March 16

The girls and I drove over to my mom's house to stay for a couple of days.  Daniel stayed home to work on a long list of home improvement projects without any children to get in the way.  We have someone coming to walk through our house on Monday.  We haven't listed our house yet (because we haven't found a house we want to buy yet), but our realtor thinks this person might be a good fit for our house. 

On Tuesday, we are going to walk through the house that we like and have heard lots of good things about.  So it could be a big (aka STRESSFUL!) week.  When I was casually looking at houses for sale, it was kind of fun.  Now that we are seriously looking at houses and thinking about selling our house, it is not quite as much fun.  It's hard work to sell a house and buy a house and to get all the timing worked out with all of it.  If I can survive it all, I think I will be really excited about a new house...but it is going to be a long road to get there.


So back to today, Isla has figured out how to say Nana and Papa, and she just keeps calling their names out over and over again.  Braxen (our niece, who is one year younger than Isla) and Isla are big fans of playing on the stairs, so we found ourselves sitting around the stairs a lot tonight.  Here is Nana with all her grandgirls!

March 12

The sun was shining today, so I pulled out my REAL camera and tried to take some pictures with the light from the front door.

Audrey found some Easter baskets in our basement, and the girls have been having fun playing with them this week.  Isla likes to wear the basket around her neck like a necklace.

And she likes to play peek a book with the basket on her head.

She also likes to carry it around and put random things inside it. 

Look closely at her pants in the above pictures and compare it to this picture from September.  Same pants (size 12 months), six months later.  She IS growing, slowly but surely!

 

I tried to take some pictures of Audrey today too, but this is the best I got.  Crazy girl!!

March 10: Distracted

This whole house hunting/selling process has me distracted.  I can't focus on anything, and I just think about houses all the time.  We have decided that we are pretty serious about moving.  I just want to find a house and move already, so we can get on with our life!  We do have a lead on a house through a friend of several of my friends.  It sounds like a really good fit for us.  Probably too good to be true.  But I'm keeping my fingers crossed!

With all this distraction,  I am a lousy blogger these days.  I am really going to try to do better this week.  Really.  Stay tuned.

March 7: House Hunting

So for a while now, we have been thinking that we might want to move to a new house.  We love our house.  It is old and quaint and cute.  We have plenty of space here, and we live on a nice block.  So why move when we are happy where we are?  I have been asking this question a lot this week.

We do have a few reasons that a move might be a good idea.  And here they are!!

Reasons Why We Might Want to Move:  (in order of importance)
1.  Better schools.   I'm not super excited about the school Audrey would go to next year, so I really do like the idea of sending her to a better school. 
2.  A quieter and nicer neighborhood.  We do like our neighborhood now.  But our block is right next to a busy business street.  Our alley backs up to that street, which means it is not quiet around here.  There is a lot of foot traffic through the alley and on our block. I would like to live in a neighborhood where I feel comfortable letting the girls play in our yard alone.
3.  A place where the girls can have their own bedrooms.  This was a bigger deal a few months ago when the girls were not sleeping well together in their room.  This alone isn't enough reason to move, but if  we are going to move, I'd like for this to be part of it!
4.  A newer and more efficient house.  Our house is about 65 years old.  Living in an old house is starting to lose its charm for me.  I am freezing all winter long, and we pay a fortune for utilities.

Then, on top of those reasons, I also have a list of requirements for our new house.

Things We Would Like in our New House:  (in order of importance)
1.  3 bedrooms, 2 full bathrooms
2.  Price under $150,000
3.  An additional room (extra bedroom or family room) where I could teach piano lessons
4.  A kitchen with a pantry or more storage than we currently have
5.  A house that doesn't need a lot of upgrades
6.  An attached garage
7.  A basement
8.  A house with the same space we have now (around 2000 square feet)
9.  A laundry room (in a finished part of the house)

So, I am pretty sure it is impossible to find a house around here that meets all the reasons we want to move and all the things we would like in a house.  I know we are most likely going to have to compromise somewhere.

Last week, we found a house that fit with all of the above except for #7 and #8 on the "Things We Would Like" list.  It was such a cute house, it was in excellent condition, right across the street from a little park, and it was in our budget!  We put in an offer at the same time as another couple...but they went with the other couple's offer.  I am still really sad about it, because I loved that house and the neighborhood.

Now we are back to searching, and I am just not finding anything right now that comes close to the standard of that house from last week or to meeting all of the requirements on my list.  It may be a long hunt. 

In the meantime, we are trying to get our house ready to sell, which means tearing down the wallpaper and repainting the kitchen, as well as several smaller projects around the house and LOTS of cleaning!

