Country Boys in the Big City

Since we had the boys, Ryan has dreamed of taking them to a Cardinal's baseball game. We finally decided the bigguns were old enough to not drive us insane at the stadium, so when our church offered free tickets, we jumped at the chance. We invited some friends to join us, dropped Little Bit off at Grandma's, got pulled over twice for expired tags (long story), and headed to St. Louey. In the city, we oohed and aaahed at the arch, and squashed many "is that the stadium?!" moments (every semi-large warehouse apparently looks exactly like a baseball diamond.) Then, while Ryan was dropping us off, I told the boys that they would see all different sorts of people and they should be polite and not stare, but also stay close to me. Of course they were curious about these "different sorts of people," so I ran through a crash course of hobos and ticket scalpers and kidnappers. Probably not the best idea.

They walked into the stadium, clinging to each other and me and gawking nervously all around. They looked so small and overwhelmed that I had to get a picture. So I wrenched my hand away from Calvin and ran ahead a few steps to get a good shot. Only to turn around and find that they were right on my hind end. Every time I surged forward, they frantically surged with me. These were the best I could get:

So, I passed off the camera to our friends and did my best I-always-smile-when-I-walk non-pose. Look at Reed --paranoia written all over that child's face!

They loosened up a little from the fun of riding the four escalators we had to take to the nosebleed section, but kept on clinging. 

Then they were amazed at the hugeness of the stadium--and the tiny-ness of the players. This ain't no warehouse.

They were pretty much adorable through the whole game. I'm not sure how much they actually paid attention, but they clapped at the appropriate times and got really excited when a Cardinal hit a home run and fireworks exploded. I'm guessing they were doing what Mama was doing, staring at people and Jumbotrons and taking cues from the crowd about the game.  

Posing with a church buddy

They ate the entire bag of Starburst I had stashed in my purse. And half a bag of Smarties. And some of the other food that other people offered to share. And they peed about 8,000 times, probably just to see more sights. Is it selfish for me to be happy they're too old to go in the women's restroom?

We left the game early to avoid getting stuck in traffic, since our gas gauge was on empty (long story) and we weren't too keen on getting gas in downtown St. Louis at 11:00 at night. Ryan and I each took a hand and hauled the boys to the parking garage, past a hobo or two. This time I was the one clinging.

The boys zonked out in the car on the way home, but not before talking excitedly about the stadium, the sights, and even the game. Daddy's dream came true - and without the nightmare of a kidnapping or rogue hobo.

$75 Entertainment Center and Homemade Mod Podge

I've mentioned that I'm cheap. Well, years ago, we needed some kind of entertainment center. I bought a plain, black shelving unit from Wal-mart for $25. The back panel was atrocious! Cheap, cardboard with fold lines running down it? Ugh! So, I tore up an old book and decoupaged the backing with wallpaper paste. Years later, when we moved to a larger house, I purchased two more shelves and did the same. I wish I would have made a frame on the back to hold the shelves together, because if you look closely, you can see the gaps between them. Oh well -- I'll just add it to my to do list (ha!)

My favorite parts of the "entertainment center" are the locker baskets and hidden shelf. The locker baskets were an incredible score from the school where I teach. Years before I started there, the janitor rescued all the locker baskets from the trash when the school redid the locker rooms. She had stacks of them in her garage and gave me over a dozen! Cha-ching! I love those things! The hidden shelf is just made by installing two of the shelves very close together, then hanging napkins down to hide the gap. Our Xbox and Wii are hiding out in that little hidey hole. In all honestly, it stays wide open most of the time, but when company comes a-knocking and I freak out, I can act like we're all sophisticated and have no visible gaming systems.

P.S. If I had it to do over again, I would use homemade Mod-Podge instead of wallpaper paste:

Homemade Mod Podge

1 part Elmer's Glue All
1 part water

- Stir together and brush on in place of Mod Podge. Store in a sealed jar.


Linked to Kammy's Korner Trash 2 Treasure. 

Inside-out Burlap Lamp

My mom gave my sister and I old matching lamps, with a hint of a challenge: "I can't wait to see what you two do with them." Well, sister, I've finished mine. What're YOU going to do?

I wish I had a before picture, but I'm sure you can imagine this lamp in wood, with a lampshade. It actually had a pink gingham shade, but I used a similar plain shade that I had as the base for my burlap project. First, I painted the base black, then distressed it pretty heavily with sand paper. Then, I used the original lamp shade to make a paper template for the fabric panels. I pinned the template to burlap and cut out four panels. 

I pinned two panels together, matched them up to the real shade and used masking tape to mark where I needed to sew the seam. 

Then, I just sewed right beside the seam. I was nervous about getting the curve right, but the masking tape worked great to guide me. I could've written on the fabric with chalk, but I'm glad I didn't, because  what I thought would be the inside of the shade ended up being the outside.

After the panels were all attached, I put the shade on upside down to see if all the seams matched. It was then that I decided to leave it inside out for a rougher look. I mean, it's burlap, right? Doesn't get much scrappier than that. I decided to leave the white shade underneath and trimmed the excess flaps fabric down way shorter than what is shown here, but it still needed something.

