Jewels

 

Just some cute pictures from the last week or so.  :)

Photo Bomb

Dang

I had a touch of a cold last week and was feeling better Saturday.  So I got some projects around the house done, including cleaning out the refrigerator.  While rinsing the shelves off, with cold water, the glass shattered everywhere.  :(

 

 

 

I spent over half an hour carefully digging chunks of glass out of the garbage disposal.  Even though it is tempered glass, it can still cut as my fingers will attest. 

 

That is what I get for trying to clean. 

Peaches

I may have made the best dessert ever tonight.  Wow. 

Fresh peaches and home made crust.  Ice cream and whipped cream made it amazing. 

 

We even had some fresh raspberries to add.  I wish the crust was pretty.  Even though it didn't look great, it tasted great.  Yum. 

Solid Food

I have the Mom guilt about Julia's weight.  She is kinda skinny.  Over the last 2 months, she has only gained half a pound.  Her percentages have dropped.  So I have been nursing her more frequently.  Oddly enough, she has also started waking up at night now.  I feel like she needs more than I am giving her. 
She will not, NOT, take a bottle.  Bummer.  I will catch up again soon.  In the meantime, we did introduce some rice cereal yesterday.  The pediatrician said it was time if she seemed interested.  And she really does!  Everytime we eat around her, she gets wide eyed and stares at us, fixated.  So this food isn't taking the place of a feeding, but is in addition to. 

First bite, she did really good!  It went down just fine. 

At first, she gave us a lot of these faces:

But overall, she liked it.  And even though a lot dribbled down her chin, she got a lot of it down.  And we started to get these happy faces:

She even wiped her own chin when she was done :)

 

And so we have a new addition to the evening routine.  Dinner for Julia :)

Lucky Me

Brian made something yummy the other night.  Peaches, butter, brown sugar.  If it's wrong, I don't wanna be right.  :)

 

 

We make a pretty good team at dinner if I do say so myself.  He makes the best marinated chicken on the grill.  And I know my way around a French fry!  Mmm.

Peaches!

In July our early peach tree came on and it was great!  Our regular tree is now ready.  Look at these!  It was no fun picking them because of the earwigs.  AAAHH!  Creepy.  But here they are, individually washed by hand and defuzzed too!  Time for jam. 

Rainbow

On the way to Blake's 1st soccer game, we saw a rainbow in the sky.  Dallin he wanted to touch it so his hands would be all "sparkly."  :)

Projects

It has been really fun to be home with the baby.  I've really enjoyed her.  You can tell from looking at my house, that I enjoy her since not much else is really getting done. 
But, since school is back in I have been trying to get some things organized and finished. 

If you stop by my house on any given day, it will probably look like a cyclone hit it.  First of all because I still just hang out with the baby a lot, and I play a lot with Dallin.  But also, because I am pulling out closets and re-organizing them.  Slowly but surely we are getting there.  Check out my desk:

We have enough projects, big and little, to last a long long time.  One that we are particularly anxious to get done is redoing our kitchen cabinets. 

I have read a bunch of tutorials online.  There were two possibilities for what we could do.  Option 1, paint them white.  Option 2, stain them.  Both looked promising. 

I decided to try stain.  I used my downstairs bathroom to experiment on.  That way, if I hated it, it was only the little bathroom.  Here is what it started out as:

Blah, boring honey oak colored cabinets.  So I sanded them as the tutorials say to do. 

Then applied the stain.  At this point, I loved it!  Pretty! 

Encouraged, I kept going.  Then I started to have some trouble.  Anytime you refinish wood cabinets, it is really hard to get all of the varnish off.  Since wood has a surface that is not perfectly smooth, sanding really only removes it from the high spots.  Varnish remains in the low spots.  Where the sander removes more varnish, it accepts more stain.  There really isn't an anyway around this. 

 

So I ended up with a blotchy surface.  And oddly enough, one coat on the top drawer was way darker than 2 coats on the middle one.  Weird.  But I am no expert. 

 

I kept going.  And redid the whole thing.  Here is the finished product:

 

It is not amazing, and you can tell this was not done by a professional.  But I do like it better than what was originally there.  Especially since these cabinets do not get seen a whole lot.  So I would do it again.  I think I would have been better off not sanding at all, since the stain will go on over the varnish and I could have avoided the blotchiness.  I was trying to follow directions.  Silly me.  Anyway, I am not going to use the stain on our kitchen cabinets.  So that means they will get painted white.  That will be a project! 

Pepsi

I have one food vice, permanently I think.  I love pepsi, or coke.  Just one can, in the middle of the day, makes my day.  :)  I look forward to it. 

At lunchtime today I got a perfectly cold, slightly slushy pepsi, cracked it open and took a few sips.  I left it sitting on the counter while I got a few things done around the house.  Dallin found my lovely still slushy pepsi.  He came running over to me smiling, with the can in hand, "Mama!  Mama!  Your pepsi is my pepsi now, okay?  Okay?"  big smile still on his face.  How could I say no?  "Ok, Dallin, you can have the rest."  I love my Dallin :)