The Johnston Kids

Advent and Christmas

2012-01-22T21:56:00.001-05:00

One of my resolutions this year was to write--and, in particular, post on this blog--more. Here it is January 22 and I'm only now getting Advent and Christmas pictures. Even though it's late, I thought you might enjoy seeing them and, in any case, I like to record at least a tiny bit of our life here and there to remember what we did.

The kids were really excited this year about giving gifts to each other and to us. They'd had this set of unpainted wooden vehicles for awhile and Margaret and Joseph painted them one afternoon for William's gift. He loved them, of course.

I LOVE it when Joseph reads to his siblings. He offers fairly regularly and he is a good reader but, for some reason, William has only recently allowed Joseph to read him stories. But they all got more into it this Advent when we had a lot more books around.

One new thing we did this year was an Advent calendar, of sorts, with books. We own about 15 Christmas books and I used our library to get enough for all the rest of the days of Advent and then wrapped them all in pink and purple paper and we opened one each day. Honestly, I probably won't do this again. The kids sort of liked it but I think it led to an overall feeling of their having been too many presents by the time Christmas was all over. But we do love our Christmas books and I think I will continue to keep them tucked away in the attic until the start of Advent each year so they are extra-special.

A completely non-exhaustive glimpse at a few favorites that were already unwrapped by the time I took these pictures: We love all of Tomie DePaola's books and the one below is one of his many lovely Christmas books.

The Christmas Miracle of Jonathan Toomey was the easiest to convince Joseph to read aloud to the others. It's a really sweet story and I think Joseph could really identify with the character of the inquisitive, precocious, talkative, seven-year-old boy.

This book was found at a used book sale over the summer and was new to us. We like both Rumer Godden and Barbara Cooney and the book did not disappoint. It's a LONG book for a read aloud but Margaret and I read it many, many times during the Advent and Christmas season. We bought a copy of the book for our good friend, Holly, a fellow Barbara Cooney-lover and laughed hard when Margaret opened her gift from Holly and found the same book.

Grandma Marga supplied a traditional Advent calendar with windows to open for each day. I loved these when I was a kid and this was a big hit with all the kids. We also, fortunately, have another Advent calendar (not pictured) which allowed us to let one kid do one calendar each day. I may have to start planning for a fourth calendar for next year.

I'm not the most crafty person out there, but I do love making paper snowflakes. The kids enjoy it as well but they aren't quite up for the harder work of cutting six-pointed flakes.

We were so happy to receive as many Christmas cards as we did this year. Between our frequent moves and a general decline in Christmas card sending I was worried we wouldn't get any. I am determined next year to be on top of this myself. If you didn't get a card from us this year and you'd like to be on our list, feel free to send me your address.

Did anyone else decorate with Trader Joe's shopping bags this year? The kids were so excited about the paper chain links and gift tags printed on the bags this year. We cut out lots and lots of them and had more gift tags than we could possibly use. I strung them into some garland and hung it (artistically?) on a blank wall. It's still up, to tell you the truth. I don't have anything else to put on that blank wall but I suppose that a garland of gift tags is beginning to look a bit odd . . .

We bring out our Nativity set progressively through Advent. Joseph arrives first. Then the cradle which he's "found". They he goes to get Mary so she appears the third Sunday of Advent. The fourth Sunday of Advent we bring out the shepherds and sheep. Jesus is placed in the crib after Mass on Christmas Eve and the Three Kings begin their journey at the same time. The kings move through the house each day until finally arriving at the cradle on Epiphany.

Eric and the kids brought home our biggest tree yet this year. Our old tree stand had breathed it's last after Christmas last year so we were glad to find that we'd inherited one with the house.

This picture is a poor attempt at capturing the look of total awe on William's face with the whole bundle of lights in his hands lit up as I plugged them in. He's a fan of Christmas.

