90 Degree Temperature Difference

I am a little depressed.  It is -20 here right now, a whopping 90 degree difference from when we were in Florida just last Friday.

Sigh.

Oh well, at least I do feel a little better to face the never-ending bitter cold.  School was canceled again today.  The kids are filled with excitement, I am less so.

Man, I miss this already

The hammocks were remarkably hard for the kids to get into.  Like it took them forever.  Multiple minutes, and then of course the next step was to up-end the other.

Orange orchard that my in-laws are "pretty sure" belong to the resort their timeshare is at.  So technically, we own part of it?  Or maybe it's gleaning, you know, biblically acceptable to come after the harvest and take what's left....

Regardless, it was fun to pick oranges straight off the tree.  And they were good.

Lots more to come, but all the good pictures are on Chris' computer.  Like the alligators and Disney world, and the kids being the only ones on the entire Miami Beach swimming.

A Project My Dad And Brother Did

So I was up to my parents dropping the littles off, and Truitt discovered an old tiny playhouse of mine when I was a kid.  Basically, right then and there, I decided to build a dollhouse for the littles. Because when I tried to find a reasonably priced wood one on Amazon, I couldn't.

Enter Young House Love, one of my favorite blogs.  Here is a picture of theirs.



We literally copied their instructions from their blog here.  And $30 later we ended up with this.  And by we, I mean that I roped my dad into it.  And then my brother volunteered his power tools.  So I supervised them while they did it.

Stay tuned for the final creation sometime soon.  Now for the fun part.  Decorating.

Spirited Children

Truitt pretty much is the definition of this.  As evidenced by all the things he's done lately:

1.  Run screaming down the aisle into the church service after he escaped from his leader in children's church

2.  Punch my friend in the mouth.  Who laughed.  Which makes things worse.

3.  Go from friendly to oh-so-not-friendly in about 2 seconds.  Right after he just hugged and loved you up.

At this point in the game, I got nothing.  I keep waiting for him to outgrow it, but it keeps not happening.

Okay, so this picture doesn't really just pertain to Truitt.  But I love it and I think it's funny.

Gold Dots

Before we get to "gold dots", I have to just take a moment and say that I hate the way Downton Abbey has turned.  And I didn't even get to see the whole episode for various reasons.  The writers are total crap to take and do what they did to Anna, and I really hope that Edna has a piano pushed off the second level and onto her head....

A while ago I came across some images of decorating with gold dots.  I know, wall decals seem so 2 or 3 years ago.  But I thought they looked so awesome.  I showed them to Ava, (and maybe even posted them on this blog as well?  I seriously can't remember!)  She loved them and we are going to incorporate them into her room make-over.





   

The nursery room picture is the one we most like, although we would start the dots in the very upper corner and move down.  We're also thinking about painting her dresser hot pink, once the weather warms up, you know, in 6 months.

We came across this image and we loved it.  See why we are thinking pink??



So I think we will try to go white and bright for Ava.  And the good things about gold dots is that if we get sick of them, we just pull them off and no harm, no foul.

Maps

A friend gave me a cabinet that she was going to donate to good will, and I basically turned it into a curiosity cabinet.  It's placement in the living room required some changing of art on the wall, but I couldn't really find anything that made me get all excited.  I hadn't actively been looking to be totally fair.

And then I found these:

1. Panoramic of the Canal of Panama

2. 1847 Panoramic of Florida 

I was flipping through the magazine Country Living, and one of the homes on display had a large map of a town.  In the back they show you how to do a similar idea but cheaper, and they had a map from the Etsy shop The Map Shop.

It is well known that I have a serious issue with maps, we have several awesome ones around the house so I hopped quick as a fly on over and started looking around.  Once I saw those two I just knew it.  

Now I am just waiting for them to get here!

How to wreck a guitar real fast

After a fair amount of research, we ended up buying this guitar as a starter.



A Yamaha F335.  In case you really wanted to know the model.