I taped off a border around the top and bottom of the lamp.

Then I sewed a double "hem" around the top and a single around the bottom. 

After this picture, all that was left to do was hot glue the top frays into the lampshade. I decided to leave the bottom scraggly. When I showed it to Ryan, I got more than the usual fake-pleased "Looks good:" (that's a half-exclamation mark, not a colon, fyi). He kind of looked at it weird, I'm sure trying to decide if I was going to turn it right side out or not. Then I got the feigned excitement. Oh well. I like it. And I'm sure Calvin does too. That boy wears at least one article of clothing inside out every day. 

Linking up to Kammy's Korner: Trash 2 Treasure Tuesday

Clothing Optional

As I look at past blog posts and reminisce, it occurs to me that our boys rarely have actual clothes on. They're either in jammies, shirtless, or wearing nothing but their skivvies. In fact, just for fun I went back and labeled all posts illustrating this phenomenon with "clothing optional." Click on the link to this and at the time I type this there are 24 such posts.

So, since I choose to post pictures for the world to see of my kids looking like they live in a third world country, maybe I owe an explanation for why my children are hardly ever fully dressed. Here it is:

- Cuts down on laundry
- No tan lines
- We're just going to strip down to play in the slip-n-slide anyway
- We've got tight little abs to show off
- Stains come out of skin easier than clothing
- It's easier to do tick checks.
- We have to wear clothes to school and day care 5 WHOLE days a week for 9 WHOLE months! Isn't that enough?
- We can chase each other faster without the wind resistance of shorts and/or shirts
- Calvin doesn't have to worry about matching or getting stuff on inside out, backwards, or upside down
- It takes a whole week of near-nakedness to recover from being forced to wear fancy clothes on Sunday (fancy clothes = polo shirts and jean shorts with tennis shoes - pretty high-falutin, I know)

As for me, I just wear T-shirts and shorts for 24-36 hour time periods. I'm assuming you figured out that this list didn't apply to me after reading the fourth item.

Sloth

June was super amazing. The weather was nice. We were on a great schedule. I was productive. Everyone was happy.  Life was good. Then July hit. We were good until I attended a week-long class for a grant I'm in. That was all it took to get us out of whack. The next week I threw myself into Vacation Bible School preparations (I was the director at our church) and gave myself permission to sleep in. The week after that was VBS week, so I figured, what the heck, sleep in another week, you deserve it. I didn't jog. We went to the garden every few days only to harvest. Housekeeping was nonexistent. I broke my already-loose "no pinning or facebooking when your children are awake" rule. And every morning, I rolled out of bed only when absolutely necessary. Usually a poopy diaper was involved. And the culprit is on a pretty consistent 8:30 B.M. schedule, and waits until the contents of his diaper are no longer completely housed in his diaper, so I was getting to "sleep" almost an extra two hours each morning. (I put "sleep" in quotation marks, because there was a good deal of chasing around the "track" in our house, which goes right through our bedroom. Plus, I had to get up to pour milk and keep an ear out for trouble. But I was in bed and my eyes were closed.)

One morning, I woke up to Max eating mini-wheats in our closet. (?)

It was nice. But it wrecked July. Garden? Total disaster! Benefits of jogging daily for five weeks? Completely erased - and piled on top of by two and a half weeks of sloth (SO not fair, by the way!) Devotions? Maybe once or twice a week. "School at home?" Nope. Productivity? Nil. Mood? Crabby all the time - especially the first hour after getting out of bed. My morning mantra was, "Stop talking so loud! You're hurting my head!"

It wasn't pretty. I knew it, but it was just so hard to drag my butt out of bed, and the days spiraled from there. And then two days ago, I was reading my Bible (for the first time in a week) and came to this verse:

"Do not love sleep, or you will grow poor; stay awake and you will have food to spare." - Proverbs 20:13

I thought, "Yeah, I probably should stop sleeping in and get back on my schedule...starting next Monday," and went about my lazy business for the day. The next morning, a super-runny nose (mine, btw) work me up before two of my children had even stirred. I stumbled out of bed, grabbed a roll of toilet paper and headed back to hit the two-hour snooze button. And that verse from the day before struck me, so I decided to slog through the morning.

Only, I didn't slog. I jogged. And read the Bible. And made breakfast for my kids instead of hoping they put together something healthy on their own (remember I trained them to be independent?) We started tackling the weed jungle that had taken over the garden. We read books and ate popsicles. And then, I proceeded to have the best, and most productive day in a long time! I played badminton with Reed. I painted six pallets and installed two shelves for a super-huge project I'm excited about! I painted a window for another project I've been meaning to do. Max peed on the potty without fussing every time I suggested it, many times with a dry diaper! I worked on my social studies curriculum for this year. I tried a new recipe from Pinterest. Then let the boys help me test a dessert pin. I showered AND put on make-up so I wouldn't look like a skanky slob when Ryan came home from hunting. And at the end of the day, I felt like I had gained six hours, not two.

Guess God knows what he's talking about, huh?