomorrow.

Extreme Room Makeover

Now that we have officially been in our house for 18 months, we have finally gotten around to re-decorating and updating Abby's room. Kim's sister, April and her two boys have been with us for a little over a week. She is a master decorater on a budget, so we "hired" her for the week. We started out with paint on the upper 1/3 of the wall. We had originally thought a soft pink, but when we got to Home Depot for the paint purchase, there sat a gallon of "oops" paint in a slightly Pepto Bismal-y pink....it was marked down to $5!! So, we bought that, and a quart of white paint and decided to make our own color. It turned out a little "pinker" than expected, but still went with her comforter, which we were using as a guide for color. So, we brought the paint home, did a little taping off, and shazam....in about 1 hour we had on two coats of pink paint on the upper third of the wall. The next day was wall paper day. I had discovered that you can purchase wallpaper that looks like beadboard....it had a little texture to it, and a little of a distressed look to it - best of all, I could put it up with a little help from April. It was cheaper that the actual beadboard with just about the same look. I bought it at Lowe's a few weeks ago and had to drive up to Sandy to pick up enough rolls to cover the lower 2/3 of the walls in Abby's room. I was excited at the prospect of getting a really cute look, without having to hire someone to put up the expensive real thing. So, on day two, April and I gathered our supplies, sent the kids off to school and began. The first sheet went up pretty smoothly. We soon figured out that the walls were not completely straight, and so with a few adjustments we were off to the second sheet. Now, April had wallpapered a little, and I had wallpapered with my mom many many years ago. We both thought that it couldn't possibly be rocket science and we had read the instructions, so we thought it had to be fairly painless. We were sooooo wrong!! By the time we had put up about 4 sheets of the wallpaper, we discovered that the stuff was just not sticking right. The glue was adhearing in some spots but not others, and bubbling up after we had smoothed it on...disasterous. We decided to trudge forward and get on as much as we could for the day and then go back and do some repairs and touchups when we were through. We finished an entire wall and then some and stood back to observe how it all looked. We were not satisfied with the final look, but thought maybe after it dried it would look better. We left it and came back down after dinner and discovered it looked even worse in the evening light. Ugh!
We came downstairs on day three and were completely frustrated with the whole project. We ended up tearing down the entire previous days work and decided to return to Lowe's, return the remaining wallpaper with a LARGE complaint and go with a creamy white paint on the bottom 2/3 of the wall. We spent the day doing the painting and sewing the curtains and the next day ventured to IKEA to look for the accessories for the finished room. We spent a good hour and a half walking through that joint. I'm not a huge IKEA fan anyway, but I thought for a "teenager-ish" looking room we would find all kinds of good loot. We walked out with a lamp and a picture holder for the wall. So, more shopping. We hit Target, Michaels, Roberts, and then finally Pebbles in my Pocket before we had all our items. And, I'm NOT a shopper. In the store, out with my product. Forget the window shopping. In, out, home. That's how I shop. Friday evening, a friend of ours sacrificed his date night with his wife and came to put up the chair-rail trim. We touched it up with caulk and paint and began counting down the hours until we could be done with the whole darn mess. Oh, and to top off the evenings project, our friendly neighbor tells us that the reason our wallpaper project didn't work was because apparently the paper won't stick to the wall if it has been previously pained with a latex paint. Apparently we should have used a primer of sorts on the wall before attempting to go all Martha Stewart-like. That would have been nice to have read in the instructions before we started!! We read the entire paper and in NO PLACE did it say that we should prime the walls. Apparently wallpapering IS rocket science.
On the final day of decorating madness, we moved out old furniture, moved in the newly refurbished yard sale furniture that I have been working on for about 3 weeks, moved the bed back in, re-assembled furniture, hung pictures, built a lamp, and cutsified the room. Total girl mania. On Saturday afternoon, after an entire week of work, we had the big reveal. Blindfold and all. I think that Abby was pretty happy with the result - it was just the colors she had wanted (pink and aqua blue). She had a cool new lamp and adorable jewel curtains. New furniture and new accessories for the desk and walls. So, a week of work and a few hundred dollars later, we have a newly decorated room for the pre-teen in our family to trash. A big THANKS to Auntie April who sacrificed a week at home and drug her poor children up to our house to give Abby a new room. Please mute the music and take a tour....