Here's the thing about me and guitars.  I don't like the "regular" color.  Like the first one below.  I really like the black colored ones, but fingerprints on it would drive me nuts because it's all you notice.  Seriously, it is all I could see as I looked at a model that someone had just touched.  I had not idea I had such anal ideas when it comes to guitars.
     
Anyway, we had to wait a week for ours to come in, and it finally came last night.  To which I promptly took it out and felt like a moron because I had no idea what to do with it.  So of course, all the kids came running over expecting to be impressed, so I strummed it a little bit and all the littles oohed and ahhed.  But then, I was looking at the older two when I was strumming, and while I was doing that, little sneaky Kembia came up beside me and turned all of the tuners on the right side of the guitar.

Literally less than 5 minutes after we got it she un-tuned it.

We did buy a tuner, but no, we didn't think to have them show us how to use it.  And I swear it took me like half an hour to even tune it back to some type of normal after reading the directions. Although the first string is still out of tune if my ears are right and I can not for the life of me fix it.  And Chris brought the guitar home in the hard case he bought and left the box at the store, but we bought a warranty on it so now I am pretty sure without the box the warranty becomes a moot point.  Have to call today and hope that they didn't throw the box away or maybe have the option to return the warranty.

So, for exactly 1 hour into guitar ownership things are already a little stacked against us.  Perhaps my musical aspirations for the fam are slowly swirling down the toilet??  (Okay, that might be a bit dramatic, but you get my drift.)

Downton Disappointed

All right, so I haven't posted in a while, and I am going to admit it, I didn't really miss it.  But, I will try my best to be more responsible until I decided that I am just not going to do it anymore!

Anyway, Downton Abbey.  We've waited a whole entire year for this.



In my head, I knew it was going to have to be HUGE to keep me interested after Matthew died. And can I just say that I was bored last night?  B.o.r.e.d.

The whole Griggs guy (dancing man from Carson's past), and Edna, who tried to seduce Branson after Sybil died is back.  That irritated me to death.  I don't like her, get rid of her now.

And Mary, wow.  I kind of always flopped between really liking her and really despising her.  And I have no idea what it would be like to lose Chris, but I like to think that 6 months later I would be leaving my room and not a heartless wench to the rest of my family.

In the end, I felt that there were too many random things and not enough excitement.  If this had been the first show I had ever seen, I totally would not have been interested in watching it again.

I'm crossing my fingers that Branson redeems this family, and part of me still hopes that Tom will set himself right and become a good guy.  A small part of me keeps rooting for him, but I don't think it's going to happen.

2014 Resolutions

I may be setting myself up for failure, because I have some BIG goals for 2014.

We decided recently (over the course of several years) to make our family musical.  Cause it's just that easy right?!  Anyway, this week we finally put things into motion and we bought a digital piano and an acoustic guitar and are enrolling Ava into piano lessons, myself into guitar lessons and Owen into drum lessons.  The theory is that as I progress through guitar that I can then teach those after me when I get good.  And for all of those who are die-hard piano people, I know that the digital piano isn't the same, and yes her experience would be better on a real piano.  But we don't have the room in our small house for a real piano, but we can carry the digital one downstairs.  And let's face it, we are running on quite a small budget and there is no way that I am pumping money into something that may fizzle out in a year or two.  If she becomes amazing and has performance aspirations, then we will re-think the layout of our house and where our money is spent.

Owen will take drums hopefully by the young man at church who plays on our worship team.  I am going to try and learn piano at home while Ava does it because we cannot afford private lessons for both of us.  And then we'll pass it down and down and down.  I mean, if the Duggars can have their 19 kids all playing piano and violins I ought to be able to do it with 5...

Also, other resolutions are:

1.  Reading the Bible in one year
2.  Saving $5,000
3.  Going back to spending cash only
4.  Less time on the internet looking at design blogs and rotting my brain.  Hopefully, with all of our musical aspirations that will force me to you know, play guitar instead of hopping on the net.

And of course, eat healthier, lose weight and all that jazz

Should be easy, no??  I mean, it's not like I am asking for much!