Happy birthday to meeeee, my dining room is done!

Well, almost. I need to sell this table and chair (plus the other three that go with it that I felt it was superfluous to photograph). Then I need to hang curtains, pictures, and return the tools to the garage. Believe it or not, I don't plan to accessorize with an electric drill and a bucket of drywall compound.

These two cross-stitch pictures were made by a family member and handed down from my mom to me for Christmas last year. I need to cut some mats using a mat cutter I was able to borrow from a church friend.

However. I'm super excited that the painting portion of this room is done. We have some kid free time coming up soon and I plan to use that to finish the little odds and ends. Because nothing says "happy 31st birthday" like a new dining room!


Cheapskate breakdown:

Paint: $10
Curtains+curtain rod: $7 (from Wal-Mart on clearance a hundred years ago)
Dresser for extra dishes: $15 from garage sale+free Menards pulls
Art: $5 from garage sale for framed cafe scene picture, $15 or so for mat board, frames, and paint for dulcimer pictures
Sunshades: Luau party beach mats from Big Lots via a garage sale 50 cents each+magnets ($2) sewn in fabric pockets on back to hold them up on steel door
School desk: $12.99 from Goodwill
Other decorative stuff: (vintage canisters, silver tray, sparkling grape juice bottle, respectively) Free--Christmas gift, $1 at a garage sale, free from hospital, personalized with Little Girl's birth info)

=$68.99

Once I sell the table, I'm hoping to score a good deal on a kids' table as this is a multipurpose playroom/dining room for the time being.

In sickness and in health, and...

Last night I was in a weird mood and vented on Facebook about how much I hated gluten at the moment, hated feeling like a weirdo every time I leave the security of my own kitchen. I want to be able to eat what's put in front of me without quizzing the chef.

I'm so thankful for my friends for their empathy and understanding. Any feelings of being a pain are entirely in my own head and not something that my friends have made me feel. Regardless, I was feeling down and I wanted to make some pancakes to cheer myself up, remind myself that it's not the end of the world.

I found this recipe on Pinterest and was lured in by the promise of simplicity. One flour?? One? Really???

In this blogger's defense, the pancakes were delicious as promised. It was only my casual interpretation of the words "cup" and "teaspoon" that threw off the consistency. (I can't get used to the fact that "a pinch of this" and "a smidge of that" doesn't really work with gluten-free flours, most of which billow like baby powder in your face and all over your counter and are therefore, really hard to measure.)

As I was whipping up dinner and practicing my geography (pretty sure I saw Idaho and Florida, as well as something that closely resembled a petunia) I was thinking about my poor husband and the random gluten-free dinner options I've subjected him to over the past couple of years. Aside from an occasional "you probably shouldn't make this again" (I usually concur) he has sampled my mishaps and my successes alike without complaint.

Significant because, unlike me, he has a choice. Oh, sure, technically I do have a choice, but I'm going with the decision that doesn't involve me feeling like my appendix is being removed sans anesthesia thank you very much.

We just celebrated our eighth anniversary and I was thinking the other day about romance. We have never been much for flowers and all that but to me, no fancy chocolates or jewelry would mean as much to me as quietly eating soggy corn pasta, crumbling cookies, and biscuits with the texture of marshmallows.

Thank you for being with me through sickness, health, and gluten-free.

Paint!!

I'm sitting here typing this with primer and paint polka dotted hands. As you can probably surmise, I've been busy painting, hence my absence from blogging.

(I thought it was a good idea to actually live life instead of just blogging about it...)

I got one wall painted blue and then my husband and I decided we kind of hated it.

From this...

...to this

It's a nice shade but just a little jarring with the rest of the house's muted theme (it looks gray here but it's actually robin's egg blue).

So we did what any other cheap/innovative people would do and mixed the blue with some other too dark paint with blue-ish undertones. It came out kind of the color of a Hershey's Kiss. Mmmmmm.

