Rugs Bloom In This Heat

When it is hotter than can be believed outside, I hide. While hiding I: read extra, drink inordinate amounts of seltzer with ice and re-discover all the little projects I wanted to accomplish in our house. I have been painting trim like mad and spackling little dings and holes and nail pokes in all the walls. I established a secure relationship with our drill (I can now drill in and reverse out all screws with straight confidence...no fear). I made and hung tissue flowers from the dining room ceiling and then got all inspired and re-organized the pantry. But sometimes the best projects come on you in a fit of random inspiration....

One very lazy day I began to doodle on a plain green carpet I'd picked up at a local tag sale and the paint and doodling just kept on creeping along. Pretty soon there was a long trailing bloom explosion expanding pinkly from one corner of the plain, faded green. I passed through several stages of terrified and exhilerated while painting...worrying by turns that I was destroying the rug or exulting over having really *made* the rug work. I love it. Sometimes you just have to take leaps and do crazy random things because the spirit moved you, urges can be genius.

Checkups and Coral With a Side of Pea Shoots

Have just had another little check-up at the midwife and tomorrow I take the two big boys to their yearly appointments as well. Its a week for medical doctoring. We usually get very simple, happy news at the pediatricians. We've been very lucky to have such normal, easy childhood health situations so far. I do think there may be some shots for Dee which will be tricky since Ru is positively exultant over the fact that he is quite done with shots for a few years. Please lets not have a meltdown.

Brothers fooling around on Mommy's cell phone, under my recently framed apple painting in the office.

My appointment went well. Heartbeat sounds strong and clear (135!), my blood pressure is pumping along at a perfectly healthy spot, iron just a touch low, glucose test was all clear, and my weight...have I told you about my weight? My weight was wonderful! They always tell you to gain 20-25 lbs during a pregnancy and then I always gain more like 40-50 lbs. Intimidating to the max. Part of the problem is that I binge eat when stressed and pregnancy brings out very worst in my emotional instability. Part of it is honestly just laziness in menu planning and eating. But this time around I am doing amazingly well. I've gained 20 lbs so far and between last appointment and this I didn't gain anything at all, just held steady, although Baby continues to measure larger.

Typical lunch at our house. A plate full of nibbly bits, lots of produce and nothing that requires Mommy to cook. :)

I have been doing a good job lately, trying to eat carefully during the week and allow myself to cut loose on the weekends. I've heard this sort of back and forth effect is good for the metabolism and keeps food restraint from getting too restrained to keep up. I also gave up drive-through restaurants for Lent which was a very good plan. I sometimes skipped fast food and just went home to get food or even dashed into the grocery store and made better choices for quick lunch ideas. Am hoping to keep this going. I am also trying to track what I eat as consistently as I can and watch my nutrients using Fitday to be sure I'm hitting all the targets which is far more interesting and encouraging to me than watching calories.

You can see the matching baskets and new runner on top of the bookcase here.

In other news, my Interior Design class is done. I feel so-so about it. Am not terribly inspired as a result of what I heard and learned and I don't feel accomplished in the subject or anything like that but it is a toe in the door. I think I may take an online class next to see if a different instructor helps. My assignment for the class was the living room in our house and although I have just a few new ideas and no real progress there I did get a few thoughts for the dining room.

I put all our regularly used eating accoutrements (olive oil, salt, pepper, butter, etc.) into a pretty basket that matches one for bibs and cloth napkins. When the meal is over the get cleared to the top of my cookbook cupboard which functions as a sort of sideboard. I also bought matching runners for the top of the bookcase and the dining room table to try to pull in the coral color inside the corner cupboards. And I bought a stunning ceramic bowl for a between-meals centerpiece.

Am madly in love with it. Am now considering painting the walls a soft oatmeal grey to set off the white and coral accents. What do you think? After of course, I finish all this crazy spring cleaning I'm in the middle of.

The pea shoots are turning their velvety leaves to the sky and starting to uncurl tendrils here and there. I am hoping they really begin to climb sometime this week. We have forecasts for warmer weather and even a little rain (Heavens, we could use rain!) and spring is really chasing us down! Hooray!

