A Math Equation

Returning from a family vacation + a broken dryer =

This:


+ This:

The good, the bad, and the ugly of our new house

Welcome to my new house. Are you ready for a tour? It's good, it's bad, and it's ugly. I cut off this picture so you can't see the other side of the duplex. It looks just like our side only reversed. If you walked in the front door you would see this:



Well, actually it would look more like this:

Here is the other side of the front room:The kitchen is bad and ugly. It is small and has no counter space. Our IKEA table takes up half the room

The counter NEVER looks like this. We have no dishwasher, so the counter is always covered with dishes. There is only on thing I like about this kitchen and here it is:

Why doesn't every kitchen have a built in cookie sheet cabinet? I have been wishing I had something like this for years!

Here is the upstairs bathroom. The yellow counter top is pretty ugly, but at least is matches with my butterfly shower curtain.


The girl's room: They wanted to all share a room, but the room is so tiny. They look like little orphans with their beds all in a row.

Here is the other side of the room with its tiny carpet space showing.

With the girls sharing a room, the other upstairs room became the play room:

I know we have way too many toys.

That's the whole upstairs. It is very tiny, but this room saves us from killing each other due to being crowded:


It's a basement, but it gets tons of light. And this room is huge. It can fit our new couch, the TV, all our instruments, both Rand's and my desks, and several book cases. And still have floor space for the girls to play games. I was tempted to make this room the play room, but my dh wisely suggested that we should make this big room a room that the whole family could enjoy.


Here is our bedroom. My dh bought all the decorations when we lived in Colorado. He did such a great job. It is the nicest decorated room in the house. And now it is in the basement... When we first got all the decorations up my dh said it looked like our old bedroom had been shrunk in the dryer...

We have a garden plot in our backyard. That is one of the "goods" assuming I can get anything to grow. I have tried gardening before, but I never really had a good space to work with. I love planting pretty flowers, but I haven't had too much luck planting things from seed.

Here is another on of the "goods. " This is the view from our backyard. Feel free to be jealous and then remember I have no dishwasher.

Only a 5 year old...

I came upstairs yesterday and found this on the kitchen table. It took me a minute to figure out what I was seeing. Yes, that's right, someone had been STAPLING a graham cracker. It only took me one guess to figure out who had been doing this. I confronted the culprit:

Me: Arwen, have you been STAPLING the graham crackers?

Arwen: Yes

Me: Um, why?

Arwen: Because I wanted to.

Me: Uh, OK.

What was going through that 5 year olds mind? Did she come up with the idea to staple the graham crackers and go and get the stapler? Or was the stapler sitting on the table while she was eating the crackers and stapling them seemed like a good idea? Who knows, but I am stilling laughing at the sight of the stapler with the graham cracker crumbs in it.

The 10 year old gets her ears pierced

OK, I was going to post something sentimental yesterday about my oldest daughter turning 10, but by the end of the day's festivities, I was exhausted. We went to our homeschool group's park day in the morning - and brought treats. Then we met my dh on campus and had lunch in the food court - yuck. We then walked around campus and went to the art museum's family art festival. Back to the student center for ice cream- yum. Home for a bit before heading to the library for their Shakespeare for Kids activity (Sierra insisted even after I suggested we skip it since it was her birthday). Then home for dinner (lasagna - Sierra's choice). At 7 pm we had Sierra's new friend from church over for cake (cheesecake - Sierra's choice). I wasn't planning any kind of friend party since we just moved here and I didn't think Sierra had made any close friends, yet, but I was informed on Sunday that her friend Emily was so excited about Sierra's birthday and wanted to give her a present. Well, what's a mom to do? So, I quickly came up with a plan to have the friend over for cake in the evening. So as you can see it was a very busy day that led to a very exhausted mom at the end of the day.

But that is not what this post is about. Last year my dh decided that Sierra was old enough to get her ears pierced if she wanted, but she didn't want to, yet. This year she was ready. Here are some hilarious pictures of her reaction to getting her ears pierced.

Before the first piercing... feeling a little nervous


Time for the second ear. The crying has begun.
Getting the second ear pierced. Love the reaction!



Very happy to have gotten her ears pierced?



Feeling better

An impromptu camping trip

Last Wednesday we decided to go camping on Friday. My dh had been talking to the girls about going into the mountains on the new moon to look at the stars and since the new moon was on the 3rd we figured Friday night was close enough and when better to look at the stars than on a camping trip. It was very tempting to say that I was too busy to go camping, having just gotten settled into our new house, but I am glad I didn't. We had such a great time. And the star gazing was only a small part of the fun of the trip. We hiked through a creek bed that led into a canyon, up a hill that led into a canyon and and in a wash that led through a canyon with huge walls on both sides. DH, of course, had lots of geology tidbits to share along the way. We also explored a pioneer town in the area and saw petroglyphs. We left Friday morning and were home by dinner time on Saturday.

