I have to brag on tonight’s supper. I fixed fettuccine florentine (some spinach noodles and some regular noodles) with canned mixed veggies and “pink” sauce (tomato/alfredo).

You would have thought that I fixed homemade pizza (J’s personal fave)! It was amazing; everyone ate without a single complaint and even showed off their empty bowls.

They were shocked when I told them what was in the dish, and A. remarked, “Oh, well, you camo’ed it pretty well.” lol! Someone called it “creamy saucy goodness.” I’ll take that as kudos, tyvm.

Note to self: make that again!

vinyl wall art: baseball!

vinyl wall art: soccer!

This was a very interesting room. The previous owners had girls, and this room was painted orange & green with vinyl stick-on polka dots in black, white and pink. We took down the pink dots, but the guys really liked the funky colors, so we tried to figure out what would go well with the bold color scheme.

I found these vinyl “shadows” for the wall, and [in my humble opinion] they look awesome! Definitely a boys’ room now! 🙂

Lane and I had an epiphany yesterday. For one academic year, we will have kids at all four schools! When R&R are in 4th grade at elementary school, D. will be in 6th grade at the intermediate school, J. will be in 8th grade at the middle school, and A. will be in 9th grade at the high school. Oh. My. Gosh!

We were jamming to some rock tunes in the car earlier, and every time we heard a song from Guitar Hero (which was often), the boys would try to guess the song before the name popped up on the dash display.

A few bars into one song, my oldest remarked: “Wow – Crazy Train sounds a lot better when someone isn’t missing notes.”

My oldest is the measuring rod by which all manner of unpleasant foods are assessed. Ok, fine, he’s a picky eater. That isn’t to say that he gets to eat whatever he wants. On the contrary, he knows that he has to try everything on his plate, and more often than not, there is a minimum amount that he has to eat of his veggies.

We picked lettuce from our garden this week, and I made a salad with a couple of banana peppers that were also ripe. Lo and behold, the little booger ate his whole salad without complaint! He also ate two helpings of spaghetti and walked away from the table to take his empty plate to the sink, saying repeatedly, “That was really good!”

>>proud Mama!<<

We’ve been brainstorming décor in the new house and after taking an informal poll of what the boys wanted in their rooms (being sure to make no promises … just gleaning their ideas!), we’ve decided to decorate the boys’ rooms and bathrooms as follows:

1) The oldest’s room: space/Star Wars theme. Have you ever seen “chalkboard” paint? It’s so cool – it goes on like paint and dries as a chalkboard, so you can literally write on the walls. It’s black, so you wouldn’t want to do more than one wall or part of a wall, but we thought it’d be cool in a “space” room and provide the budding genius with ample space to brainstorm (or quantify string theory … whatever). We could put glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling, etc.
2) The two middle ones’ room: sports theme. The room is currently painted in bright orange/green layers. We could repaint it, but we thought the bold color scheme would lend itself well to a sports theme. I’ve seen some cool wire silhouette shapes of sports that would be neat up against the bright colors. We were even thinking of hanging old skateboards as shelves, etc. There is an abundance of sports-related décor out there.
3) The two littlest ones’ room: superheroes/comic book theme: We have some Spiderman wall border (Peel & stick! No glue!) that we originally bought for the bathroom at our current house but didn’t get around to hanging. Also, we have a pair of framed comic book stamp collections that the boys received from PawPaw and also a Spiderman rug. Again, there is a myriad of options with this theme.
4) Hall bath: jungle theme. We already have a framed giraffe print and a leopard print, as well as a wild cat hook rack that are currently in the shared bedroom. I thought it’d be a nice, neutral theme for the guest bath.
5) Shared bath (rooms 2&3): frogs theme. This is the décor that my nephews had in their bathroom back home with Daddy, and it’s still in great condition. We thought it’d be a nice familiar touch for them to have at their new home.
6) TV room: rock ‘n roll theme. We’re going to use the second living area as a tv room and leave the “nice” living room with just some comfy seating, fireplace and piano. Since the tv room doubles as the video game room – and we all LOVE Guitar Hero! – we thought it’d be perfect to decorate with music in mind.

Everyone is psyched about their new rooms, so I think we chose well. Our goal was to pick themes that would be: 1) relatively easy and inexpensive to pull off, and 2) able to “grow” with the boys over time.

As for the master bedroom and bath … well, we’re not sure yet. We definitely want it calming and soothing to the eye (polar opposite of the Mary Engelbreit-on-steroids wallpaper that the current residents have in the master bath). I still would like a place to display my porcelain doll collection (the poor girls have been in boxes for years!!), but I’m not sure where. Bless his heart, Lane said I can put them wherever I like, but I don’t want to just throw up some shelves and call it done. I’ll keep thinking about the perfect place.

Tonight’s special side dish: greenbean casserole – from our very own garden! We also have lettuce and banana peppers almost ready to pick. The boys are very excited about being able to eat some of our “crops” before we move!

The boys were asking if we could puh-leeeease go to the beach, since this is a long weekend. I replied, “It’s a holiday weekend; do you have any idea how many people are going to be at the beach?!” One of the guys answered: “Probably like a thousand.” I said, “More like a million.” He shrugged, “Well, I was close.”

Do you ever have that feeling that you want to share some fantastic news, but you’re afraid that if you write it down, something is going to go horribly wrong, and it’ll all fall through? hmm … I s’pose that makes me a pessimist.

At any rate, we found out that our bid for the house we want to buy has been accepted! 🙂 We still need to sign the final contract (hopefully today) and get 1,000 other details worked out. Once all the ducks are in a row, it looks like we’ll be moving in as few as three weeks!!

I’m reminded of the song “Beauty for Ashes” by Crystal Lewis:

“He gives beauty for ashes
Strength for fear
Gladness for mourning
Peace for despair”

Blessing has sprouted from tragedy. Praise God for gladness, peace, beauty and strength!

I talked with the boys about moving to a new house and what all is involved in that process. (Only two of them were around when we moved here, and they were too little to remember.) We talked about packing, getting rid of stuff, prioritizing what to keep vs. what to give (or throw!) away, etc. I was prepared for some backlash about giving away &/or discarding toys and all the cleaning that they’ll have to help do, but what I didn’t expect was how badly they wanted to keep our garden!

The proposed solutions were hysterical. One suggested that we simply wait to move until our crops come in, so that we can take our veggies and fruits with us when we move. Another recommended selling the house to a friend so that we could come pick vegetables whenever we wanted to, because they would [naturally!] let us. A unanimous idea was to sell the house to Nana & Granddad (they don’t really need a new house, right? Ha!) so we can still access the garden. Even stealing the ripened crops under cover of night (*gasp!) was proposed, as was digging up and transplanting everything to our new backyard.

As a general rule, I try to avoid making outright promises to the kids, because I want to be sure that I can follow through, but I did tell them that we absolutely, positively would plant a new garden at our new house … I promise!

That pledge seemed to assuage the complaints … until we were at the grocery store last night. We walked through the produce section, and my oldest sighed and pointed at the large crate of watermelons: “That’s what we would have had in our garden. Now someone else will eat them.”