Snow Day

They've been talking about snow here for about a week.  Last night, it finally came.  I was becoming skeptical, so it was somewhat of surprise when I looked out the window this morning and saw that there was about an inch on the ground.  We checked out the schools website, and found only a 2 hour delay.  This puzzled me somewhat, as the snow was coming down, pretty hard, and was predicted to continue through the rest of the day.  It really seemed that they should have either started on time (when there was less snow to deal with) or just cancel it all together. Especially considering it's Wednesday, and the kids have early release every Wednesday.  Oh, well.  Kindergarten was cancelled, and Harrison had an orthodontist appointment at 11 (when school was suppose to start) so we didn't go to school today, anyway. 

Harrison got out and helped Sam shovel the driveway this morning.  Noah romped in the snow, attempted a snow man (the snow wasn't sticking very well) and helped construct the walls of a fort. 

Sam left for work (despite my misgivings) and the boys came inside to play.  I took Harrison to his appointment (braces are definitely in his future, but for now he'll just get a bite plate to deal with is severe overbite).  The roads were really pretty bad.  Nothing had been plowed.  I kind of figured once I got out of the neighborhood (which NEVER gets plowed) the roads would be pretty clear.  Not so.  They were somewhat compacted from people driving on them, and I think I saw some sand that they spread, but that was it.  I saw the traction control light come on a lot during my drive, and I kept my speed under 20 miles an hour.  On my way back from the appointment, Sam spotted me as he was headed home from work.  Apparently they sent everyone home (again in the worst part of the storm, with some pretty bad road conditions) at 11.  I didn't notice him following me home at all until he pulled up behind me when I went to pick Olivia up from her friends house. I was surprised, but glad to have him home for the day.

It was so nice Sam got to spend the rest of the day home with the family. We made cookies, and Sam took the boys out sledding.  They stayed out sledding for over an hour, and had a great time, meeting up with several other kids from the neighborhood. 

Olivia napped, and this pregnant lady stayed inside the warm house.  Oh, and I figured out our fans (despite what the HVAC guy told me) were going the wrong way (making our great room colder instead of warmer.) So, clever little (okay, huge, pregnant) me used the pole I got Sam for the Christmas lights to flip that switch (on one of the 2 fans) for the direction of the fan.  Not an easy task when it's at least 18 feet up in the air. Pretty proud moment for me.  So now one of our fans is for winter and one for summer, I guess. 

In the late afternoon I got the urge to do some sewing.  I found a tutorial on a pillow last night I was dying to make, and already had everything I needed to make it.  So I put aside my dinner making duties (Sam thankfully came to our rescue), and made this pillow: 

I just LOVE it. Used up some scraps of the drop cloth from our bench, and a pillow that I bought for Christmas. Took me about an hour, I think. The back is the envelope style - makes pillows SO simple. The ruffling is a little time intensive, but so so easy. 

I think it looks great on this chair in our great room.

I have pinned a bunch more, and I have 4 more red pillows that could use covers. Can't wait to start those too!

The kids have another day off from school tomorrow, so maybe we'll lust laze around the house, do some reading, sewing, and lots of playing.  I guess the snow is going to switch to more freezing rain, so it might be a day to spend indoors.  Sounds good to me!

Quick project

I'm in the middle of my pregnancy right now, and I'm finding I finally have some energy.  It's like all the projects that have been building up in my mind, I now want to get done.  Right now.  Because I know that the next few months are going to be tired ones, and then with a new baby, free time is hard to come by. 

Thanks to my new addiction to Pinterest, I found this great idea for organizing ribbon. The tutorial is actually for a wrapping paper station, but I knew it would be perfect for my collection of ribbon, and it would look great hanging in my craft room.

The first thing  I needed was an open back frame.  While we were out shopping on Saturday, I stopped by Michaels to see what they cost.  They didn't have any big enough, but they were expensive!  Our next stop for the day was Lowes, so I decided I would pick ups some moulding and make my own frame. I spent a total of $6 on the molding to create a 2 ft. X 3ft frame. This proved a little more difficult than I intiatially expected, as the wood was too thin to Kreg Jig together. And, due to some errors in my miter cuts initially, the frame ended up being a bit shorter than I wanted.  Live and learn.  We ended up using glue and staples to connect the corners.  The rest was pretty straight forward.  I just needed a little more depth from the wall to give my ribbons enough room to spin freely, so I attached some 2X2's to the vertical sides of the back of the frame.  I then used this to hang the frame, so there wouldn't be any weight on the joint of the frame (which is pretty much held together by glue.  I was able to fit almost all my ribbon on 2 rows, and had some space left over for wrapping paper. 