I'm looking forward to finishing this so I can hang pictures and curtains. After that I already have grand plans for ripping up tile in the bathroom.

Kindergarten lunches

She moved too fast for me to get a good shot so I'm going with the abstract artsy feel on this one.

Big Girl has been a kindergartner for a full week now. She has changed so much already (in good ways) and I'm glad I decided to send her to school. As a former homeschooler I wrestled with the decision between public school, private school, and homeschool and decided to give the public school a try. So far, it has been a huge blessing in her life.

So since she has broadened her horizons and challenged herself, I wanted to write a little bit about my challenge with myself in making her school lunches, since the gluten free thing is supposedly part of my blog. The main dishes this past week included:

hummus and tortilla chips
a turkey and cheese "sandwich" on Glutino crackers (highly recommend)
plain yogurt with some GF granola (used Trader Joe's but Bakery on Main also makes a great one)
a bean quesadilla (refried beans in a corn tortilla)
cubed cooked chicken (from a roasted chicken I made for dinner) with homemade honey mustard dip

Add some cubed cheese, various cut up fruits and veggies, and milk and she is good to go.

It's been a fun spin on the Adventure Breakfasts we tried this summer. I think everything has been a hit but she has a mostly non-picky appetite. Each week I'm trying to get even more inventive with my menus.

Why I'm happy with my Dumb Phone

The other day, I was answering some pressing questions regarding the mechanical function of a gas pump when my phone rang. It was a call I'd been expecting and needed to take to get a quick answer.

Having exhausted my gas pump knowledge (easily accomplished within ten seconds), I assumed the subject had been fully discussed and I told Big Girl, "I need to take this, just a minute, please."

Well, one minute was not actually one minute, and when I got off, she very calmly said, "Mom, I was talking to you and you interrupted. Whenever I interrupt grownups you tell me to wait but you interrupted me."

Wow. She was right. In my mind, the subject had been thoroughly hashed out, but she wasn't finished yet. I should have asked her if she was done before turning my attention to someone else.


There have been many times I've been interrupted by life one way or another when having long discussions with Big Girl (she is nothing if not thorough in her quest for knowledge.) Obviously, I can't neglect every interaction but her mature statement of her feelings made me realize that at least once too often, I made the wrong choice for that moment.

I'm sure everyone has seen the articles circulating on Facebook about Moms on iPhones and the various rebuttals. I take a middle of the road stance on that particular topic. I don't want to be glued to my phone to the exclusion of my children, but I also think children need to learn that Mom (or Dad) doesn't need to witness every tiny detail of their lives. I think you can take things to an extreme either way.

My extreme is a super obsessive personality. Collections are out of the question. When I find an author I like, I read all his or her books back to back like I can't get enough. I researched cloth diaper brands for close to six hours (after kids were in bed) before going with my first choice. When I started blogging, I planned to blog every day and almost threw in the towel when that didn't work.

So an iPhone plus an obsessive personality to me spells disaster. I need the un-accessibility at times. I need to be unplugged from the world and know it will be okay if I miss a Facebook message or a once in a lifetime deal on Craigslist, etc. Strangely, cheapness doesn't really factor into my decision.

I just last year got a phone with a pull out keyboard for texting, which is a great source of amusement to Little Girl. I can also take pictures and have a choice of four different ringtones. Whoa.

I can count on one hand the number of times an iPhone might have come in handy over the past year and each time, there has been a simple solution.

1. We were looking for the farmer's market and the billboard advertising it only posted the website, not the location. Solution: call someone to look it up. When they didn't answer, I did what people have been doing since Lewis and Clark (and way before) and followed my inner compass. Found the farmer's market in 30 seconds.

2. I needed to run errands but was waiting on someone to Facebook message me back. Solution: send them a Facebook message explaining I would be unavailable until x time and to please call or text me at my number.