My Kids and My Pet Peeves

Let me just start this post by saying that I love my kids. Alot. When one prospects the idea of becoming a parent, you just can't fathom how much that you will love them and how much they will change who you are, for the better. Being a stay at home mom, I can attest to the fact that although I love them, alot, there are a few things that I notice, almost on a daily basis, that drive me batty.
The following is a list of things that I have encountered, just today. I'm sure that if I kept a running list of things that peeve me, I wouldn't get anything else done today. So, here is my short list:
#1: Toothpaste. I am a stickler about brushing teeth. I have my kids brush their teeth after breakfast and again before bed and really anytime in between that I get a whiff of their insanely stinky breath. I have a huge peeve about halitosis. Ask Kim. So, as a result of having this teethbrushing rule, EVERYTIME (and I'm not exaggerating) I go to clean a bathroom, or even just pick it up, there is toothpaste everywhere. In the sink, all over the counter, floor, drawers, you name it. Ugh! Why, oh, why is it so hard to spit it DOWN the sink and then rinse it down?
#2: Empty Toilet Paper Roll. Again, I'm in the bathroom picking up and just about everytime I find that the toilet paper roll is empty. What are they wiping with?? There is usually a refill of TP in the bottom drawer of the cabinet. Somehow this has become too difficult a chore to take on. Reach in the drawer, remove the new roll, take out the springy TP holder, take off the old roll, throw the old roll in the trash, replace the roll on the springy thing and WAHLAH, we have a new, completely usable roll of TP. Too much to ask, apparently.
#3: Clean Clothes on the Floor, Clean Clothes in the Hamper. I really don't mind doing the laundry. In fact, I find it quite satisfying to see the stacked piles of clean laundry when the day is done. A couple of weeks ago, I was cleaning Abby's room (because my mom was coming to visit...I don't usually clean down there unless someone other than Abby will be occupying the bed) and stepped into her room to find a rather large pile of completely clean clothes. This is not unusual, but on this day, I also found another pile of shirts that I had taken the time to hang on hangers (so they wouldn't be all wrinkled and gross looking and my children would therefore not look homeless). The pile of pre-hung clothing was stacked IN FRONT OF the closet. Another two steps, and they would have hung themselves in the closet. Hmmmm.....guess who's now doing her own laundry? It really peeves me even more to be sorting the hampers of dirty laundry and find clothes in there that you KNOW no one has worn. Long sleeved shirts that couldn't have possibly seen the outside, since it is still 90+ degrees here. Clothes that are actually still folded from the last time you washed them. And, now that they have been in the hamper with the other stinky, dirty clothes, they have to be re-washed. Kim and I have provided each of our kids with large dressers. In fact when we moved 18 months ago, they all got NEW large dressers. Although we have provided our kids with this luxury, apparenly we have missed the boat on teaching them that the clean clothes go IN the dresser. We'll have to work on this one.
#4: TV and Lights Left On. All the time, Everywhere. Maybe a month of paying the power bill will cure this one?
#5: The Appearing and Re-Appearing of Polly Pockets and Crayons. If anyone reading this blog has a young daughter, you know what Polly Pockets are. If you don't have a daughter who has a plethera of Polly Pockets and the accessories to these plastic dolls, consider yourself lucky. FYI: These are the new and improved version of a Barbie doll. They are plastic, smaller, and much easier to dress. My girls love them. And really, they do keep them entertained for hours. We have a large box in which to store all the dolls, and their coordinating outfits and accessories. However, here is my peeve about Polly and her smallest ever accessories: They seem to mysteriously re-appear. We go in to clean up after a hour or so of amusement. We get them picked up and put away on the top shelf of the closet. No matter what, I always find more. Another doll, a plastic outfit, a shoe, a purse, whatever. I've already put away the box, and there it is. Always. It just happend this morning. I even left the box out until the very last thing and sure enough when it was all said and done, I walked into my bedroom and there was a brunette Polly Pocket staring me in the face. The same concept with crayons. You can never pick them all up. There is always a stray. Or two, or three.
#6: Stinky Boy Feet and His Stinky Socks. I almost don't have to explain this one - it's disgusting. And, again if you are graced with a son, you know what I'm talking about. Jake has the stinkiest feet ever. And the socks to go with them. I have a specific load that I always designated for Jake's stinky socks. Can you say Clorox Bleach?? I had the grace of finding a bag yesterday. An innocent looking Target bag. Tied shut. I'm sorting laundry and decide that the bag looks like it has clothing of some type in it. I open the bag and almost vomit. Literally. I have a pretty strong stomach, but the foul smell that emanated from that bag almost sent me to the toilet. It was Jake's baseball uniform from Saturday's game. He had been to a friends house after the game and had brought other clothes to change into. The friends mom had given him the Target bag to put his dirty uniform into - she too was probably trying to corral the smell. It had been tied shut for two days. Vomit, Vomit, Vomit. Sadly, it doesn't seem to bother Jake. He's okay smelling his smelly feet and socks, and therefore his room smells like smelly feet and smelly socks. If you have a son, and have not encountered this yet, it's coming. I promise. Gross.

Okay, enough ranting. I've had my peace. I have a few other things on my list of peeves, but these are the ones that have graced my presence this morning.
By the way, my mother is laughing (at me, not with me). She regularly reads my rantings on this blog and I promise you that today, she is laughing. Laughing because as she was raising her own 7 children, these were the things that she ranted and raved about. Life has a way of coming full circle, huh mom? Yes, your oldest daughter is now ranting and raving about the very things that almost sent you to the looney bin.
I'm off to find a few more things that may or may not send ME over the edge.

Happy #6 Emmy Lou

It's been awhile since I've posted, and a few weeks since Emily turned 6. So, here are the pics of her now infamous birthday cupcakes (they were disgusting) that we made. She decorated them herself, in case you can't tell. She had to go to school on her birthday, which is rare at our house, because all the kids have a summer birthday. This year started the week of her birthday and she was able to take treats to her class and celebrate. We took store bought ones to school, and made the ice cream cone cakes at home. The next day was a Saturday, and so our family and Brenna and Chris ventured to Seven Peaks Waterpark and had a day of fun. About $100 and a few sunburns later, we came home and slept hard that night. Emily had a fun birthday and the rest of us had fun celebrating with her. The picture is of Emily and Chris as they were about to go under a waterfall in the Lazy River - poor Chris got the brunt of it most times around!