I've added a bit more ribbon since I took this pic, so it's starting to get a little crowded.  We'll see how long the wrapping paper lasts on there until it's totally consumed with just ribbon!

Several of my ribbons were not neatly wound - I got them at a ribbon outlet, and some of them were just stuffed in ziplock bags.  I had a big cardboard bolt from fabric I had purchased, and cut this to the widths of several of my ribbons that needed to be wound up.  Then the kids helped me get it all wound, so they could go on my new organizer. 

What better way to spend a day off from school, than helping your mom organize her ribbon. Right?  The kids actually really enjoyed winding up the ribbon, and each did 5 or six spools!

I was glad the kids were such willing helpers.  As you can see, we had a lot of ribbon to wind up!

It's really great to be able to see all the ribbon I have. Mayne now I'll finally get around to making some cute hair bows for Olivia, as I originally intended when I bought all that ribbon. I do plan on painting my cafe rods, so they aren't brass (or rubbed bronze...), but that will have to wait until another day. 

Chairs

Sam helped me finally get the craft room organized and cleaned up (on his birthday no less!), and I love having an orderly place to work on projects.  There's also a table for the kids to do crafty things on, the one that used to be the lego table, and then we replaced the top with our old kitchen table, so it's a shorter legged table.  But it's lacking kid sized seating.  So we decided to build some chairs.  We have 2 small ikea chairs (which I'm now realizing are a steal!), and we decided to use those as a guide to build our own.  Taking a cue from our locker build, we decided to go with MDF, as the boards are really straight, and pre-primed.

The tricky part about this design was how the seat works.  The 3 sides of the seat have a groove on the inside, that the seat slides into.  Sam has a table saw, and figured out how to make these cuts, although it's always a little nerve-wracking when you have to take all the safety devices off a tool to get it to do what you want.  But they came out perfect!

Unfortunately, I did the kreg-jig drilling, and it turns out that our MDF was less that 3/4 inch, and I had the drill bit set at a little bit greater than 3/4's inch.  So, in some spots, when we attached the parts, the wood split, or the screws poked through.  We took out the worst offenders, and just screwed in from the outside.


I wanted to find some cute contact paper (I had covered the white seats of our Ikea chairs a couple years earlier, and it just adds so much), but when I went shopping, there was really nothing out there.  It was also going to cost me more than it did to build the chair for one roll of paper, and I only needed a small amount.  Then I thought, I wonder if I can mod podge fabric to the seat?  I looked it up, and it can be done!

Using Mod Podge to cover the seat.

 So for the first chair, I took a leftover scrap of fabric from Olivia's roman shades and mod podged it on the seat.  I spray painted the chair in Krylon's Watermelon, and I sealed the whole thing (including the mod podged seat) with krylons clear sealer.  I think it turned out really cute! 

Olivia immediately declared the first chair was her's, and insisted that it be painted pink.

For the 2nd chair, I used a scrap from the roman shades in the kitchen, and painted the chair green.  I also simultaneously built and finished a larger chair.  This time, I got the Kreg Jig set up correctly (for 5/8th's thickness, instead of 3/4), and there were fewer problems, but the 90 degree joints were still troublesome.  I ended up having to put in some screws from the outside again.

I think I'm done trying to build chairs like this out of MDF, but I do want to try out making some of these folding chairs.  I think these would be perfect with a drop cloth canvas seat, maybe even stenciled with an initial or something.

Minnie

On Monday night for FHE, we introduced the kids to the idea of "Mikey nickels".  Now, that's going to need some explaining.  First of all, "Mikey nickels" are replacing what was last years "cow nickels."  This was an idea from my MIL - she got all the kids really excited about purchasing a cow for a family in a 3rd world country this year for Christmas, and gave us the idea of the kids earning nickels to help pay for the cow.  We had a jar where the kids would get to put a nickel in any time they obeyed quickly, did their chores, etc.  It was a really great experience, and Harrison especially really latched on to the idea of helping others in need.  Noah and Olivia had a little bit of a harder time with the concept, but there were times they were really excited about it. 2 cows were purchased with the money condtirbuted from Sam's sibs and families, and it was a great experience.

