Category Archives: house stuff

Things and Stuff.

The weekend was good, but more on that later since pictures are still on my camera. We got out of the house on Saturday for haircuts, but didn’t get out on Sunday since it was drizzly. The dark clouds and the missed nap the day before gave us a grouchy little boy and a sassy little lady. C’est la vie. They might also be picking up on a little stress from their parents. Our downstairs is crazy with boxes and piles everywhere as we try to get everything sorted for our garage sale that starts on Friday. Plus, we keep coming across new things to add, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

All of this decluttering has also made me realize just how much stuff we have and why it’s so important to buy toys on sale unless I am absolutely certain our kids will get a ton of use out of it. This cardboard house I got on super sale, and they played with it a handful of times before Enzo told me he wanted his ball tent back and no more house.

It turns out we also have a lot of the same toys that they have at day care, which is sometimes good, but then also means that they’re often bored with these toys at home and want different ones. I guess I’ll have to coordinate with day care from now on. One thing we have a ton of that they don’t play with are stuffed animals. Some have been handed down and some I lovingly chose before they were born and others have been gifted. Every once in a while they’ll suddenly pull them all out and play with them, but it might be time to let some go and let them choose their own plushy friends when they want to.

However, the best toys are always the toys that aren’t actually toys. Phoebe decided pulling movies off the shelf is especially delightful and therefore Enzo also had to join in. They were quickly reprimanded, but now Phoebe likes to still pull them out because she saw us pulling out random DVDs to sell. I’d like to say it’s because she wants to be helpful, but the naughty grin says otherwise. She gives the same grin right before she starts throwing food, dumping whatever she’s drinking and running away from diaper changes.

I totally get why some people like the minimalist lifestyle, though. So much less to pick up, which makes it easier to keep clean and takes less time to do so… however, I’m a “collector” by nature, as is the man I married, so I can’t imagine us ever becoming minimalists. I’ve heard a lot about The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, though and I’m going to start reading that in the hopes we can find some balance.

Because no one wants to end up on an episode of Hoarders, right?

Much like the weather

Just as the weather can suddenly go from warm and sunny to overcast, windy, and downright chilly, so too can a toddler go from being happy and healthy to being sick from out of nowhere. Phoebe randomly started coughing last night and today it sounds pretty awful, but she has no fever so I’m not taking her to the doctor yet. I did, however, have to get her early and bring her home because day care called and said she was pretty much inconsolable most of the morning, wouldn’t eat, and only wanted to sleep. Poor Squish. Oh well, at least we were able to enjoy the weekend… these pictures are not even from this weekend, but another fun weekend. :p

Such is life as a parent, I’ve discovered. You rarely have time to accomplish all the things you want to, or at least I do. Perhaps that’s just a reflection of my constantly changing priorities and motivation that is always on a roller coaster.

Most of our weekends often have a lot of the same going on, though. They often start way too early because the kids are very much against sleeping in. I’m usually the first to stumble out of bed with them and coffee is typically my first priority if I can manage it. This is why most of my morning photos have the flash… because our living room has very few lamps and they like to wake with the sun. Sigh.

This particular weekend was fairly windy and Enzo was feeling “off” on Saturday so I took Phoebe on a quick run to Costco. It’s grilling season and their organic beef is a great price, plus I bought enough aluminum foil to last us at least a couple of years. Then yesterday was one of Enzo’s friend’s birthday party so we went to that. I have a feeling most of our weekends are going to be fairly busy this summer.

We also found out that our city-wide garage sale weekend is mid-May, so yesterday I started doing some prep work for that. I think I have about 9 bins of baby clothes and so many toys and other kid items that it’s going to take quite a while to sort through everything and prep for it. Plus, we have books, movies, games and you name it, so it’s going to end up being a fairly large sale. I can’t wait to clear up some room in our garage and under our stairs. It’s going to feel very, very good.

There’s a new man in my life…

So, there’s a new man in my life. Not only does he mostly keep to himself, but he’s a smooth talker and really tidy. Plus, Josh likes him too. It’s a win-win! Let me introduce you to Walter.

