Productive Sunday

How can it already be the end of the weekend? It has really flown by quickly around these parts.

My son came down with the croup, so he was confined to the house and unable to attend two birthday parties this weekend (not that he knew any of this since he is too little to really get it), but it also meant at least one of us was required to stick around the house all weekend as well. Perfect timing, since we have officially commenced on "Potty Training 2008" -- good times, good times, folks. All I can say is thank the good Lord above for "Elmo's Potty Time" DVD, Pull-ups training diapers, jellybeans (incentive to go #1 on the potty) and a cooperative toddler (for the most part). You would totally crack up if you came to our house and used the bathroom because there is a stack of 4 little wrapped presents sitting on top of the toilet -- bribes, if you will, for our son to go #2 on the potty, which has yet to happen. Oh, how I am hoping the presents will be enticing enough! Part of me is excited about the whole potty-training adventure, and part of me is so tired of it already. A trip to the potty every 20 minutes ALL DAY long is starting to really wear on this Mama...

My husband got a whole lot of work done on our son's room this weekend, so I was very excited about that. I will have to take some pictures of it tomorrow to show you what has been going on in there. And since I have sent all previously unfinished quilt tops off to the professional, I treated myself and started a new quilt top for fun with fabric I bought quite a while ago (being that one of my new goals is to use up fabric I already have). I used a "jolly pack" of Kaffe Fasset squares (from www.fatquartershop.com) and some white cotton I already had a ton of. I totally stole the idea off of Creative Little Daisy's blog -- it is the Freshcut Doll Quilt from Better Homes and Gardens. The picture is all the squares laid out, prior to them being sewn together. So far I actually have the first six rows sewn. And I think I will be adding some borders to the whole thing as well to make it at least big enough to be a decent lap quilt size.



And I was also able to steal away a little bit today to go to a movie (thanks to my husband who stayed behind with the Potty Master) and got to see "Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day". What a delightful movie -- I loved everything about it. The costumes, the music, the cast (phenomenal), and it even had the guy from Pushing Daisies on ABC, a fun little bonus. I'm so glad it was worth going to -- now that I am a mom, I rarely see movies actually in the theater, so they have to really be good for me to see them, and boy am I ever disappointed if they aren't!

A typical day...

Today was a pretty typical day for me.

First I sent my son off to school like this (I did not know it until I picked him up this afternoon, and his teacher kindly brought it to my attention):


Next I dropped off two more of these finished quilt tops complete with batting and backing to be quilted by the professional (no matter that they were supposed to be finished by Christmas, oops):


Then I picked up one of these, in the hopes that I will be getting the nerve up to go and take the driving test for my motorcycle endorsement:


...which will in turn make me finally legal on this:

(I've been riding for five years now, and this is my new scoot I got last year. She's all pimped out, complete with wicker basket, whitewall tires, and personalized pin-up girl. Yeah, so maybe after a good five years of riding I might finally be feeling a teeny-tiny twinge of guilt at not being legal -- that, and I've heard the test isn't that bad after all.)

Then I capped off my "free-time" (that is, time away from the 2-year-old) with a little bit of shopping at the big red bull's eye:


I wonder what all I can accomplish tomorrow...

He is Risen Indeed! and Merry Christmas...

Hello there...

just popping my head in quickly to wish you all a very Happy Easter (even if it is in the evening, and Easter is almost over). I am completely and utterly exhausted from all of our Easter festivities here in Wonderland. We had a full day of church attending, last-minute asparagus cooking, eating lunch with family and new friends, Easter egg-hunting, a little bit of soccer playing, kite-flying, remote control-airplane flying, trying our hands at a game of horseshoes, dessert-eating, chatting, and nap-taking. (See, aren't you exhausted just from reading our list of festivities?!)

I love Easter, and this one was yet another great day. Our pastor gave a fantastic sermon, urging the congregation to start off on a journey of reading through all of the "red letters" in the Gospels -- reading through all of Jesus' teachings and really trying to follow His commandments, moreso than most of us might truly be making the effort to normally. He used the example of a book that came out this past year by A.J. Jacobs (The Year of Living Biblically -- if you haven't read it, it is pretty enlightening and very funny in parts). To sum it up, an atheist decided to tackle the job of trying to (literally) follow all of the commandments in the Bible for 12 months, something that is really humanly impossible, but our pastor's point was this -- if this guy, who is a declared atheist and doesn't even have a relationship with Christ, can devote a year of his life to living passionately in the attempts of trying to follow and obey God, then why don't we as Christians, people who openly are declaring our love for Christ to the rest of the world, show the same passion in trying to obey Him and His teachings? The pastor made a very good observation in my opinion, and I am personally going to try my humble best at this "Red Letter Experiment" for the next 12 weeks. What a great Easter sermon, not only a time to reflect on Christ's great love for us and the sacrifice He made, but also a much-needed kick-in-the-pants reminder of how, if we truly love Christ as we say we do, we need to be obeying Him and keeping His commandments.