I love this picture: a cutie little imp, living it up as chaos swirls around him. Margaret and Joseph pooled their money to get Gregory that little toy which we call the "Smasher Ball." I have no idea what it's official name is but it's a Melissa and Doug toy and it is, far and away, the biggest success I've ever witnessed in the Gifts for One-Year-Olds department. Gregory just loves this toy and still plays with it every day.

The kids got a box of dress-up hats one morning. We stretch out gift-opening for the entire Twelve Days of Christmas though most of the days the gift is just one small thing or even one thing to share. The lion hat is the most popular.

Another morning the kids opened a big "art box" filled mostly with things I would have gladly bought them any time of the year but I have no problem giving them those types of gifts for Christmas. Joseph is an extremely prolific artist and has gone through about 1000 sheets of paper in the last six months. There's some waste but mostly he just really likes to draw and work at drawing. I ordered the kids several reams of different kinds of paper from Dick Blick and also got two over-sized clip boards so that Joseph can more easily draw when he's sitting on the floor or in the car. A big box of paper inspired quite awhile of this sort of thing:

All, in all, we had a lovely Advent and Christmas this past year.

Thanksgiving with the Tuthills

2011-12-08T21:32:00.001-05:00

This past summer we were forced to make our annual pilgrimage to the Midwest at an inopportune time in order to attend the memorial service for Eric's grandfather. It was a beautiful time and a lovely trip but, since Eric's semester wasn't quite over, we had to return again quickly and we had very little time to visit with Eric's family. They decided to put aside their distaste for Thanksgiving travel and join us on the East Coast this year to make up for some lost visiting time. We were thrilled to host Marga and Larry and even more thrilled that Ben flew all the way from school in LA to join the fun.

I was all in a flurry preparing for their six-day visit and, at one point, Eric said, "So, basically, you want to renovate the whole house before Thanksgiving?" To which I replied, "Yes." I didn't, of course, but those of you with a good eye will see hints of several of the projects that have kept us busy this fall and which will get their own treatment before too long.

I love hosting people and putting together menus and while I certainly don't claim to have any particular expertise in that area, it's something I'm actively working on. My "decoration" budget is pretty much non-existent but I was pleased with the results of working with stuff I mostly had on hand. I sprang for a pot of mums for our sideboard and ransacked the attic for every small mason jar I could find.

Pumpkin, Apple and Pecan.

Of course I forgot to take any pictures of the table set for dinner because we were all starving but imagine a darkened room and all those jars behind the pies lit with candles. And then a whole bunch more jars with candles on the table. And food crammed into every square inch. It was sort of amazing to see that candlelight can really overcome a multitude of shortcomings in the Fine China and Table Linens department. The food was delicious, the company was even better, and we enjoyed nice time with all three Tuthills through the weekend.

The shells make me crazy so these are a real treat around here.

Margaret can peel potatoes! And squash!

A belated birthday present.

This is what my in-laws do when they are here: wash dishes. They can visit anytime. It was like being on vacation.

Cranberry-red wine-cinnamon. Note to self: make a triple batch next year.

Remember Margaret's chicken apron birthday present? Marga had a matched set made for us. I love them except that they make us both look fat.

I had a sinus infection over Thanksgiving which is why I look like death in these pictures. Someone must have snagged the camera and caught me trying to relax with some knitting while the turkey roasted.

This is NOT our Thanksgiving table but, rather, our Leftover Tea that the three "girls" had on Friday . We bought that china at an estate sale when we were engaged but we seldom use it because we only have four place settings.

Ben, in the Familial Garb. Ten points to anyone not related to Eric who can tell me what the real family name is.

Joseph's Birthday, a little late

2011-12-07T21:12:00.001-05:00

Guess who finally forked over six dollars and bought herself a new cable to connect the camera and the computer?

We rearranged our "office" awhile back and my not-so-UniversalSB cable for my camera disappeared. I'm sure I'll find it tomorrow now that I've finally replaced it. In the meantime, we've been pretty busy and I'll try to catch you up a bit.