Designing to Distraction

I cannot seem to bring myself to have the gumption to sit down and blog regularly this week. Am forever dashing off on wild tangential projects or slumping down into a chair with a book, a snuggly kid and no ambition. There is no steady, responsible in between at the moment. I am sans equilibrium. I think part of the issue is that although far from my own due date, my sisters-in-laws are all delivering their three babies like a string of dominoes...or at least we all expect them to. Only one baby has been sighted so far! It puts me in a very distracted frame of mind. I check and re-check my email and decide not to make the bed and feel overwhelmed by the idea of coming up with a lunch and then check my email again. Useful, eh?

Image via Wikipedia

To shake things up, I enrolled in an interior design class. Ahhh!!!!! I spent the days leading up to my first class meeting alternately freaking out (Why did I sign up for this thing? I am going to be the class dunce!!!!) and pretending that it wasn't really happening (What supplies I'm supposed to have by tomorrow?). And then I really went and it was good. Better than good. It was fantastic and inspiring and I didn't want to go home. I spent the next hour buzzed, standing electrified in Barnes and Noble flipping through home decor magazines and design books and then drove home with the window open listening to electronica in the wired night air. Am feeling like I may figure out how to crack design after all. I have a feeling this class could lead to others. So exciting to feel empowered and hopeful about such a luminous and baffling subject. Am rubber cementing together mood boards for all the rooms in the house.......fabric swatches, paint chips and magazine bits abound!

Interior Design Magazine (Photo credit: Associated Fabrication)

 On the heels of my interior arts class I am starting to feel the first stirrings of spring, the first magnetic pull towards my garden and there is suddenly design spillover from my class to the yard! Huzzah! May I conquer all things....(unless all things means the dishes or the laundry...now hindered by our broken washer). I am not feeling so starched about the seams that I feel up to tackling the front yard which I basically blank of all design at this point and needs major visionary help. I still feel like I need my landscape designer friend's handholding to pull that off but I feel up to tweaking and filling beds that already exist in the back and simply need some polish. So far I've done two of them in rather slopping, kindergarden style but hey....they're done and I've feeling excited about watching for annual season at my local nursery in a couple of months.

 So, that's what I'm doing this week, designing things in a somewhat frenetic manner. Hope your week is going well and that you are managing the balance between dejected apathy and pulsing mania better than I. Happy Thursday!

Titanic to Promising

I was having a bad morning. The kind of bad morning you're bound to have after Monday comes barreling down the road and hits you head-on, after a fabulously happy weekend. I headed in to paint with my friends with a bad attitude. I felt a little like somebody gave me a brain-ectomy and replaced all my wits with over-cooked spaghetti, given me a teaspoon to bail out The Titanic with and then waved blithely from the distance as they set a fuse to crackle slowly towards the ship. So overwhelmed and so hopeless and so alone. I am wandering through new parenting issues that feel super over-the-top and I periodically feel so alone in my marriage and am even feeling at-sea in my housekeeping routine (which, darn it, I was so on top of a week or so ago). Blast Blast Blast.

Image via Wikipedia

So, anyhow...there I was heading in to church...wondering if I should even be there...thinking that I might not even stay and in walks my sweet landscaping friend. So sweet, this friend. And with her gentle way, she flourished an onion-skin paper my direction and suddenly, there on my empty watercolor sheet (uninspired and unproductive in the painting department today) there was the most beautiful garden plan.

A plan. A solution. A stunning work of art, featuring my yard. And just like that, my day turned from ridiculously over-the-top sucky to absolutely survivable...yea, foreshadowing promise.

I feel like I felt when I had my portrait drawn by an artist friend as a surprise.

I feel like my life and my self and the world I am trying to live in and create are beautiful or at least look beautiful to some people or could be beautiful. So much of the time the problems we wade through every single day and the mind-numbing road blocks that zing stunningly up in the way start to feel like they mean something...I forget they mean nothing more than the fact that I'm alive.

