our week as visitees

Goodness, has this week been flying by or was that just me??
Don't mind us over here slacking on the pictures I promised, not to mention on documenting Sawyer's first baseball game and other random fun. Sawyer and I had friends over to visit this morning and had such a great time. It was so good to just hang out and chat with another -and fabulous- adult while the kids played. It's been a long time. I loved every minute of it.

Anyway.
Back to last week...
I don't have a ton of pictures. I really only snapped a few out on our hikes. We had a great time, a fabulous weekend away with the Wests, and a blast just hanging out here at home with them here. Fun times with the kids, lots of games played after they went to bed every night, and lots to look forward to for the next time they grace us with a visit here in Tennessee!















Here are the rest of some of the pics of our weekend away all together...
Touring the Great Smoky Mountains National Park:





















(not sure what my wackos kiddos are doing here)







Some from the trails:






































Stopping for snacks:
























and Sawyer showing off his skid marks (which turned into lovely bruises) from a nice fall



















And more hiking:





































The kids (and the dads!) liked doing a little off-road rock-climbing, tree balancing and water hopping whenever they had the chance:












































































We also detoured over to Chattanooga on the way home after the weekend and stopped for a ride up the Incline Railway. It was very cool. This has already been a lot of pictures, so I'll group those together another time.

My sister has a handful more pictures over at her blog if anyone's interested.

today is friday

^ I keep having to remind myself of that ^
I am so off on what day of the week it is... coming off of a week with my sister and her boys here, a weekend away with them that carried over to Monday, Ryan being home part of the week to sightsee with everyone and Sawyer being on spring break... all combines to mean I haven't a clue what today really is.

Except that the family left today. We had a great great visit... a fabulous trip east to the mountains, great hikes, pretty waterfalls, tacky tourist strips, late nights in the hot tub, doting cousins, some gorgeously warm weather to tease them with our spring, and just a touch of touring Nashville, including a morning at the zoo.

I actually remembered to snap a few pictures this time and so I want to collect them with a few words about our week and get them on here...
as soon as I get my bearings on the fact that it's already Friday.
Yay for the weekend!

spring or summer?

We have jumped right into full on spring weather around here and we are LOVING it!
Eighty degrees yesterday and today. Yes please and thank you!!
And may I present further evidence of this fantastic weather in the past 24 hrs...

We've been sleeping with our windows open all night and I just love the fresh spring smell (our front yard smells like pear and cherry blossoms right now!) and the sound of the birds singing in the morning. Such a nice way to wake up. :)

Savannah and Sawyer spent pretty much the entire day outside yesterday. Sawyer had a friend over for the morning and then after lunch we walked down to the other end of our subdivision to meet a friend of Savannah's from the school bus and walked her back to our house to play.
Turns out I greatly underestimated the sunshine and temperature, the distance, and the hills immediately surrounding our house (I haven't been walking much in this new neighborhood yet) and by the time we got back (we live at pretty much the top of the biggest hill) I was sadly winded and sweating.
I will admit I am sorely out of shape from this winter, but in my defense they are pretty good hills, I was wearing jeans, it was 80° outside, and I was keeping up with a high energy skipping and running five-year-old boy.
I will also admit that I opted to drive said friend back home when it was time to go.

We had baseball last evening and stopped at Sonic afterward for some after practice ice cream with some friends since no one had school today.
Ice cream, outdoors, at 8:30 at night.
I could definitely get used to this weather!

I'm pretty sure the kids don't have a very realistic recollection of what summer is around here because they're both already making comments about it being SO HOT.
Savannah came into my room this morning as she was getting dressed, with a tank top in her hand, and asked if it was going to be hot again today. I told her yes.
"But is it going to be super hot again like yesterday?"
Oh brother.

Sawyer outgrew all his flip flops last year and he has nothing yet for this year. Savannah, however, has several pair that will still fit her this summer... so she dug them all out and loaned Sawyer some for yesterday. At least she gave him the brown ones and not the yellow and pink with heart graffiti all over them!
I can't get over how close in size their feet are... Sawyer's always had big puppy feet, but I find it hard to believe that my preschooler and my second grader are now just one shoe size apart!

{random} thoughts for thursday

>My house is finally looking presentable just in time for our guests to arrive tomorrow night. Which kicks off a calendar full of visitors; these guys this next week, possible guests the first week of April, Ryan's sis and fam the week after that, two separate families for a few different nights at the very end of April, more friends who will make an appearance two separate weekends in June, my parents in July, and Ryan's parents way out in October. Love a full house!!

>I cannot believe this is the same tree in less than two weeks time:
march 1:















march 12:
























































>Sawyer starts baseball practice tonight. He's excited to try it out. I'm not so excited about how much it all costs... the fee is outrageous (to me), we live out of district so that's an extra $40, and all the stuff you need to play that we don't have; a real bat, helmet, shoes, etc which are probably each like $20 a pop. Why oh why don't they offer spring soccer around here?? I was so looking forward to another cheaper soccer season.

>Made these strawberry donuts yesterday as a trial run for taking them this weekend away with my sister's family. Yum!

>Watching the screen while the kids play Wii Mario Kart makes me dizzy.

>I have at least ten loads worth of laundry to fold and put away today. Three loads from this week added to last week's that never made it out of the baskets... plus most of the laundry from the week before that that actually did get folded but never made it out of the piles in my bedroom, and then was rifled through and picked from all the past two weeks and basically a huge pile of mess. So basically all of the clothes all of us own are laying in avalanche proportion piles in my bedroom. I hate laundry.

>Toenail prettying and painting on the agenda for me and SJ today. This week of 75°+ weather definitely warrants presentable toes for flip flops!

breakfast dates, a picnic lunch and a grilled dinner

All with some kite flying and playground playing in between.
Definitely a perfect spring day around here.

A certain child in this house has been having a rough time lately and so her daddy decided she needed a little one-on-one date time and took her out to breakfast this morning. Well, the rest of us didn't want to miss out so Sawyer and I headed out the other direction and had our own treat; Krispy Kreme for two! It was a fun little breakfast date.

We came home to attack our mess of a house... the kids worked on the playroom and Ryan and I managed to clean out and reorganize the attic storage off our spare bedroom, as well as clean up all the mess of the past month's unpacking/sorting/remodeling/painting projects that have overtaken that end of our second floor. I'm happy to say we now have a guest bedroom and bathroom ready and waiting for guests (who arrive Friday!).
We took something like 5 large moving boxes and a few bags of things to Goodwill.
It's so nice to finally start feeling like we're "moved in" and situated (ie: house arranged and decorated) so I can get rid of everything else we don't need.
After our big drop-off we hit up Sonic and ate lunch outside in the sunshine while the kids played at the park.

We headed back home and Ryan and I wrapped up some loose ends upstairs, thought about tackling the garage for half a moment, but when the 4runner turned up with a dead battery (yes we still have the invalid sitting in our garage) (I can't believe it either) we decided that was a better project for after we're done with houseguests.
The kids spent a few hours outside in the backyard, where according to them it was burning up, sweating hot. Sawyer was stripped down with no shirt on and Savannah had changed into shorts and a tank top and they were both barefoot. And it was only 74°. Oh Lord, I can't wait for summer and their complaining then.

Just before dinner we loaded back up in the car and drove down to SJ's school to fly kites... the kids have both received big cool kites over the past year and we had yet to get them out. Today's sunshiney wind was the perfect day...





























































































































We flew kites for a long time and then Ryan and I manned them on our own while the kids spent the rest of the time on the playground before we headed back home to grill up some steaks for dinner.
Mmmm... it was a great Saturday!

if you give a mouse a to-do list...

I had my work cut out for me yesterday.
And instead of buckling down and checking important things off my list (did I mention we have houseguests coming for a week in just 8 days?!) here's what I actually got accomplished yesterday:

I started cleaning up the kitchen, ran out of dishsoap, then got sidetracked and reorganized a few cupboards.
In going thru my baking cupboard, wherein a certain costco sized bag of chocolate chips would not stop calling my name, I got sidetracked and decided we needed to make chocolate chip cookies. Right now.
After cookies were mixed, baked and cooled, I started picking up the game room living room and got sidetracked when Sawyer wanted to play a game and I offered to teach him how to play Ticket to Ride.

Hmmm... this was beginning to feel familiar.
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Determined I had to do something productive, I sat down and sanded the cabinet doors I need to paint... and just as I was picking up the paintbrush, I got a call from the school that SJ had a fever.
So instead I picked her up and took her to the dr to confirm that the sore throat she was complaining about was strep.
Spent the rest of the afternoon getting antibiotics, new toothbrushes and groceries.

In short, my house is in the same condition as yesterday.
Plus I have another bout of sick germs and two kids here to contend with, none of which will probably not help with the condition of said house.