Joseph also requested coffee cake for his birthday breakfast but we held off on a birthday cake until his party the next night.

I think he's excited about the treasure hunt. Not sure why Isaac rearranged the furniture.

Joseph is now seven and we had a lovely time celebrating accordingly. After the big shebang we had for Margaret I was hoping for something a little quieter for Joseph and he was fine with that idea. We had coffee cake for breakfast on his actual birthday and fried fish for dinner (his choice). The next day his best friend, Andrew, came over, as usual. I planned a very simple "pirate treasure hunt" for them. Honestly, I wasn't sure it would be blog-worthy. I typed up six very simple clues like, "Where do we go when we want to read about Hammurabi?" Answer: his history text.

Retrieving a clue from Margaret's sweater bin.

Studying a clue in the kitchen.

I was worried about making them too easy or too hard but I think that the following along of the game was what was most fun. Joseph didn't have to think more than a few seconds about each clue but he had a blast "hunting" for his treasure.

Thinking hard . . . where could the last clue be?

Found it . . . but where's the treasure?

On a whim I also made a very simple map of the entire route and this turned out to be a hit with Andrew who loves anything in the in maze/map genre. He took charge of the map, Joseph read aloud the clues and together they found the treasure. At the end, Andrew immediately made another treasure map and convinced Joseph to play again.

A treasure chest!

With treasure!

Since Halloween was a bust due to sickness and rain the "treasure candy" was a nice stand-in.

And how is our not-so-little seven-year-old? Joseph spends pretty much all of his spare time either reading or drawing. The last few weeks he's branched out a little into creating 3-D toys out of paper. He's been really interested in drawing various characters lately and is working on a whole crew of pirates to decorate his bedroom walls. We love his drawings and it is really fun to see the evolution of his artistic sense. I will try to scan and post some of his work before too long.

He reads voraciously and has inherited my tendency to be completely oblivious to everything around me if I have a book in my hand. Now that I see how annoying this can be, I'd like to take this opportunity to apologize to my parents. But, of course, we're thrilled that Joseph reads so much. He likes everything: novels, picture books, non-fiction of all kinds, poetry, magazines. He'll even pick up the Wall Street Journal, in a pinch. And, happiest of all, from my perspective, he's often very willing to read to his younger siblings. He has a real knack for expression and nuance when he reads out loud.

So there's a bit about our most recent birthday boy. More to come!

Tea Party

2011-10-12T13:40:00.000-05:00

Margaret found an old book of mine recently all about Anne of Green Gables. It's a sweet book full of "behind the scenes" information about what daily life would have been like on Prince Edward Island in the late 19th century. Included is an extensive chapter on Tea and, especially, more formal tea parties such as Anne would have delighted in.

Margaret became rather obsessed with the idea of planning a tea party of her own to celebrate her birthday. We had a great time putting it together. Margaret came up with the guest list on her own including all the women she knew within a two-hour drive between the ages of four and sixty. There were twelve of us in all and with some careful furniture rearrangement and some fabric repurposing we were able to set up a few lovely little sitting places.

I, of course, failed to take a single picture but Robyn came to the rescue once again with a few lovely shots.

The menu included tea, of course. We also served chicken salad sandwiches cut into triangles and cream cheese sandwiches in the shape of hearts. Margaret seriously impressed me by using a cookie cutter to cut a dozen heart shapes out of whole sandwiches (the boys ate the leftover edges, don't worry). Then we had strawberries and cream and plain scones with jam, marmalade, and lemon curd on the side. I won't claim to be an expert on authentic British tea customs but it was a delicious menu. And a big shout-out to Trader Joe's flowers. We got three five-dollar bouquets of chrysanthemums (because that's the flower Anne spelled to beat Gilbert Blythe in the spelling bee, of course) and filled nine vases with them for the party. Ten days later, more than half the flowers still look beautiful.

