On to Utah! YIPPEE

Well, I was going to post my second toddler bed sheets post, but I didn't take enough pictures to describe it while I was making my first top sheet, and I'm getting ready to leave for Utah, so I won't get the second one completed until I get back. After I come home and unpack, (Yes, for once the unpacking WILL come first, thanks to FLYlady) I will finish the top sheet and the quilt for Jackie's bed. Then, I will add the instructions.

I just have to say that I am SO excited to be going out to Utah. I LOVE the west. I love how dry the air is. I love the snow. (I'm praying that it will snow while we're out there.) Most of all, I love my parents, and they live out there. We'll get to go trick-or-treating in my home town! YIPPEE! So, I'm off to Utah, and I hope to take a lot of pictures to post on my blog when I get back. YAY!

Money Money Money

Money is a necessity in this world. When we need anything, it costs money. In fact, almost everything costs money. Strangely enough, even learning how to fix money problems can cost money. When people are scraping pennies to feed their families and pay rent plus minimum payments on their debts, they can sometimes cringe when it comes to paying even more money to try to get out of debt. If you're not absolutely certain that the program will work, why would they pay their precious money to get out of debt.



When we're in debt and stressed about money, we become more attached to our needs and less attached to our kids. As an attachment parent, I don't want my money problems getting in the way of my attachment to my kids. We can become a slave to debt. Instead, (no matter how much or little money we make) we can live within a budget, get out of debt, and start paying more attention to our kids than our money again.



Here is a treasure chest full of good money saving tips and finance helps on a free blog posted by a fellow attachment parent. http://crisanja-livelikenooneelse.blogspot.com/

Toddler Bed Sheets

I love to sew. I love it! I love it! I love it! Since I'm going with the Winnie the Pooh theme with the room, I found a cute bedding set for Ben's crib, but I didn't find a cute toddler bedding set. Therefore, I found some cute fabric at Walmart that I made sheets out of for Jackie. I got the idea from my friend Crissy who directed me toward http://www.sleepingbaby.net/. In the crafts section, there is a link to toddler bed sheets. I saw what she did and then worked off her idea for the bottom sheet. I didn't have 3 1/2 yards of the top fabric (there were only 2 1/2 on the bolt) so I imrovised the top sheet with an idea tha my friend and I came up with for a bunk bed cap. Here are the instructions with pictures for anyone who is interested. The sheets are very easy, even if you don't sew much.

First, I got 3.5 yards of fabric for my bottom sheet. I washed it and put it through the dryer. (For anyone who doesn't sew much, this is a very important step. You don't want your sheets to shrink after they're sewn).

Then, I folded them in half with the short ends together and the bright side of the fabric facing out.

Then, I cut the sides off to make them 34 inches by 60 inches.

After that, I measured and cut one three inch by three inch square out of each of the corners that would be at the foot of the bed. I did NOT cut them out of the top corners. (That would be both corners on the short side.)

Then, on the big sheets, I pulled the corners together where I cut the squares out. When they're pulled together, they make a triangle. Then, I sewed those corners together.

Then, I matched the seems of the corners I sewed to the ones on the opposite sheet with the right (bright colored) sides together. After that, I sewed around the two long sides and the side with the corners sewn together. After that, then I hemmed around the top edge. To make a hem, I just turned the fabric toward the wrong side of the fabric twice and sewed around it.

Redecorating

So, if anyone was wondering about the end of my remodeling post and what our next remodeling project was, it is Jackie and Ben's room. Jackie decided to pull the border off of her walls. It was the permanent/glued on type of border, not the peel and stick type. So now, there is a big off colored stripe across the wall just above the chair rail where the border was. We cannot leave it like that and have any chance of selling our house at some point. If we're going to have to fix it sooner or later, we may as well fix it now and at least get our own enjoyment out of the redecorating at the same time.

My mom-in-law is good at decorating. I, on-the-other-hand, don't get the color families the same way she does. She and I had a glorious time shopping for a new nursery set. Everywhere we went, I looked around, and I decided that Winnie the Pooh was the easiest way to decorate. There is a really cute bedding set for a crib called "Pooh Hunting for Honey." And since Winnie the Pooh has some green in it, we got to do that. Therefore, I have spent a good deal of this week with my sewing machine.

Jackie and the Phone

Jackie LOVES the phone. Every chance she gets, she talks on the phone. My mom-in-law's old cell phone is one of her all time favorite toys. Here is a picture of her talking on the phone. I text messaged myself the dialogue (to my email), so I wouldn't forget to post that, too.

"Hello, my name is Jackie. I live in Cairo, GA. Where are you from?"

She knows that her grandparents were in "Okahoma" last week, and that her other grandparents live in Utah. She's a very smart girl.

Where's my baby?!?

I can't find my baby! He's gone. Maybe it has something to do with him having his first birthday, but he's gone. I can find a little boy everywhere I look. (Mostly because I have to keep both eyes on him to keep him from falling off the table or jumping off a chair). Although I still nurse my 1-year-old boy, he is no longer a baby. He's growing up on me, and I'm wracking my brain trying to figure out when it happened. I know that the answer is one day at a time, but it honestly feels like he grew up over night. It seems like he looked like a baby on Saturday, with him walking and trying to climb, and then yesterday, I looked at him, and he looked all grown up. He knows how to say more and more words now, and he's a good little boy, but he's not a baby anymore. In some ways, it's a celebration. He can do more for himself, and it's interesting to see the new tricks he's learning every day, but I miss my cuddly little guy.

Remodeling?

Our washer died last Saturday, so we spent the day in Tallahassee looking for a new one. On our way back, we realized that we had the vinyl tile we wanted to lay in the garage. The washer is scheduled to come this coming Tuesday, so we decided that we had to get the floor laid before the washer came. We didn't want to have it hooked up just to have to move it again. Therefore, we had get the floor in before Tuesday. That gave us three nights in a row that were up all night. Tuesday night we were up until 3:30; Wednesday night, we were up until 6:00, and Thursday night, we were up until 5:00. But our floor looks great. Here are pictures of the steps.










The floor started out like this:




Then we swept, mopped, mopped on our hands and knees, and took off the floor molding, so the floor looked like this.




Then we put floor stripper on the floor and scrubbed it in and then we had to mop up the excess















After that, we had to put embossing leveler on the floor to fill in all the texture of the vinyl that was already there.















We just got so tired that Rob just decided that he had to take a nap right there on the floor. That was 4:45 in the morning on Wednesday night/Thursday morning. We still had 150 square feet of embossing leveler to put down before 5:00 pm when our friends Patrick and Danielle would come to help us lay the tile. After staying up all night again Thursday night/Friday morning laying tile so we could use the 100 pound floor roller on it before we had to turn it in on Friday. We put the floor molding back on Saturday, and our house was put back into some semblance of order that night for Sunday. Here is the finished product.













For those of you out there who know Rob and me, you know that we're not the best do-it-yourselfers. However, we are getting much better. Rob just got a Dremel for his birthday (which is today, but he got the Dremel yesterday). That way, we could finish the floor molding around the edges. We are becoming better and better at do-it-yourself projects. Practice does help make things better. "Practice does not make perfect; practice makes permanent." Here is our somewhat permanent floor. . . Maybe we can practice do-it-yourselfing on the kids' bedroom next.