March 4

It's been kind of crazy around here for the past couple of days.  We almost bought a new house!  But we found out today that we didn't get it, which was a bummer because we really liked this house.  I'm sure I will write more about this whole house hunting situation later, but I'm not feeling very long-winded tonight.

Mom and Marcus were here this weekend, which was convenient since we ended up looking at houses this weekend.  The girls were super excited to have Nana and Papa here.  Isla took a special liking to Papa, and even starting saying "papa" in reference to him.  I wish I would have gotten a picture of the two of them together, but I didn't.  Here are a few pictures of the girls with Nana though.

February 28

I realized tonight that I haven't posted much on the blog this week.  So here are a couple of pictures of the girls in their matching pajamas before bed tonight.

"Golden Hollywood" Oscar Party

 My friend Heather and I threw our annual Oscar party last night.  The party was fun, and everything went well.  Except for the actual awards show.  I could write a whole post on my thoughts about the show (maybe I will!), but I can sum it up with one word:  boring!  Seriously, these people are supposed to be the best of the best in entertainment...why can't they put together an entertaining awards show?  It was a good season for movies, and there seemed to be a lot of potential for a good show this year, but for the most part, I was very unimpressed...and bored.

Most of our guests ended up leaving before the show was over, due to the fact that it was boring, plus everyone had babysitters who needed to be relieved back home.  But still, we all had a good time.   I will say that this party completely wore me out.  I was EXHAUSTED by the time I got home last night; I am getting too old for these kinds of things!

Daniel wins the husband of the year award, because he spent the afternoon taking care of the girls while I helped get the party ready.  Then he skipped the party and stayed home all night with the girls, because we couldn't find a babysitter.  And while I was out partying, he also cleaned up our whole house!!

Here are more details than you probably ever wanted to know about our party!

FOOD:

Heather and I make a good party planning team.  She likes to do all the food and party games, and I like to do the decor and crafty things.  So all credit for the menu and food preparation goes to her.   Our menu included:

Oreo peanut butter brownie cupcakes and a golden tuxedo cookie cake

 Mini spinach quiche bites and ham and cheddar cornbread bites

 

Golden Hollywood punch and  Homemade Panera mac n cheese

 Tiramisu trifles and a popcorn bar (with various popcorns, seasonings and mix ins).  The popcorn bar idea was inspired by this.

DECOR:

 The decor was inspired by this gold and black New Year's Eve party.    I just love the look of the sparkling gold paired with the black and white stripes.

I throw a lot of parties, and I don't have a lot of money, so I have found that it is necessary to recycle many old party supplies and reuse them over and over again for different parties.  I decorated these votive candle holders for my book club last month, and the sparkling gold wrappers were perfect for this party too.  I just took off the pink paper and the rhinestone, made the Oscar party tag and attached it to the front...voila, it's like a brand new candle!

I also LOVE these white frames from Ikea and use them all the time for parties.  It is so easy to just switch out the papers inside and create a totally new look with the same frames.  The frames are only 99 cents, and next time I am at Ikea, I am going to buy 10 more!

 One more recycled party item:  these office binder clips that serve as name cards for the food.  I cannot even count the number of times I have used these same clips.  They are large binder clips, and then I just tape paper on them and tie ribbon around them.  So easy to switch out and redecorate with a new theme!

Each year we have a packet for each party guest, which includes a ballot, a bingo card, and usually several papers that we use to play games throughout the night.  I saw this idea on Pinterest, and I just had to copy it.  It matched our theme perfectly!!  I bought the bags through this Etsy shop.  I used the template provided here, and traced the Oscar statue onto sparkling gold cardstock.  Then I cut them all out and attached them to the bags.  I did not love this idea while I was cutting out all those statues, but I did love the final product!

For favors, I got these little gold boxes from Oriental Trading (I also go the black/white striped table runners from there).  Inside I put some gold wrapped candy (Werthers and Rolos), then I finished them off with some black satin ribbon and Oscar party tags.  I thought these were super cute.  Too bad we forgot to pass them out to about half of our guests before they left!

I folded the napkins to look like envelopes.  But I think they looked too pretty, because hardly anyone used them!!

OK, that is just about everything!  Heather planned some games for everyone to play to try to keep the show interesting, but once the party actually got started I didn't take many pictures.  Here is one group shot while everyone was consulting their ballots and bingo cards during the show:

Whew, just putting this post together has worn me out.  Good thing I have a few months before the next big party (Isla's 2nd birthday in May!).