Robyn asked what she could bring and, while I can hold my own in the scone department, I knew that Robyn would come up with a dessert far better than anything I could muster. And she did not fail to deliver.

Margaret (and Joseph) helped Robyn set up pink frosted vanilla cupcakes with handmade chocolate butterflies and fun butterfly cupcake wrappers. We distributed them around the room and they were such a nice decoration until I ordered everyone to eat them and I was glad they tasted as good as they looked. Margaret has crowned Robyn the Cupcake Queen. And every day she is careful to wear the cupcake charm necklace Robyn gave her for a gift.

And, happily for the little girls, the cupcake wrappers make fantastic crowns.

It was a lovely afternoon with a lovely young lady and it left me wishing for more excuses to put together lovely little parties for friends.

She's Five!

2011-10-10T12:36:00.000-05:00

And she's not even my oldest. I remember being five quite well and the memories are mostly pretty happy. Such a fun age and Margaret is already milking it for all it's worth.

The day was slightly less than it might have been because we were all in various stages of a cold that week. That day in particular my cold was exacerbated by Gregory's having been up hourly the night before. I did manage to drag myself out of bed to make Margaret's requested birthday breakfast: coffee cake. It's pretty much everyone's favorite breakfast so it wasn't too much of a sacrifice. Though after she insisted on a traditional birthday cake for dessert that night I've decided that we are having a One Cake Per Birthday rule going forward.

Then we were supposed to have lunch with "G.I. Grandpa" (my dad) and family on their return trip to Colorado but since we'd had a long visit with them the week before, my dad opted to just swing by and drop off presents rather than subject everyone to plague while on a road trip.

The highlight of Margaret's actual birthday was, I think, her violin lesson. She's been asking to start learning for awhile and Eric promised that she could start when she turned five. She was ecstatic and has been very enthusiastic about practice. In this picture she is also wearing one of her favorite birthday presents. Grandma Marga (Eric's mom) had this chicken apron made just for Margaret. It's practical and whimsical and cute and very well-made. And the thoughtful woman who created it basted the finished hem up four inches to leave plenty of room for growth.

The day ended with Margaret's favorite dinner which is "rice and beans." Fancy, huh? What she means, specifically, is the rice and beans that come from a particular Peruvian chicken place in the neighborhood. So, Margaret gets her rice and beans, the rest of us get awesome chicken, and I get out of cooking on a day when I'm sick and already making two cakes. Everybody wins. The cake was chocolate with chocolate frosting with vanilla ice cream on the side. Margaret is all about the basics.

And shortly after this picture was taken (imagine me shouting "don't set your hair on fire!") Margaret sat down on the couch and promptly fell asleep. It's exhausting being five.

Administrative details

2011-10-10T11:39:00.002-05:00

UPDATE: Never mind. Fun as it was to tinker with different layouts, I like having the categories and archive easily accessible in the sidebar.

Blogger is finally starting to do slightly interesting things in the visual department so I tweaked the organization of the blog a bit, mostly just for fun.

I do want to point out that a neat feature of the new layout are all the options underneath the blog title: Classic, Flipcard, Magazine, etc. You can choose your favorite way to view current and past material and (I think) your computer will always revert back to the last option you chose. But you can change it at anytime. This is a nice option for you grandparents out there who might want to skim pictures or find a particular one. Each view is slightly different but in each one clicking on either a picture or a post title will take you the entire original blog post.

On her way to a big girl bike

2011-09-26T08:30:00.001-05:00

We bought Margaret a little bike last summer. She had been begging for one for ages and when we finally decided to get one, the local big box store was sold out in her size. The local hardware store only had a red bike with a "flame" seat. I don't think it's a style typically marketed for girls, but she's never complained. She had fun tooling around with the training wheels for the last year but we decided it was time for her to really learn to ride.

