He Cleaned

Well, I told Jake I would blog about his new room if he cleaned it. So he did. (I made the bed - it's a tricky one.)

It was not easy to get a good picture of the entire room - it's large and the door is in a corner, so you'll just have to envision the entire thing in your mind.

Scott built a loft bed for him, so he would have plenty of floor space to sprawl out and create with his legos.
It's also a great place to pound in a few nails and display all the swimming ribbons!
He wanted a "lego" room, but I am done making stencils and doing theme rooms for the kids - it takes forever and in a few years, they'll be over it, so I printed some lego blocks out of vinyl and stuck them on the wall. Viola. Done. We also provided him with plenty of shelf space to display his lego creations. His desk is just eye candy - I don't think he has ever sat at it to do anything. Ever.

We also had to put up a few of his favorite things - - like his reminder of how brave he was when he broke his wrist... (and not so smart - but we kind of blame daddy for that one).

And this is my favorite little area - it shows two of Jake's favorite interests; nature and science. His fish...and his microscope. He's quite a kid.

And I'm sure he will keep it looking like this - all clean and picked up - until he graduates from high school.

Ahhhffice

Jake decided he wanted a bigger bedroom, so we moved him out of his tiny room and gave him the former guest room. I will post pictures of that when he cleans it. I decided to turn his former room into my office and the kids' craft room. I LOVE IT!!! I just feel like saying "ahhhhh" whenever I am in there.

I have never had a dedicated office in this house, so my piles of paper would either be on the kitchen counter or on my dresser, depending on who was coming over. This was most possibly the cheapest makeover ever. Mom sewed my curtains and table/desk skirting (with 1/2 price fabric...) I made the chair pads and used old chairs we already owned. Scott built the cubbies a long time ago, and he also built my desk and Maggie's craft table-using wood we already had, too. I bought the cute little antique typing cart for $7. Yes, that's "seven dollars," my friend.
Maggie and I have been loving the vinyl stick-on trees we've been seeing in Pottery Barn and other catalogs, so we decided we needed one in the office. I have a Silhouette machine (cuts vinyl and other stuff) and you can print your own designs (unlike the Cricut...you have to have cartridges for that one). So, we designed a tree, downloaded a cute owl and made our own. We love how it turned out.
Since I took the pictures, I added a large owl to her craft table (under the glass.) Whooo wants to come over and do some crafts?

Shark Teeth

We love the ocean. On our trip to Florida in December, we couldn't just stay in Orlando, it was way too close to the ocean to let that chance slip away. So we took a day to get our toes in the sand.

When Scott was a kid, he went on a vacation to Venice, Florida and found shark teeth in the sand. He thought the kids might enjoy that, so off to Venice we went. We went to Venice Beach and were unsuccessful in our shark teeth hunt. (I started out by looking for big white jagged teeth. Not quite right.) These are fossilized shark teeth - black and not super sharp.

Even though we didn't find teeth there, we found some shells and built an awesome sand castle.

Then someone told us to go to Nokomis Beach. Paydirt. We found dozens of teeth. Pretty cool.



It was a glorious day.

Disney, Where All Your Dreams Come True....Really?!?!

Right before the kids got out of school for Christmas break, we decided to have them skip a week (horrible, I know) and take them to Disney. Scott had a conference there, so it was ideal. It started out pretty cold...we were glad we had our winter coats!!
The kids enjoyed some turkey legs...

Maggie got her hair wrapped - it's a piratey thing!

We were not good about taking pictures. We hit all four parks - Epcot, Hollywood Studios, Magic Kingdom and Animal Kingdom. It was fun. Before we came home, I asked the kids what their favorite part of Disney was and they both yelled, "The Ocean!!" Which, of course, is not at Disney. I'll post pictures of our little side-trip to the ocean later. (That was my favorite part, too...)

On a side note, our little get-away got extended a bit when we got back to Minnesota. We landed in the middle of a blizzard and ended up spending the night in a Days Inn in Bloomington. No one had any clean clothes. (Yuck.) We do now, though, so life's good!

I Am A Sucky Blogger and Maggie Swims

It's true. Every time I've gone to my blog the last few weeks, this little box pops up that says I have to update the html for my buttons (whatever that means) and it freaks me out (so then I'm frucked - Jake's best word of 2010) and I don't do anything.

So, today, I updated the html, downloaded a boatload of pictures and will proceed to blog away. The first installment...Maggie's first swim meet. I actually wrote this right after it happened and never downloaded any pictures, so I never published it. So, without further ado, here you go.

GO STINGRAYS!! In early December, Maggie participated in her first swim meet ever. Scott participated in his first swim meet ever (as a coach). And Jake competed in his first swim meet ever (as a 9-year old -- not his first meet :)

We had a lot of fun. Scott gave the kids a pep talk on the way there (at 6:30 a.m. in the dark, mind you...) It went sort of like this: "Are you nervous? When I was little, I wanted to wrestle, so my dad took me to wrestling practice. I sat down on the mat and all of the other kids were around the coach and I got so nervous that I just started crying, so my dad took me home." The next story was equally inspiring and also ended with him being super nervous, crying and his parents taking him home. Ummmm.

Anyway, I asked him if he was coaching or sitting by me. He told me he was "not" coaching, so we got settled in the bleachers and I asked if he wanted to go buy a program. He said, "Sure," walked away and went over to where the other coaches were. And that was the last time he sat down by me. :) He had several swimmers there (he coaches the youngest kids on the team), and one little girl was REALLY nervous and crying. (I asked if he told her his inspiring story...) She was glad he was there and I think he had a great time coaching and being in the middle of the action.

Since parents aren't allowed "on deck" (which means next to the pool), I've never been able to get great pictures. Since Scott was coaching, he was front and center, so got some great shots.
Maggie placed 7th in her first ever 50-meter backstroke. Jake got bumped up an age group since the last meet, so he was swimming against kids up to two years older than him. He improved his times, which we were very excited about!
At the meets, the swimmers write their race and heat numbers and times on their arms in permanent marker (not washable, for obvious reasons...) Jake and Maggie decided just to draw all over themselves. Maggie gave herself a watch around her wrist; a really looooong shark down one arm; someone wrote "eat my bubbles" on her other arm...you get the idea. Jake was equally covered. Still is. Maggie didn't realize that it wouldn't wash off, and when she was in the tub later that day, she asked me for a new wash cloth because the old one wasn't working. Oops.

Bad

Ok, I've been an incredibly bad blogger lately. Sorry. We had a fairly eventful December...a trip to Disney, Christmas, New Year's Eve, family, lots and lots of winter weather (we even got stuck at a hotel in the cities for a night during a blizzard). It was a lot of fun and now I am trying to get back into the swing of things. I will post pictures from our trip to Florida and anything else that's interesting on my camera in the next few days.

I will also be cleaning out a storage room, putting away Christmas (no, I haven't done that yet), moving Jake into a different bedroom and turning his old room into my office. He wants to live in Lego Land (you'll understand when you see the finished product) and I am trying my best to make it happen for him.

On a side note, I had my entire house clean all at the same time this week. That hasn't happened in a very long time. Woo-hoo!! (It's already not clean anymore, but that's life...)

Happy 2011 - here's to a GREAT year!