River Dancing or Ballet?

Lucy can't decide which dancing style she likes the best. I'm thinking we can fore go the college fund and rely on dancing scholarships for this little girl, she's pretty talented.

The good part is after my embarrassing commentary--it's amazing what we do to get our children to laugh.

1-800-TOOTHFAIRY

The toothfairy has a 1-800 number. We didn't know this until we heard John's brother, Bill, call her when one of his daughter's lost a tooth. This is very valuable information now that we have a daughter who is losing teeth, thanks for sharing it with us Bill. The other day we had to give her a call, of course we only heard John's side of the conversation, but this is how it went:

"Tooth Fairy"....

"TOOTH FAIRY"...(to Hannah)"I really hate these automated systems"

..."Yes, we have a daughter who just lost a tooth."..."Hannah Loveless"..."Lower incisor"..."this morning"....

Then he gave the person on the other end of the line our address and told her "thank you."

We have discovered that giving the tooth fairy a call doesn't guarantee that she will be able to make it the following night. Apparently she had a lot of deliveries that night (or maybe she forgot) and had to deliver Hannah's gold dollar while she was at school.

She may be cute, but she has the mouth of a sailor.

Remember the old Popeye cartoons? Madeline does.

Today she was playing in the living room with Johnny when I heard her say "Oh my Gosh!" Now there are so many other phrases that could be worse, but out of curiosity I asked Hannah "Do you know where she learned that?" Hannah told me that she learned it from the Popeye cartoon DVD that we have. Then she proceeded to inform me that Popeye doesn't know better for various reasons, one being that he is not a church going man. I am just amazed that Maddie could understand Popeye's mumbling enough to imitate him

This is when Johnny came in, he loves this type of topic. He told me that he has a friend who always says the "W" word. What's the "W" word you ask? It's "What the Heck!" I didn't know whether to laugh or nod seriously in dissaproval when he whispered this to me. I ended up laughing and then nodding as seriously as I could.

Sometimes it's hard to know what to do when you're the mom. Obviously my children haven't heard me use my favorite slang words (pure luck), maybe I should stop using them now.

Can you guess what made this mark on our window?

When I saw this I thought it was so sad that I had to laugh. Our neighbor is from Bosnia and raises pigions which are native to Bosnia. He is so proud of them, he trains them to do tricks and enters them in competitions and such (quite interesting to watch actually). The little shed in the picture is his pigeon house, unfortunately they are probably all on our roof right now so you can't see them. Well, the other day we were all on the main floor when we heard a very loud crash in our bedroom. I ran upstairs to see what it was--nothing. a few days later I noticed this ghost of a pigeon on our window. Although we have found a dead pigeon or two in our yard in the past, we didn't find one this time. Tough bird!

Hey, anyone want to buy a house?

A few weeks ago we made the bitter-sweet decision to sell our house. For a while I have been wanting to move to a little more of a rural place, and we found one (thanks Lori and Matt for the idea). We are planning on finding a place in Kaysville as soon as we sell our home. I am such a small town girl at heart, and this is about as close as I will get to a small town close to John's work. It will actually be a better commute for him, something that we are both looking forward too--fewer city streets. We bought our home 5 years ago, for super cheap, when John decided to take a break from engineering and try his luck at flipping houses. We held on to this house for our own enjoyment even after he started his job at L-3 because we just couldn't beat the price of living in it. We refer to this house as our fun house because there was no possible way we could ruin it when we moved in. It was hideous, and we have learned so much about how to fix and remodel and what is really important in a home and family. John built the garage of his dreams, we completely demolished and rebuilt the kitchen with an added dining room, and so many other little things it is hard to count. We feel like we are ready to graduate from "home remodeling 101" so now the time has finally come to flip our house!

We plan on moving into a house that is not a fixer-upper this time.

Here are a few "before" pictures:

Our scary partially finished basement

Really gross downstairs bathroom

Old, worn out shingles. There was a hole (the size of an inspector) in the roof at this time.



carpet with cigarette burn marks the size of hockey pucks and who knows what stories these walls have to tell.


Kitchen--need I say more?

As I said this was our fun house, so please don't pay attention to our bright dining room, I painted it that color to look like a retro 50's diner (and also to impress my kids of course). I will be repainting it a more neutral color this weekend. Also we were kind of in the middle of a landscaping project when the photographer came by, it is nearly finished now.

Click on the link below to see the after pictures.


www.obeo.com/522568

Enjoy!

Oh how she grows

Lucy is growing so fast, and we all love her so much. Yesterday I caught her toying with the idea of pulling herself up with her overturned toy basket. I am amazed, even after seeing this with her three older siblings, she looks a little amazed too.Maddie wanted to hold Lucy yesterday, and I just had to take a picture, it always reminds me of an ant carrying a pupae. As you can tell, Lucy wasn't very thrilled with the whole idea.

Our little homemade stuffed animals

Last Saturday my friend's three children came over for a few hours to play while she attended a class. I absolutely adore her children, she has an eight year old, a six year old and a one year old . I was planning on spending the morning sewing binding on the quilt I made for Hannah's bed while they played, but that all changed as soon as I pulled out the sewing machine. Bela, the oldest, expressed how much she wanted to learn how to sew. So on a whim, we spent the morning making stuffed animals. I have never made these before, but it was actually easier than I expected. We drew patterns on pieces of paper (Hannah insisted on drawing her own), and then we cut out the fabric, I sewed them with a little help with pedal pushing, and they stuffed, stitched and decorated. It took most of our morning, but it was so worth it to see how cute they turned out, they were all so unique.