It's kind of a trend now to teach kids to learn to ride bikes with "balance bikes." These are bikes with no pedals and no training wheels and they are based on the theory that riding a bike is all about the balance--pedals just confuse things. This idea appealed to our low-tech/lazy parents ethos but we were not about to drop $100 on a special balance bike when we had a perfectly ugly bike and a perfectly good hack saw already.

After a few minutes of hard work, Margaret was taking her new balance bike (or "coaster bike" as she calls it) out for a spin.

Almost immediately she had her first fall

but she climbed back on like a trooper.

And while I, personally, would have initiated a wardrobe change before riding a bike, Margaret is of the opinion that a long, twirly, pink dress is appropriate in any setting.

These pictures are actually about two months old now as anyone who has seen or heard about our patio recently can testify. On a recent outing to the park Margaret was zipping along on her balance bike a truly alarming speed and I think it might be time to upgrade to the real thing. And get her a helmet.

Oh! Is it Fall already?

2011-09-24T20:56:00.004-05:00

Where did the summer go?

It was a busy one for us, full of lots of fun and lots of hard work. In between finishing up work on our upstairs rental unit and beginning our wheelchair ramp, we enjoyed a week at great-grandma's house.

When I was growing up, my mom took us to grandma's several times a week all summer long. While we can't quite enjoy that level of access, we have managed to say for a full week each summer the last two years. As long as my grandma can handle our crazy family, we plan to make an annual tradition of it.

Joseph spent hours hunting for sunfish and trying, in vain, to capture them with his hands. He thinks he was pretty darn close a few times. Better luck next year, perhaps.

Grandma tried, in vain, to teach Joseph to swim. If we were spending the entire summer at the lake, I have no doubt we'd have a couple of swimmers by now, but, with only a few days available, we were unable to convince Joseph that human beings naturally float. (To preserve my grandmother's reputation, she has a strong track record of teaching young people to swim, it was lack of time, not lack of skill that was working against us in this instance.)

Margaret was a bit more brave and almost dunked her head a few times and otherwise tempted fate by walking out as far as she could and jumping around a lot.

William only barely allowed himself to not be completely petrified of the water. He's always had a problem with water, even at bath time, but he did think examining sand at the water's edge was a pretty good time. Each time a motor boat came by he would move a respectful distance up the shore and wait for the waves to subside.

And Gregory just charmed us all with his (then new) sitting skills and winning smile.

I'm sorry it took me so long to get these pictures up. Happy Fall, everyone!

Sunday in the park, with garden

2011-07-11T11:04:00.004-05:00

Sunday afternoons are so lovely. It's especially wonderful when we get up and out early enough to get to Mass at 8:30 so that we're home early with the whole day ahead of us. But what to do with that whole day? Typically we either take the train into Manhattan and wander around or go for a drive. Margaret was strongly lobbying for the latter this past Sunday. Eric pulled up a map and made us a list of parks we'd never been to while I put together a picnic dinner.

Making dinner has been a blast lately. Our garden is doing really well. All the lettuce sprouted but between our late start (we could have planted in mid-March) and slugs it was awhile before we got our first harvest. The slugs had us stumped for awhile: they'd emerge each evening just after dark and munch our young leaves down to nothing. After a bit of research we decided that hand-harvesting was the best bet. We--and by "we" I mean Eric unless the kids are up late--keep a slug stick stuck in one corner of our planter box. Each evening we head out, use the stick to pull off any slugs we find and drop them in a cup of salt water. I love animals but I love lettuce more.

Once we got on top of the slugs the lettuce went crazy. We've made lots and lots of salads and we just pulled out some bolted plants and started a second planting. We'll see how that goes. One of the lettuce varieties didn't do as well so we put some parsley in that space.

And we added a mint plant to one end although we hear that mint spreads so we might move that to a dedicated planter.

We also have cilantro and basil on the roof of our shed.

Between our garden and our weekly produce deliveries we've been eating well: lots of salad, lots of pesto, a yummy caprese salad for our picnic last night. We are definitely planting a much bigger garden next year. I never would have thought that container gardening would work so well.

But back to our Sunday. We opted to explore Palisades Park which is on the Hudson River, straddling the George Washington Bridge on the New Jersey side. It's a long, skinny park and it is very pretty but it is largely hiking/biking with some small marinas along the water. We were hoping for more of a "picnic spot with picturesque view." The first place we stopped seemed to promise this but after a few minutes we noticed that the water on the path was rapidly encroaching on our bench. Who knew the Hudson River was tidal?

We found a nice little picnic area and enjoyed our dinner. We are still loving Joseph's FreeWheel. It's great to see him getting around on sloped, bumpy, thorn-riddled terrain.

And here's a couple shots of my new haircut, courtesy of me. I've tried a couple hair salons since leaving Minnesota and the results was always a bad hair cut and less money in my wallet. So I did a little googling, got out my scissors and had at it.

I needed to do a couple of rounds over a day or two to get close to what I was going for but I'm pretty happy with the result. And it was free! Can't complain about spending zero dollars on a decent haircut. Eric has proclaimed it the best haircut I've ever had.

How do I do it?

2011-07-07T09:00:00.003-05:00

Love these rings . . . .

I get this question a lot and I've gotten it quite a bit the last few weeks. How do I renovate an apartment and blog about it and not neglect the children? Am I superwoman?

I thought it might be helpful to take a minute to try and clarify some of the behind-the-scenes logistics that go on around here. First, pretty much anytime "I" am doing something involving long stretches of concentration or power tools, you can assume that all the kids are asleep (rare) or that Eric is watching them. He's a teacher, remember, and doesn't have busy summers. His summer course was canceled last minute this year and that was the final impetus that decided us in favor of spiffing things up in the rental unit. He has plenty of independent work he'd like to be doing but we both knew that being landlords would be equivalent to taking on a part-time job and that's what we've been doing the last few weeks.

Look how I only sort of tip to the side when I'm in a highchair.

Even smaller projects, like building a nightstand, are things I do on the weekend when Eric is putting in time with the kids. It's a fun hobby for me and Eric supports it and it's the kind of thing I tend to blog about. But it's not like I'm operating a furniture store on the side or anything.

Also, the work we put it on things like this is pretty evenly divided. I'm the main blogger around here because Eric has plenty of writing projects of the sort that earn money or advance his career. It makes for more interesting reading to write in the first person so I only write about my half of things. I also tend to do the more interesting stuff. Anyway, I'd certainly rather read about paint color than about the experience of extracting 8000 staples from a wooden floor. But Eric is very generous about taking on some of the grunt work and (literal) heavy lifting that I don't want to--or physically can't--do so that I have the freedom to do fun stuff like finish floors and paint. He is also more gung-ho about plumbing and electrical work which are two things I wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole. He's pretty aware of the risks involved and he doesn't do anything too complicated--we're not afraid to call professionals for the hard stuff. But no way do I want to hook up a dishwasher.

And we both kind of enjoy this sort of work. Not that we have very long experience, of course, but I think we're a pretty good team. Our approaches to DIY projects complement each other nicely. I like to do things "right" and Eric likes to figure out how to make do and rig something up. Usually the best solution for our budget and skill set is something in between. Our too-short kitchen counter, for example: If money and time had been no object I would have had us remove the counters, pry them apart, level the base cabinets, buy a new short section and cut it correctly the second time around. Eric thought we should just leave it or maybe jam something in there. In the end, we did use his solution but then I made it look nice and it worked out fine.

Wonder how many fingers I can suck at once . . .