Spotlight on the Playroom

Whole lot of paint on my fingers and toes lately as we start to really get into Remodeling Land.

Little mini-tour of an evolving room in our house today. I have shown you bits of the playroom before, but today you'll get a little glimpse into its hopeful future too. Right now, we are mostly calling it "the playroom" by default because it is the place where all the toys and many of the kids books live, but it will also be the room where we will homeschool.

The walls are all faux-wood paneling in a dark brown which makes the room feel very close and cave-ish. But, that is changing! We are now halfway through painting the walls with a gallon of flat white paint that, believe it or not, I found in the basement. (How fabulous is that?) The beauty of knowing that everything will be eventually getting painted and that the floors will eventually be refinished is that kids can paint too! No worries about "messing it up" really. The boys think that's the best thing ever.

Finished walls...just trim left.

Art hanging finally! Love that purply watercolor on the right...Dee's work.

Kid measuring chart, a cool housewarming gift from the next-door neighbor

Where I've stopped at the moment...and you can see our new stand globe, the recently hung curtains and our two free chairs that will belly-up to the table I'm still looking for.

I got a gallon of soft periwinkle blue ('Blueberry Buckle') for $5 in the reject paint section and slapping that on some or all of the walls will be the next step. I think once we've opened the space and made it more breathable with the white its going to be fun to add a little character and homey love with a touch of color.

Found this old metal tray and the two wooden crates below it at a free neighborhood swap. Am planning to have Dee help me organize the rest of the Matchbox cars in it.

Other ideas on the way include:

• A thrifted heavy, very large baroque style frame, painted gold mounted on the wall, around a chalkboard, right at kid level. Something like what this woman did.
• This giant zebra rug, made with just glue, scissors and felt
• A big, sturdy table of some kind that I am hoping to find for free on Craig's List or else curbside
• Some of these nature posters
• A cheap cd player/tape player for listening to books on tape or music together
• A frame like this, and a rotatable set of "The Great" artist's works to put inside
• A simple, big  wall clock with hands and numbers
• And...one or both of these very cool cupboards which the sellers left down in the basement 

Garden Packing

So, today I started "packing" the garden a little...or at least preparing it for packing. I made a list of all the plants that I know want to dig up and take with me, clipped back some of the plants that had gotten so wild that they'd be hard to dig, pulled my raised bed apart, gathered up the garden decorations and pulled potted plants out of their tucked away locations throughout the garden. There is quite the assortment of flotsam and jetsom on the patio now.

Since we pulled the vegetable bed apart we pulled out all the remains of our veggies, threw the leggy plants into the woods and solidified our dependence on the CSA for fresh produce. That's it folks! We had one little moon-white cucumber left. Ru ate it for lunch.

I have decided to do it right this time and make a careful, orchestrated blueprint-style plan for our yard before I move in a single forget-me-not. I'm hoping this will help avoid turning it into a botanical three ring circus and make sure that we use our space well. A friend of a friend from church who was a landscape designer in her past life has offered to help advise and direct me with design and layout and making logical choices. I am so excited about that. A real design person!

Before we even look at the property together her first assignment she gave was that I make a list of what we'd like to work into our yard. Heh. The list is a bit long but, she told me to put down even my wildest dreams and scrimp not...better to dream big and finagle ways to work things out than to downsize our ideas and have a so so yard that we wish we'd been braver with. (So goes the theory) I haven't emailed her the list yet but so far this is what I have:

• Stone bread/pizza oven
• Cottage garden style flowers (annuals and perennials, sun and shade)
• Fruit trees (at least some, espalier style)
• Grassy, open area for play/football
• BBQ area
• Water feature of some kind
• Vegetable bed
• Compost area
• Herb garden (can be small, even potted)
• Berries
• Grapes
• Stone bed borders
• Butterfly attracting flowers
• Places to sit
• Sandbox w/ cover
• Board and rope style swing?
• Window boxes and front porch plantings
• Arbor
• A garden statue or two
• A beehive

Do you think that's a bit over the top? I'm all for extravagant dreams.

I'm thinking something like this: