Projects

Amidst taking plenty of pictures of friends and family, I have also been working on some other fun things. The girls needed something more in their room so I did a painting to match their comforter. I also found an outdated queen headboard and repainted it for the girls' room (picture to be posted later). I'm still working on a painting for the living room that will be on hold for a little bit while we potentially move between now and Christmas! I also got the idea of making cute coffee cozies from my sis-in-law Jess and have been making them with my friend Tabitha to give to friends and teachers for Christmas. :) Assuming we do get to move I have plans on redoing our dining room table which I am very excited about! I will sand and restain the top with a dark stain and paint the rim and legs a yellowy/off white with the distressed look. I think I will also do the same to our living room side tables to bring a little flow between the rooms. They're small but I think it will work well with our leather couch. Anyways, just a bit of what I've been doing.

To live or not to live? I'm all over it!

I have been completely overwhelmed lately at my desire to be creative. I don't know if it's just that I'm in a better place emotionally or what but it's all I can think about. I have all these ideas that go through my head. I want to take pictures. I want to print and mount creatively all these different pictures on my walls. I want to paint all these different things in my head. I'm just bubbling at the seams. (Can you bubble at the seams?) Well, I can!

Anyways, the kids are just about to start school in a couple days and I am so excited for an empty house. I'm excited to have my quiet time at the beach by my house. I'm excited to exercise. I'm excited to only have one pick up time in the afternoon for the kids instead of three. I'm excited for my lunch time not to be interrupted by picking up Izzy from school. So much awaits me and I just want to be thorough and not leave things undone. I want to be able to focus all my energy and do things well. I want to unpack thoroughly and condense and repack the things we don't need right now in our smaller house. I want things on my walls. I'm just so excited about life. Whoopee!

Here are some of the things I've had printed to put up in our home. They're mounted on a special 3/4 in foam board. I've got another really cool one I'll post as well as pictures of our house. But you might have to wait a week or so. I do have to attend Faith Quest which I am also very excited about! Maybe I'm really back to blogging now. Only my posting will tell!

Wolfe Family Sneak Peak

Ellie

I am going to surprise Ellie's mom with pictures of her as my parting gift because I won't be watching her after May ends. I haven't decided exactly which ones are my favs or what I'm going to give her exactly so you'll have to give me your input!

The bane of my existence lately...

Why, oh, why, did I have two children 2 years and 3 days apart? I tell you, it has been ridiculous this year! For those of you with children, even though we try and remind our children that "life isn't always fair" do we not try to have a sense of balance when it comes to being fair? You count every jelly bean that goes into the Easter eggs because they WILL count them. And you don't do something special with one without plans to do something equally as special with the others, right? Well, these last four weeks have been a whirling dervish of balance and counterbalance.

Our conversations began with ideas of what they might want to do for their birthdays. For some reason I sometimes want to think of extra special ideas that we haven't done before but then I also realize that some of the "special" ideas cost more, the more children you invite... So I say, "Izzy, would you like to see if your very best friend, Ella, could come up around your birthday and you could go to the tea room and paint some pottery?" And she says that she would like to do that for her birthday! Great! A plan. :) Well, it just so happened that Aaron was going to come up two weeks before her birthday, so Ella came and we did the tea room thing while the big kids were at school. I brought my camera, took plenty of pictures... One special "party" down ! Right?

Then, Aiden decides that he would like to go to a movie with Aaron and Ben for his birthday! Okay! Easy enough. But, as it turned out, it wasn't feasible for Aaron to go to the movie on that trip so Aiden switched his idea and decided he wanted his Uncle Andy to go with them instead of Aaron. Awesome. No problem. Well, when push came to shove time got away from us and Andy didn't get to go to the movie. During this time, Emma, has felt left out because every body else in the family got to participate in a "party" thing except her. Aiden kindly offered for her to come along. So, the day after Andy went home, Ben purchased tickets and was planning to take the kids to the movie right after school. Then, Izzy says in a tearful squeally voice, "I'm the only kid who doesn't get to go to the movies?!" So Ben makes an executive decision that it will be a special trip with dad to the movies and he will do something else with Aiden for his birthday. (Let me remind you that it is one week and four days before Aiden's birthday still...) They have a great time and Ben and Aiden still have to plan something else.

Izzy gets stuck on the fact that Aiden gets to go to the movie (original plan) AND something else! Aiden tries to explain that it was NOT for his birthday because SHE came! Yikes... Somewhere else in all this Izzy says, "Mom, we need to send out invitations to my friends!" "For what", I say. "For a party!" :0 "You already had your party with Ella! That's what you chose to do!" (squeely voice)"I don't get to have anyone over for a party?!" WHAT? What just happened? All of a sudden it is getting closer to the day when she is going to turn 6 and her "party" has been nullified! I think I went numb.