But we do have chocolate chip cookies!

wish me luck

My house is a wreck.
Seriously. I'd take pictures, but the mess wouldn't fit in even a dozen of them.
Usually, when we're working on projects and such, there are always a couple of rooms totally out of sorts, typically directly connected to the project we're doing. Painting; furniture moved away from walls, stuff moved into another room, etc.
Currently we have so many projects either going on, projects with loose ends waiting to be tied up or just JUNK sitting around, that it is every room. Not joking.
And that's all mixed in with the everyday mess of a family where the mom has been sick for the past week. Lovely.

Family room: cabinet doors I'm painting are sitting on a drop cloth with the can of paint... have been sitting there for four weeks since I started painting the cabinet they belong to... which has since moved back into the dining room doorless. Also a mirror leaning against the fireplace waiting to be painted and to replace the one currently hung above the fireplace.

Kitchen: bag of ready-mix grout to finish some spots we had to patch the backsplash around outlets (remember the ninety million outlets?? they've been the bane of my existence) and outlet covers floating around. We tiled the backsplash before Christmas!! And of course there's the dishes and the like from last night's dinner and this morning's lunch making. Even the pretty flowers Ryan brought me this week (LOVE!) sitting on the island have done nothing to make me more motivated to clean up in there. Plus there are random tools covering the top of our booksellers bookshelf by the laundryroom door that have been sitting there forever.

Laundry room: random paint cans and spray paint sitting on the dryer.

Dining room: has made progress since being buried in an avalanche of overflow since the office unpacking/purging upstairs sixish weeks ago. Craft stuff sitting in piles, two boxes of garbage and piles of fabric and the like waiting to find a new home. This room was almost unmaneuverable for a few weeks there and now I have a clear, clean table and cabinet and hutch with just piles around the perimeter of the room, so there's light at the end of the tunnel for that one!

Living room: cardboard "dropcloth" and paint can still sitting in the middle of the room from painting it a month ago. Pictures, clock, etc lining the perimeter of the room waiting to be hung. Still waiting for new bookshelves.

Playroom: ugh. Seems especially bad right now because the kids have not one, but two play tents set up in there. Well, set up and then taken down and sprawled all over the floor.

Entryway: trying to find a rug that fits the space that I like... two different ones are there now and all the coats and shoes that were there are thrown into the closet to get out of the way so I could get a "clear view" of the rugs.

Half bathroom: really needs to be cleaned.

Upstairs hallway: overflowing laundry baskets, cardboard dropcloth filled with miscellaneous painting tools, trays and cans.

Office: pretty good, considering I finally unpacked, purged and cleaned out last month. (it's where we, upon move it, threw all the boxes of stuff that wasn't important or didn't know what to do with like books, photos, crafts stuff, office stuff... and also our go-to junk room)
This room currently has no furniture but a small desk (which is currently hosting a dead computer) and there's still a small assortment of boxes of papers to sort through and boxes of Ryan's books (mostly text books I think) I need him to go through. Also for some reason there is still an inflated air mattress leaned up against the wall ever since we used it the week we moved in here... six months ago!

Spare bedroom: wow. It's where lots of the random office unpacking went, waiting to be put into the attic storage. A few boxes of kids clothes, toys, extra frames and decor stuff, our extra kitchen chairs, and also half a dozen boxes for goodwill I've been collecting while toying with the idea of a garage sale this spring. And still a pile of tools and painting paraphernalia from the bathroom project last week. And a random closet door.

Kids bedrooms: messy

Our bedroom: it's laundry day again and I still have last week's all over my room waiting to be put away.

Our bathroom: really needs to be cleaned.

Kids' bathroom: the only room that's actually almost perfectly put together right now. I actually just replaced the under the counter stuff back to under the counter since we'd been painting and such and the only thing left for me to do is scrub the floor... white tile and grout that looks like it's never been scrubbed in the 1o years this house has been here. Can't wait.

I think I'll go take pictures of the good bathroom. For posterity's sake.

good day

Prepping a great dinner for the grill amid kids' watercolor paintings drying on the island and SJ doing homework, the boys in the backyard tossing the football and a little old school Jack Johnson playing in the sunroom between us with open windows floating the mellow tunes into the house and out to the yard simultaneously.

Today's a good day.
And it's really nice to have one of those.

welcome march

"Oh, get up, my dear friend, my fair and faithful one—
leave your seclusion, come out in the open.
Let me see your face, let me hear your voice;
for your voice is sweet and your face is lovely.
Arise and come with me.
Look around: the winter is past; the rains are over and gone.

Flowers appear on the earth; the season of singing has come."

Song of Solomon chapter 2, vs 11-14