3. I got stuck in a ditch out of town in the middle of nowhere. Solution: I looked on my car GPS to find a towing company, then when they couldn't help me, I had them give me three other potential numbers. That one's a stretch because cell phone service was spotty anyway so I'm not sure if a smart phone would have improved my experience.

The ideal life

If you've followed my blog for any length of time (or if you know me personally, for that matter) you know that I have a real struggle with perfection. I love to read books and blogs committed to ideals: i.e. a year without buying, a plastic free house, or a completely organic diet. When I read these types of things, though, it's hard for me to go back to my real life. I feel overwhelmed, like I have to incorporate all of these lofty aspirations into my daily life.

Ideally I would make all my own clothes, run a marathon, homeschool all 13 years (per kid), serve only homegrown foods (and of course no junk food!), and never use a disposable product. There may be someone out there that can do this, but I've accepted that it's not me.

I have a lot of fruit in my life...

...but there's still room for the mini marshmallows and chocolate chips.

I have a real passion for cloth diapers. Likewise, for homeschooling during the preschool years. Gardening, not so much. And while I would like to buy only hormone free, ethically raised meat and dairy products, I'm just now starting to get a handle on the gluten-free thing. 

I've heard Dr. Spock quoted many times as saying something like "Trust yourself. You know more than you think." So my twist on this and my new motto is:

"Trust yourself. You are more perfect than you think."

Silicone caulk is not for patching drywall and other life lessons

They say you can't hide your mistakes and I've discovered that to be true. For example, if you want to patch some holes and you can't find your joint compound and instead use silicone caulk, the next owner WILL notice when she goes to paint.

Speaking purely hypothetically of course. Or not.

Hmm. So that hole I strategically covered with a piece of furniture...that paint glob that I ignored in the hopes that it wasn't glaringly obvious. Sorry about that, lady who bought our old house. You probably weren't any more happy to inherit my temporary fixes than I am at the moment with my own inherited house quirks.

As you can guess, I've just finished scraping bunches of silicone caulk out from behind the trim in our dining room. It's tough stuff. Which is why I have yet to put any color on the walls even though I have been "in the process of painting" for the past two weeks.

Also slowing me down has been the archway. It was incorrectly installed and the part where the bottom of the arch joins the doorframe (I don't know technical terms here) sticks out about half an inch past the doorframe instead of being flush. I have called upon my artistic skills to camouflage the discrepancy until we can actually fix it.

Weird bumpy area looking 10 times better already

Working in 15 minute bursts as I find the time, I have finished rough sanding everything. I just need to go over it with a fine sanding sponge and then (hallelujah chorus!) I will be ready to change my bright orange-with-drywall-splotch-white-accents to blue.

Also...some updates from my July projects. I was on vacation when I blogged about my flowers and when I returned home I realized that they had died in my absence. In keeping up with my goals for the month, I also tried to make some coconut milk shampoo but failed for two reasons:

a. I used the wrong soap base
b. I used the wrong type of coconut milk

Considering there are only three ingredients, there was a pretty high chance this recipe was doomed from the start. However, I bought the right stuff earlier this week and hope to mix up a batch soon.

The ants go marching

We have an ant problem. A major ant problem. They are taking over the kitchen.

Now, if they were taking over the kitchen and fixing me some shrimp, tomato and spinach linguine and a side salad that would be nice. But otherwise, they are not welcome.

I've tried cinnamon because I heard they hate the smell. Apparently these ants didn't get the memo because they marched right through my cinnamon pile and kept going. I tried baking soda because I read that it's bad news for ants but not so much for 13 month olds who put everything in their mouths. No go. I tried diatomaceous earth but could only put it in places those 13 month old hands can't reach.

Last night it poured and usually the morning after a rainstorm is when the ants invade en masse. But this morning I woke up to something beautiful in my kitchen. A spider.

Normally I dislike spiders almost as much as I dislike ants. But when the spiders are feasting on the ants and thereby helping you take back your kitchen, I love them.

Good teamwork, spider.