CAG at 3

Once upon a time there was a teensy weensy little fellow formerly referred to as the Speck.  Look at his funny little elf face:

And now that teensy weensy baby has achieved the illustrious age of 3!  I know I said this last year, but it's amazing the difference a year makes.  He's grown so much in basically every direction, and is such a little person now. 

(Sometimes he rides the bike and wears the helmet at the same time.)

Of course not everything has changed.  He still loves everything with wheels, though he can identify more of them by name now.  Loves his bike and scooter and gets better at riding them all the time.  He likes to be outside exploring, digging in the dirt, going on walks, jumping on the trampoline, antagonizing bugs or daredevil swinging. 

Just a little stitious.

Generally he has a great appetite, and he particularly loves cheese, peanut butter, fruits, and mac and cheese (who doesn't?).  He's still not a big fan of meat, but pepperoni has won him over.  Occasionally he'll tell me chicken is yucky.

I suppose you could say that in the last year his personality has simply continued to expand along with his physical dimensions.  He knows what he likes and what he wants and he's happy to tell you.  He recognizes when people are sad.  He has a sense of humor and laughs at funny faces and funny noises.  Sometimes we play a game where he says "Heyyyyyyy Mama!" and I say back something random instead of his name, like "Heyyyyyyyy bathtub!"  And he says, "Bathtub?!  Hah!"  Simple pleasures.

I will admit that we did not achieve all the goals I had set for this past year.  In fact we only hit one of them--moving into the big boy bed.  But we'll get to the others soon.  Sooooon.  And he does love his bed, though it took a few days.  

Anyway, he's just a funny and fun boy with lots of energy and lots of interests.  He loves to read books and make silly faces.  Also loves to watch Charlie and Lola and he also got to see a few movies this year (Tangled, Winnie the Pooh and Peanuts) and he still talks about all of them.  He's gotten into music lately too, asking for Lion King and Tangled ("Prepunzel") a lot, but also Princess and the Frog (Tiana) or sometimes the crab (Little Mermaid--I only have "Kiss the Girl" on my iPod...).  I love to see what he gravitates to, though you could say he just gravitates towards fun things in general.

Who needs eggs when you have golf balls?

 Like Baby:

This is a pretty good representation of their relationship actually.  Buddies, with no respect for personal space.  Lately he has been walking her around the house by the hand and trying to get her to make her own funny faces.  She has picked up a few from him as well.  If she's sad in the car he'll talk to her and say "We almost home, Baby.  It's okay, Baby."

'80s style

This was his flower sniffing stance for a while.  ??

He always pauses during a walk to sit in a "little nest."

I'm just amazed at how he's changed and the things he picks up on and understands now.  I love how enthusiastic he is when he says, "Oh!  I know what we can do!  Shall we go outside?!"  And I love when his eyes turn into half-moons with excitement.

(Still loves Kitty too.) 

Not to say that this year was without its bumps.  Like the rejection of potty training and of course the teeth incident.  He's had some epic meltdowns too.  But after all, he is still a pretty little person.  

But even during the meltdowns or when he wants me to move his water for him at bedtime (or tuck Kitty in or adjust his blankets or put his book in the right place or put his car UNDER the blankets or decides his jammies are "too hot.  Too hot, mama." etc. etc. etc.), he is just the best.  I'm looking forward to seeing what my favorite three year old has in store for the coming year.

Intrepid explorer. 

It's going to be good!

Bedroom Overhaul

And thus we come to our May house project.  It was a big one, though it actually took less time than doing those bathrooms in February.  Go figure!  Anyway, we decided to tackle our bedroom, which I have been wanting to redo for a long while now.  I just wanted something lighter and fresher.  

Let's look at it before (please note the brassy fan):

I'm happy that our house was painted a neutral brown all over, but after a while it gets to be a lot of brown everywhere you look.  So it was time to shed the brown!  I decided to go with a nice light grey (Saxon Grey) for three walls and a plum for an accent wall (Intellectual Plum).  My explanation for this is that I like grey and I've been very taken with the idea of a plum wall lately.  My color choices are basically a gut decision, I guess. 

Maybe now is a good time to mention that I ask Drew's opinion on these things, but he generally agrees with whatever I pick.  So this is basically all my decisions with his stamp of approval.  Though of course, if it were up to him I'm sure all the rooms would still be brown, haha.  MEN.  He is very good to go along with all my schemes, color and otherwise.

ANYway, we taped things off Friday night and got to work on Saturday morning whilst the babies played at the park with Drew's parents.  Needless to say, tarps were put to use.

We got the grey done just as a new paint crew arrived:

Once that crew was put to bed, we started on the plum.

At this point I stopped taking pictures until it was done so I will just list what we did after finishing the painting: bought a new little ceiling fan, went to several stores in search of new bed stuff (Gordman's was the winner!  I'd never been there before and I will go there many, many times in the future.), got some pizza for dinner, fed babies and put them to bed.  Then Drewbles took down the bedroom fan, took down the fan in the downstairs TV room and then put THAT fan in our bedroom.  Of course by this point it was dark so he did this as I held a flashlight, sometimes in my hand and sometimes in my mouth if he needed help.  But we did it!  

Old fan, reused fan, little brand new fan.

Then we ate our pizza at 10:00 and watched some Amazing Race.  When we did our bathrooms I'm pretty sure we ate at 10:30.  So...a little better?

But anyhoo, once all was said and done, I love it!  It turned out even better than I hoped for.  I love the colors, I love how much lighter and brighter it is in there.  It's so much more cheerful.  But let's look at the evidence (AKA pictures of the babies):

(The duvet cover is from IKEA, the pillows are from Gordman's)

This next picture is notable for the fact that Mr. C is actually airborne.

Okay okay, the rest of the room (please note the fan):

HER CUTE LITTLE FACE AUGHHHHHH

Oh you two, just being all adorable and hijacking this post!  Go on then.  

Where was I?  Right, the room.  The idea is to get a canvas print/s for over the bed but we haven't picked a picture for it yet.  So for now it's just the Intellectual Plum.  I'm okay with that.  

And for our June project we will go back through all our painted rooms and do touch ups....

Office Redo

This past weekend we did our monthly house project but before I post about it I have to post about the one in April!  We decided to redo our office since it's not really an office anymore because Drew works at an actually Office now.  

(Do you have the Office theme song in your head now?)

Now I call it the hobby room, which I'm sure will be a show one day too.  Here is how it used to look, minus Drewbles:

It was a very low key project, and mostly involved rearranging and repurposing things we already had around.  No painting, hurray!  We planned to do something simple this month since we expected to exceed our $100 budget in May (which we did).  Anyway, here it is now:

I had this obsession about getting a chaise, not really sure why I latched on to that.  In the end we did not get a chaise.  In fact we bought nothing, just took this brown chair that Drew's parents were getting rid of.  It fits just right and is pretty comfy.  Maybe I'll get that chaise one day (probably when I'm an old lady).  

The new stuff was the chair pillow, diploma frames, that little fake plant and the longer white shelf.  I've been meaning to hang those diplomas FOREVER and now they look so nice and everyone who comes in this room will know how dang smart we are.  Too bad hardly anyone goes in there...

I had my ma send me all these Star Wars guys so I could finally display them (the other shelf has my Jack Sparrow and Toothless).  Don't they look awesome?  Wouldn't they look MORE awesome with lightsabers?  Yes, yes, they would.  Still waiting for someone to send those to me... (HINT HINT)  It would also look pretty cool to have a Legolas figurine on the shelf too, huh?  (HINT HINT)

Anyhoodle, another project in the books!  

Bathroom Redoux

That's how you pluralize redo, right?

This year, instead of focusing on a major overhaul of the kitchen, we've decided to do a house project per month and our goal is do it for under $100.  Some projects will probably go over that, but others will definitely be well under it so it should all balance out.  Some of these projects will chip away at the kitchen too so win win.  This month we decided to redo the guest bathroom, which has been on the list for over a year.  

The inspiration for the color was the children's book Miss Suzy, which is one of my very favorites.  Well, that is probably obvious since I based this bathroom off it.  The color we went with is called Cottage Grove and we chose it after much deliberation.  My instinct was to go pale with the color, but then I watched Rehab Addict and Nicole convinced me that bathrooms are the ideal place to go bold with color.  So I sent her a high five across the ether and went for it. 

After a long morning going to a million stores to gather all our goods, we put babies to bed and got to work.

I will admit I was afraid of what I'd done after that first coat.  But even with my misgivings we decided to just paint the half bath downstairs too.  Why not, right?  We are all about using up paint.  So we did that.

Once the painting was finally done, we added some hardware to the cabinets and hung a shelf to put some doodads on.  And that was it!  

(Nothing changed but the paint downstairs)

And by the next day I loved it.  I think the green is so pretty and vibrant and that's just what I was going for.  Plus Boo Boo will walk in and say with delight "Miss Suzy!" and that is a nice perk too.