A few months ago, Sam's mom brought up the idea of all going to Disney World as a family.  By all, I mean our family + Sam's 5 sibs + their families and his parents.  She has a very kind and generous friend who has given her 1 weeks worth of  a timeshare for 2 "villas" in Disney World's Animal Kingdom.  The plan is to go in early October of 2012.  So, we reintroduced the idea of nickels, but this time they are "Mickey nickels" to help the kids save up money for their admission to Disney World.  Because, although are accommodations are taken care of, there's still airfare for 5 and tickets to Disney world to be purchased. And I thought it would be a great chance to get the kids involved in contributing to the expenses.  Now, I admit, this is not quite the charitable endeavor that it was last year, but, as my MIL reminded me, building strong families is also a worthy cause.

When the cow was our theme, GG (Sam's mom, as the kids call her) made everyone cow print PJ's, and got us a cow jar to collect nickels in.  We also have a few cow statues around the house to help the kids remember what they were working towards.  So, I figured some Disney paraphernalia was in order.  Over the summer, I was at a yard sale where they were selling a very new looking set of Mikey and Minnie stuffed animals, the genuine ones, purchased at Disney World earlier that year.  I got them for $1 each, and they've been up in the top of my closet waiting for this occasion to bring out.  Noah and Olivia immediately latched on to them.  GG had brought some Disney shirts for the kids last year, and the next morning, Noah and Olivia both came down dressed in their Mikey and Minnie shirts holding their dolls. 

Then I remembered I had found some red/white polka dot fabric in the remnant section of Joann's and went about finding a tutorial on a bubble skirt. Gotta love the internet - I don't buy patterns for anything anymore!  It was super easy, and I was able to put it together in about 30 minutes.  Then today, I made a big Minnie bow (out of some fabric GG brought with her in October), and Olivia dressed up as Minnie today.  She just needs some white gloves, yellow shoes, and some Minnie ears and she's good to go. I really like the fabric for the bow, but there wasn't enough to make the skirt from that.  I might try and find some more of it, and make a new skirt.  Or maybe a dress like this one. Maybe this will be Halloween next year? 

Reviving the blog

In the past few weeks since Christmas, we have been trying to get the blog back up to date.  We've put in about 15 posts, and dated them accordingly.  If you're using Google Reader or another RSS feed aggregator, then they wind up in your inbox.  otherwise, you might want to go back through the last several months, back to the summer weddings. Besides simply wanting to get back into blogging, the real impetus for this was to make sure that next Christmas we don't have to spend forever getting our yearbook written.  2010 was a pretty busy year, what with moving and all. Unfortunately we didn't do a good job of keeping the blog up to date. Mollie spent a good week to make sure that photos and stories made their way into the book.

A Year in the Life of the Paynes by Sam, Mollie, Harrison, Noah, and Olivia | Make Your Own Book

Our yearly books are turning out to be one of my favorite things.  We have a book for each of the last 4 years, and send them to parents and grandparents for Christmas.  It's the perfect gift.  It is quickly making a wonderful family record. It's basically a slurp of the blog, done by Blurb.  If the blog is out of date, then we have to sit down and write in all the content. Having the blog up to date makes this a much better book.  2011 was such a fun year! So, in hopes of having a the book reflect that, we have been spending a lot of time updating the blog.  Here's our books from past years: 2009 

A Year in the Life of the Paynes by Sam, Mollie, Harrison, Noah and Olivia | Make Your Own Book

 2008

A Year in the Life of the Paynes by Sam, Mollie, Harrison, Noah, and introducing, Olivia | Make Your Own Book

2007

House of Payne, Summer 2007 by Adapted from House of Payne - Family Blog (http://houseofpaynesandiego.blogspot.com) | Make Your Own Book

The Big 35

We celebrated Sam's 35th birthday on Saturday.