Of course, one of my favorite things about Easter Sunday at church is the phrase we all say: "He is Risen! He is Risen, Indeed!". I love that part every single year. This year our pastor added a little something funny -- he said that a former pastor of our church would also add in "Merry Christmas!" at the end of his invitation, since many folks won't darken the door of church again until Christmas rolls around...:)

Progress as promised

I can't believe I'm actually going to post these pictures, but they really must be posted in order for me to feel the accountability in finishing the clean-up. It ain't pretty, folks. But the upside to these pictures is the fact that I worked on both the guest room (pictured here) and the basement (no pictures), and both are about halfway done (er, excavated, that is). I should have taken photos of the basement as well, but I wasn't actually planning on cleaning that one yet -- it just happened that I was stuck down there for "TV reasons" (i.e. the Tivo upstairs was recording something and I had another show to watch at the same time so I had to use the second TV in the basement, sad, sad, sad, I know). So I got some bonus work done on the basement over the course of a good two hours.

Apparently, I could open my own craft store with the amount of stuff I have accumulated...




I promise to post some "after" pictures soon.

On another random note, I'm beginning to think robins are not all that bright. We had new windows installed in our basement last week -- the high-up kinds that barely peek out over the ground kind since ours is a true basement and not a walk-out of any kind. Anyway, the windows are crystal clear and have those robins fooled completely. The poor little things keep flying up to the windows and running into the glass with their beaks. I think they are trying to get the dead spiders and bugs they can see trapped inside in the cobwebs (note to self -- clean the old cobwebs out). I thought it was kind of funny at first, but now it is getting to the annoying stage because there is now a constant "boom, boom" noise all day with them continuing to try to break through. Seriously. Don't you think they'd give up after a while?

(Are you bored yet?)

Technical difficulties...

Anyone have this problem? I am trying to add a new label for music to my posts (since I now have a few of them), but every time I go to add a new label, my Internet window shuts down and reports a problem. I was able to add the one label the other day for "quilts", but for the last two days, it won't let me add any new labels. There's a lot more to me than just quilting, so I am hoping this gets fixed somehow soon. :)

Go out right now and get it.

That's an order.

I was blog-surfing yesterday, and on one of my favorite blogs ("Me" by Tara Whitney, and no, I haven't learned how to put that in here underlined where you could just click on it to visit it automatically), and she was talking about a new CD she bought. Out of curiosity I hopped on over to iTunes, listened to a few snippets, and fell. in. LOVE. It's like the CD was tailor-made for me and my personal taste in music! I had trouble at first remembering who Zooey Deschanel is -- she is an actress, and I remember her from the movies "Elf" and "Failure to Launch" (as SJP's roommate, or sister, was it?) although she has been in more than just those two movies. Anyway, apparently this girl sings on the side. She's a fine actress, but I think she should quit her day job and take this gig on the road!

See what you think. I found this video on YouTube -- I guess she recently performed at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin.



By the way, this is the first full album I have actually downloaded on iTunes. Usually I only buy songs one at a time because I never hardly like every song on the album (unless it's Pink Martini or Sondre Lerche or one of my faves). But yes, I downloaded the whole entire thing late last night, and I love every song. But poo on iTunes for not putting the album up on it's new releases since it just came out Tuesday. I always check those to see if anything good came out, and had I seen it listed there, I definitely would have checked it out.

Kick-start your day

If you're anything like me, you might need a kick-in-the-pants to start your day off right. I know I do, especially after last night and having to bid adieu to the lovely Gilmore Girls. I almost started crying during the last episode, and even my husband kept saying, "This is sad!". I'm telling you, I think both Lauren Graham and Alexis Bledel both looked a little bit puffy around the eyes throughout the whole thing, like they had already been crying before having to shoot the episode.

Today is day three in my Spring Break week of trying to knock stuff off the list, and today is going to be a doozy. I am going to tackle my guest bedroom. I don't have any pictures yet, but I promise to post a "before" and an "after" picture, but at least I can describe what it looks like in there right now. It basically looks like a craft store threw up in my guest room. There is so much stuff piled on the floor that you cannot walk in there. I have three windows that have lovely drapes (made by myself) hanging up, and one poor window that has been bare. The worst and most pathetic part is that I made the drapes over a year ago, and the fourth one is only missing the hem at the top. All of those hours spent making the drapes, and I couldn't find the 15 minutes to finish the measly hem across the top?! I am lame, lame, lame. So, today will be spent fixing the guest room. And by "fixing" I don't mean cramming all of my junk into other rooms and re-stuffing it in other closets -- I do mean to fix it all properly, finding a place for everything.

So to kick myself in the pants, won't you join me in watching a very cute video? This is one of my favorite songs by The Ditty Bops, and what makes it especially cute is the fact that it is a video of one of the girl's grandmother's Jazzercise class exercising to the song. I dare you not to get up and shake what God gave you when you watch this...



(Oh, and I was successful yesterday in dropping off my quilt for professional quilting. Go me!)