As the actual birth days approached, we decided that we would be celebrating Aiden's birth (opening presents) on Monday (not Tuesday) because we also got invited to have dinner with friends and I left the decision up to Aiden since it was his special day. He was very excited to have his birthday dinner at their house so we brought the cake! Good times. On Monday, he had cub scouts, so he rushed through opening his presents after we ate dinner and totally forgot to use the camera. Ben snapped some with his iphone. At our friends, I totally forgot about bringing a camera, also! Our friends took some for us but I don't have them yet.

For Izzy's birth day we decided to have her special dinner AND presents on Thursday (not Friday). I asked her if she would like us to invite our neighbors over for dinner, her friend, and she thinks that that is a great idea! It's fun, I take plenty of pictures...

Finally after many lofty ideas of train rides and tons of fun, Ben and Aiden played glow-in-the-dark putt-putt golf and video games at the mall. They had a great time. No pics...

All in all, their birthdays were rather anticlimactic and I apparently have a favorite child of whom I take pictures of and one that I do not... And I cannot communicate all the unfairness that was expressed as some had birthday money to spend at all different times while everyone else looked on, suffering. And when some would buy candy and the others had to look on in envy, but then I buy some for the others to make it a fun evening , or whatever, and the one who used their money says, "That's not fair. I had to spend my money!" So I buy theirs... I am sick and tired of mediocre birthdays and trying to live a fair life. Shoot me! (But just with a bb gun, in the arm, or something.)

Here are pictures of one of my children... Please, let it be over....

Teeth

We have teeth coming out our ears these days. Well, our mouths really. And not my mouth, or Ben's, our kids'! Izzy lost one of her top front teeth this week. Her last loose tooth she allowed me to pull out but she didn't get to a point this time when she thought it was wiggly enough yet. Obviously when it came out as she ate her cereal she realized it was indeed time to come out! It was kind of gross a few days ago when she asked me if there were nuts in our bread. She said she kept crunching! I told her no and she said, "Oh, it must have just been my tooth!" Yikes. If your tooth folds into your mouth and you can bite it, it's time to come out! It also looked so awkward when she would talk because it would totally get in the way. Her lip stuck out just a little and she would pause sometimes in the middle of a sentence to adjust her protruding tooth! Everyone offered to yank it out and she would say, "Nope, it's not quite ready!" We've got one more front tooth left and it is just a little wiggly. Hopefully it won't hang on as long as it's little buddy did.

When you were a kid did you brush your teeth well? I'll be blunt and say that I remember feeling that slimy, clean feeling only after getting my teeth cleaned at the dentist! I think it is hard to train your children how to brush their teeth well! Even if you've got the habit down of specific times when they brush their teeth, there is no guarantee that when they open their mouths for a teeth check that they will look much different than when they went in? "What have you been doing in there this whole time?!" I ask daily, it seems. Then I take my turn at removing the grime that has built up in that single day. How can I explain how to focus on a certain region before moving to the next? Aiden's teeth brushing is like a tornado. The brush spins and scrubs and only touches down, like, every other tooth. His hand moves furiously but it darts from one side to the other in a matter of seconds leaving small clean patches in it's path. It's like a tooth brush with ADHD. Whatever the heck went on in that mouth accomplished extremely little! We also take turns with Izzy still but thankfully Emma manages to come out with squeaky clean teeth. It took 9 years or so, but we have accomplished something! Thank you, Jesus! I hope we keep all our teeth! (At least the ones we're suppose to!)

Our Valentine's Day

We had a great Valentine's Day! We stayed after church and had a little snack and social hour with our own version of the Newlywed game that was fun for everyone. Once we got home we decided to get the house picked up as quickly as we could so we could have time to go to the movies together before it was time to make our special Valentine's dinner. We saw The Tooth Fairy and it was cute and fun and a special thing to do together.

Back in the days when we lived in Sidney we decided to make our Valentine's Day a family event. With children, it just doesn't seem easy to do something just as a couple because all those without kids are freely going and celebrating their own special day, which leaves us with no babysitting. :) Why not just make it special for everyone?

This year, the kids went shopping with me and we chose to have fillet minion, pink mashed potatoes, pink applesauce, green beans and chocolate covered strawberries. We set our table with our fanciest and picked the appropriate flowers to go with all the sweet valentine's the kids made. And don't forget, lighting is everything and we are big into setting the mood. Any time we've dimmed the lights and lit the candles in the past the kids have attempted to give us the perfect restaurant title but they must have forgotten or are just getting older...

It was a fun day and a special way for us to celebrate how much we love each other!

Family Fun

I'll have to say that some of my greatest memories are having fun together as a family. I do love having my camera out every so often to capture fun times like playing at the park. These pics are at a park near our house.
You'll notice Ben's butt barely fits in the slide...

This moment was full of laughter because Ben was playing tag with the kids and he had just tagged Aiden. Unfotunately Ben's arms were long enough to tag Aiden right back if Aiden attempted to tag him. the little guy thought he had a chance...
The good old "spider" on the swings.



It's always important for me to remember to make silly memories like these. I am planning on doing something fun for the fam on Valentines day. We'll see what I think up!