I asked him to pick up birthday candles for his cake on his way home from work on Friday.  The checkout girl kept commenting on how someone must be really old if you have to buy two packs of birthday candles.  Honestly, anyone older than 20 needs 2 packs, so if that's really old, I guess we're ancient. In 6 more years, he'll need 3 packs.  Now that's something to comment on :)


The kids were super excited, and woke up extra early Saturday.  They wanted to "help" me make breakfast for Sam (Harrison did scramble eggs), but they also wanted to wake Sam up extra early. I'm sure just the birthday surprise he wanted on a Saturday morning.  While I was cooking up crepes, they went in his room and sang a chorus of happy birthday. So much for breakfast in bed.

The Sunday before his birthday I pulled out my trusty old cake doctor book, to figure out what kind of cake to make him.  Olivia took the book, and pointed to a cake, and said, "This one!"  I looked, and it was a chocolate peppermint cake.  We still had quite a few candy canes left over for christmas, so it seemed like a good idea, and Sam thought so too.  It was chocolate cake with a peppermint candy cane buttercream filling, and peppermint chocolate ganache for frosting. The kids helped me decorated the top with mini-candy canes forming hearts. As I was putting the candy canes on the cake, it made me remember my mom had made a special candy cane cake for me for my 2nd birthday - but it didn't do the trick, as I was distraught my baby sister came home from the hospital that same day.  Ah, memories.

The kids couldn't wait until after dinner to have cake, so we had it after lunch.  It tasted pretty good, but for some reason the cake was incredibly crumbly.  Not sure what I did wrong, as I followed the doctored up recipe, adding buttermilk and extra eggs or something.  I did forget to add the vanilla, but I really don't think that would make it crumbly.  Oh, well.

I forgot to get a shot of the cake before we stuck all those candles in it. 

The kids didn't seem to notice the cake was crumbly.  They ate it right up!

 Sam was a good sport about helping with projects around the house on his birthday.  I hope he felt appreciated, as we all really think he's the greatest - greatest dad, husband, and the greatest at everything he does for all of us.  We love you Sam!

Living "Family" room update

There is always a bit of debate about what room should be called what in our home.  Growing up, our "living" room was the nicer room.  The room where the home teachers would come to visit.  The room with the piano.  The room we rarely went in.  Or the room where we actually did very little "living."  The family room was where we hung out.  It had a couch for lounging, a TV, comfy chairs, the fireplace.  The first 6 years of our marriage, we only had one living space.  This often got referred to as the "front room" for some reason.  Even in Maryland we didn't have 2 rooms that fit the definition of "family  room" and "living room" to me.  We had a basement area, and a "family" room.  But now we have 2 rooms with couches.  And lots of confusion about what they should be called.  To me, our "great room" as it was called when we bought the house, is what I would consider a "family" room.  It's got a big sectional, the fireplace, and it's where we project movies to watch.  It's adjacent to the kitchen, and it's where we do most of our "living." I know that doesn't make any sense. Our other room, the "piano" room as it gets called a lot, is what I would call a "living" room.  It's where we have the home teachers come (when they come), and it's more formal.  But, the way the decorations of this room are going, it's turning out to truly be a "family" room.  This is where I have hung our Genealogy fan chart, and our wall of family history pictures. 

For Christmas this year, I worked on creating a silhouette chart, similar to one that my sister Sarah had created for my mom for mother's day back in 2010.  So now I have a chart for each family, and I framed these and added them to our wall:

Don't look to closely - I hung an earlier version of the Payne family chart.  I updated Olivia's profile and added a future child for John and JaNae, who are expecting!  I just need to get a new one printed up, and put in the frame.

I think it ties in really nicely with the family history wall. 

 
And then I found some fabulous round frames and Micheals (40% off + an additional 25% off the sale price!) and decided it was time to put something above the piano.  I knew I needed something there, but I didn't know what I wanted to do. 

Since almost all the frames in the room are holding black and white photos, I wanted to keep with that, but I didn't really want a huge family picture or something.  So this is what I came up with:

I took our individual silhouettes, and made enlargements at costco - 8X10's for Sam and I, and 5X7's of the kids.  The baby's frame has Olivia's old silhouette minus the pony tail as a place holder for now.  I think I need to readjust the size of some of them - they are slightly out of proportion and I think Sam wants a new one done of him.  But for now I'm loving this.  I may even try and update the kids every year or so, as they change.  I think the silhouettes will be a fun keepsake to have. 

So, maybe we should start calling this room our "family" room.  What do you think?