We felt like we had to give him a name… it didn’t feel right to just call him the Roomba. Oh yeah, and he’s named after this Walter (from Fringe):

We had no intentions of getting a Roomba, but a trip to Costco had us thinking about it and then considering it for a day or two before jumping in. We don’t have a huge house, but it’s big enough that with two kids and two cats and two full time jobs we don’t necessarily have a ton of time to clean as regularly as we (okay, I) would like. It’s to a point where we hardly go downstairs except to use our offices. To be fair, it’s also really cold down there, which is why we got an electric fireplace, but I still didn’t like the kids playing down there with the excessive amounts of cat hair and cat litter that inevitably gets tracked around by them. I could easily spend all my free time sweeping and vacuuming, but I don’t want to, so the idea of having a little helper to tackle the downstairs sweeping/vacuuming on a regular basis sounded kind of awesome. Think of the time I’d save! Plus, we’ll use the downstairs family room more often! Hooray!

I did a thorough sweeping/vacuuming while it was charging overnight so we wouldn’t terrify Walter his first time around the room with the mountains of cat hair and other detritus, and we patiently waited for his maiden voyage. Overall? He’s kind of awesome. We were worried about two shedding cats and an oddly shaped room, but so far we’ve been super happy and I love not stepping on random bits of cat litter in my bare feet. It’s also not nearly as loud as I thought it would be. I’m thinking our little robot buddy was absolutely worth the price.

A Tree Grows in Our Basement…

One of our big projects this summer has been rearranging and organizing the downstairs with the ultimate goal being that we’ll use it more often. Right now it’s mostly used by the cats and our office(s) are down there. Our big TV and big comfy couch are also down there, but we haven’t been using either of those things. Admittedly it’s kind of nice to just fall asleep in bed while watching a movie and not have to make the climb upstairs, but I know the cats miss us hanging out more often. We don’t sleep well when they’re allowed upstairs, so that is the biggest reason for their banishment.

Enter a new cat tree for them. It hasn’t completely stopped Uzi from destroying our nice couch, but that combined with tape seems to have helped a tad. Sigh. I guess I can’t get too mad at him since I know he doesn’t like being banished, so the couch ruination is partially my fault. One day I’ll have nice things… one day.

I’d like to say they’ve been utilizing this tree every day, but they haven’t. I’d put it in front of a window, but there isn’t really a good window to put it in front of. They’ve actually been spending the most time in my office because they have a nice bed in there to sleep on (for now). Come October, the bed will be moving upstairs into Enzo’s room. Not like the cats don’t have a dozen comfy places to sleep.

One of the major drawbacks to having hard floors downstairs is how much colder it is. If we decide to stay longer than one more winter we’d like to pull those up and put in carpeting. As it stands we have a rolling space heater and bought one of those fireplace heaters as well, which actually works really well. Maybe this winter we’ll spend more time with the kiddos… if I can find some more rugs so little tootsies don’t freeze. In the meantime, I should probably make it more of a cat haven since they’re the ones who spend their days down there. And maybe I’ll invest in one of those robotic vacuums for cat hair because good grief they shed like crazy.

Landscaping Schtuff

One of our late summer projects (we have quite a few going on) is our landscaping. We have so many plans, and yet so little time to accomplish it, it seems. For starters, we had several large shrubs/bushes in front of the house that we wanted to get rid of. They were kind of overgrown, and several our house inspector told us were planted too close to the house foundation.

Then you had this random straggly looking thing with some equally random chives.

So, Josh started cutting them all down, and is now slowly removing as much of the roots as possible as our plan is to plant some less invasive things like lavender and bulbs. The other issue is all of those rocks. We want to replace those with mulch to surround our new prettier plants (once those get planted). We plan on getting rid of the weeds growing up all around the back door and laying the rocks from the front along the edging. Josh already removed some equally huge shrubs that were the home to hundreds of spiders and that regularly threatened to overgrow the door.

Those super attractive ill-fitting curtains have also since been replaced. 😉

Landscaping3

It’s a slow process, especially since we’ve had to spend some time cleaning out the garage and rearranging the downstairs. With cooler weather approaching, the plan is to spend more time outside getting that done so that way it’s ready for bulb planting. Thankfully we have a gift card from Home Depot from when we bought all of the inside paint, so we’re going to buy a weed whacker and should probably get a wheelbarrow as well unless we can find someone to borrow one from. Rocks are heavy.

We may keep the chives there… I haven’t quite decided yet what to do in this area. At least I’ve got time to decide. Our poor neighbors will just have to bear with us while we slowly get it all done.

Dino and Bunnies

Every day adventures