Here are some pictures from our adventure:

My love/hate relationship with IKEA

Oh these lo, many years ( 7/12 to be precise), I have so missed living near an IKEA - the beautiful showrooms, the cheap household goods. But now we live just 20 minutes from this fabulous store. A few weeks ago we decided to stop by this wonder of a store on the way home from Salt Lake City. It was a bad idea. My husband had been eyeing the sleek modern couches at the IKEA website and since we were driving right by the store I thought it would be a good idea to stop in. I was wrong. It was almost 5pm when we got there, so everyone was already starting to get hungry. As soon as we pulled into the parking lot my husband had a bad feeling. I brushed it off. He is way more into decorating than he was when we live in Seattle.

But here is the problem - you can't just walk in the store, go the the couches, pick one, and go to the checkout. You have to follow the maze through the all showrooms, then you have to zig zag through the household goods and finally into the self service area and to the checkout. I didn't have a problem with it. I love looking at the cool set ups in the showrooms and I love wandering through the cheap household goods, but as soon as a we walked in to the store, Rand remembered what we were up against and announced "this is why I hate this store!"

Luckily the couches were first in the show rooms, but I just couldn't pick one. There was the nice more expensive one, but it only came in red and I wasn't sure I wanted a red couch. There was the slightly cheaper one in brown and the really cheaper one that pulled out into a chaise bed, but I hated the fabric on it.

Customer Service is not a strong point for IKEA and we couldn't find anyone to tell us how we go about buying a couch (that is if I could make up my mind...) we wound our way through the rest of the showrooms and the household area with our tired and hungry children and made it to the self service area, finally finding someone to help us. But they were not very helpful. They could not figure out which couches were in stock. I was thinking that knowing which couches were in stock would help me make my decision. But Rand ran out of patience and we decided to leave.

I was actually kind of glad to have time to think over which couch I wanted to buy. We made plan to rent a trailer to go get a couch the next day. You can read about what happened when we went to pick up the trailer here.

So we get IKEA and this time we are smart enough to drop our kids off at the play area. I am still undecided about which couch to get. We do decided to go ahead and get a table and a bench, too. We get to the self service area and get the table and the bench and wait to find someone to tell us for sure which couches are in stock and how to go about buying it and holding it so our Good Samaritan can come pick it up after he is done working. It turns out that IKEA won't hold purchased items for pick up - ugh! - so I call the Good Samaritan and he says he is almost done with his job and will drive right over. So we hurry to get the couch purchase settled, sign up for a line of credit - no interest for a year :) and off we go. I follow Rand and our new best friend in his red truck containing our fabulous new furniture. All is well...

Until we get home and open the box for the table and find out that the table has a screw coming through the top of it - aaaaah! I call customer service (remember not one of IKEA's strong suits) and go round about telling them that we need them to bring us a new part because there is no way we can bring the piece back - it won't fit in either one of our cars even if we take it out of the box. Finally after 2 days they decide to UPS us the part, but they won't guarantee that the part won't be damaged by UPS - OK, fine. But several days later, they call back and say the part they have doesn't match the part I described and that I will have to bring the piece back, but that they will give me a $30 gift card... OK, fine whatever. We ask around at church and find someone with a truck. Sheesh, that was difficult, but look at my beautiful new couch and table.


P.S. the part on the new table was exactly the same as the part on the old table except that it didn't have a screw poking through the top...

Living and learning

Even though the boxes are mostly gone, I still haven't gotten in the mood to do school with the girls. It's been a good 6 weeks since we have done any formal school stuff. And now I am feeling more like getting out and doing summer stuff than hitting the books. Of course, my mom keeps asking me when I am going to start back up with school and "won't they be behind" if I don't.

Here are just a few of the educational things my girls have done in the last 6 weeks:

*learned about how a car engine works while watching their dad fill up the oil in the car before the 8 hour car ride (Sierra)

* listened to the entire book Gathering Blue by Lois Lowry during the 8 hour car ride from Colorado to Utah

*began copying entire chapters of Magic Tree House books into a notebook (Sierra and Kali)

* watched Cyberchase

* watched Time Warp Trio

*planted a garden

* Sierra read the first Magic Tree House book to Arwen.

* listened to 3 books on tape in a single afternoon

* found an ant hill and got out the magnifying glasses and spent an afternoon observing the little creatures

* wrote stories to go along with their princess coloring books that they bought with the $1 of allowance that they mathematically convinced me that they still had left after the previous day's spending.

Those were the moments I observed. I am sure there were many learning moments that I missed. At least right now, I feel confident the my kids are not "behind" - whatever that means. Let summer time beginning! There may be some learning moments planned by me, but there will be many more that happen on their own during this lovely time of year we call summer.