Christmas Decor

I felt like last year I really didn't do much in the way of Christmas decorations.  We didn't put up any lights, and the indoor decorations were minimal.  We were out of town the week of Christmas, and with my new calling as primary president, my life was too crazy to dec the halls.  So, this year, I really tried to make an effort to get our house feeling Christmas-y.  We spent the rest of the day on Thanksgiving getting out the decorations we had, and setting up and decorating the tree.  The kids did almost all the ornaments themselves.  It was great!

I convinced Sam that putting lights on the outside of the house would be worth it.  We were both a little worried about climbing around on a ladder outside, but I found a pole kit at Target that allowed you to put up the lights without a ladder.  While it was quite frustrating a times, it was decidedly safer.  And I loved how they turned out:

We needed some extra outlets outside, and we ended up buying one with a digital timer. I didn't realize how much I would LOVE my lights automatically turning on at dusk, and turning off several hours later.  So glad I paid the few extra dollars for that feature.  It was so nice to come home from being somewhere in the afternoon, and have the Christmas lights on when we pulled in the driveway.

After thinking about the mantle quite a bit, and not knowing quite what to do, I finally settled on putting up some large frames with photos from past Christmas'.  I really like how it turned out - I didn't take any pictures of this, but the kids managed to get a few in their picture taking sprees they often do through the house:

Note the pile of Christmas books next to the fire.  It has become one of our traditions to unwrap a Christmas book every night of December as a count down to Christmas.  The kids loved reading these books every day, and this year we had more than 25, so there were several nights where we let all 3 kids open one. 

You'll also note that we have 10 stockings hanging on the mantle.  My mom and Sam's mom have both been giving us stockings since we've been married.  We usually hang both sets, but in different spots in the house.  But we decided our mantle was so big, we'd just hang all of them over the fire place.  We'll have to see if we keep that up next year, when we'll have 12 instead of 10.  We did get some funny looks when people came over, "How many kids do you have?"

Since green is the main color of our great room, I found some cheap accent pillows that were red, and threw them on the couch and chairs to make it Christmas-y.  This was also where we had our tree.

And we strung a garland with lights up the stairway. 

There were more spots around the house decorated up too, but I didn't document any of it very well.  But I was happy that we spent all of December surrounded by red, green, twinkling lights, stars, Nativitys, poinsettias, holly and pine, with Christmas music playing almost daily, and lots of gingerbread and peppermint goodies baking in the kitchen.  Made the season feel really nice to me.  And, while I do enjoy getting things put away, part of me can't wait to pull it out again next Thanksgiving!

New Years 2012

It seems for the past few New Years we've not done too much.  It's a hard holiday to celebrate with young kids.  But one of my favorite blogs mentioned an idea that seemed very doable and fun for the kids (as an aside, this is also the post where I realized my favorite foodie blogger, Sara, is a sister of one of Sam's roomies from college, Nate. Small world.)  So I went and got supplies to dec out our Christmas tree as a New Years tree.  Unfortunately, not having a decent party store in the area, my new years supplies where not as cool as Sara's, but the kids seemed to love it just the same.

Some friends in the ward also coordinated a night out at a local Chinese restaurant.  There were almost 40 of us there, and the food and company was amazing.  Huge portions.  We now know a good Chinese spot to pick up take out from.

Harrison started writing a post about New Years, and this is what he typed all by himself: "To celebrate the New Year Mom put balloons with prizes on the Christmas tree that we popped. We LOVED the "warm fuzzies", money, "magic pebbles", and the jokes.  One joke was: Q: what do you feed a duck? A: a box of "quackers"! Get it? Quack-ers! On the tree there were other prizes like glow sticks and necklaces. We watched the ball drop at 9:00 our time. No one got to see the fireworks at midnight, if there were any because we were all asleep. I woke up at 1:07, crying because I didn't see the fireworks. "

Action shot of Harrison popping a balloon.

Noah with his stash.

During church on Sunday, I saw Harrison sketching out plans for setting his alarm clock for midnight next year. I had no idea he really wanted to stay up, as he didn't put any fuss up about going to bed at 9. So it was quite a surprise when his sobs woke us up at 1 AM.I tried to explain to him that I didn't even stay up, and he finally agreed to calm down and go back to sleep.  I think this has definitely been one of the most memorable New Years for our family.  We will look forward too a new tradition of having new years decorations on the tree every New Years eve.