So how do I do it? With a lot of help and by temporarily making these sorts of things a high priority. We didn't do any school during June. I didn't clean my own house at all last week. We didn't order take out but we didn't eat any very impressive meals. Eric didn't get any independent writing projects done. But it wasn't necessary to neglect the children. We only had a babysitter on Friday when it was really crunch time. The kids sometimes hang around when we're working on something but they respect power tools and they are good at keeping their distance. We're very careful to unplug things immediately and the kids have shoes with better toe protection than mine.

I couldn't be happier that our early adventures in home improvement are going so well. I've always been extremely over-optimistic and Eric is always very pessimistic when it comes to these sorts of things and I think we are starting to meet more in the middle (though he did just ask me to research how we could install a roll-in shower--maybe we'll try something simpler next!)

My strong opinions about paint

2011-07-06T08:30:00.002-05:00

I've never really painted anything in my life until last week. I have big plans for paint in our own apartment but I haven't tackled anything yet. The presence of lots of furniture and small children makes it a fairly significant undertaking. And I just wasn't sure what I would be getting into painting an entire room. Typically, a rental apartment is completely repainted in between tenants but ours had been repainted just before the sale so we initially thought we wouldn't do any painting at all. But the more we worked in the upstairs apartment the more we realized that one bedroom and dining room as well as most of the trim would really need some freshening up. The bedroom was sporting several unsightly cracks and the dining room was scuffed in some spots. My Aunt Deb was here for a short visit and gave me the advice (based on her long experience being a landlord) that tenants will take care of an apartment better when it's as "bright and shiny" as possible at move-in.

And while I'm certainly not given to strong opinions in general, I did develop a few based on my rather limited experience of painting those two rooms. And, of course, I'm going to share them with you if only so that when someone asks me for painting advice down the road I can point them here.

First, a word about the paint itself. Since we were doing a lot of shopping at Home Depot and since Behr paint was on sale I decided to get some of that. I bought the Ultra Pure White off the shelf and used that for the cabinets and, as I said, it took three coats to get a nice finish. I also touched up all the trim everywhere in the apartment with this paint. The color was identical--or very nearly so--to what was already on the trim and it blended in fine.

Then I moved on to painting the walls in the bedroom. I chose Behr's "Gobi Desert" which is a nice neutral beige. I liked the color just fine but it was a heck of a lot of work getting it on the walls. It required two coats which I definitely expected but it took 1.5 gallons to cover the tiny 10x10 room. This annoyed me. The paint was applied thinly and evenly but it still took a lot to cover everything.

I'd only bought two gallons, assuming I'd be able to do two rooms with that amount of paint. Time was at an extreme premium--this was about 24 hours before the tenants were due to arrive--so I decided to get the paint and the rest of the odds and ends we needed at the hardware store in our neighborhood. We've long known about the little "Continental Hardware" on the main street of our neighborhood. It's good but the selection is limited. When we moved we started using a different freeway route home and noticed that the same people also have a bigger store tucked away on the extreme edge of town and we'd been meaning to check it out. We finally wandered in part way through this renovation project and we were impressed. It's huge and comprehensive and the service is good. As for paint, however, they pretty much just do Benjamin Moore. I know some people are huge fans of Ben Moore paint but the higher cost had scared me off. But on our first trip to the "Big" Continental I was pleased to see that it was not as much more than Behr as I'd thought (averaging about $35/gallon whereas Behr is around $27). When I needed paint in a hurry for the dining room I decided I had a good opportunity to compare the two paints. Even if I didn't end up liking the Benjamin Moore better, the convenience would be worth it: Home Depot is a 25-minute drive; Continental is a 3-minute drive.

We also decided to try a different color. Well, actually, I was planning to get some "Bleeker Beige" which is virtually identical to the "Gobi Desert" but Eric said that earth tones remind him too much of Al Gore and he'd rather stick with yellow which was the color already in the dining room. I did not particularly like the existing color and we had no idea what it was so we decided to just pick a different yellow. We've been considering painting our own dining room yellow and here's where having a rental apartment comes in really handy: we could experiment with the color upstairs! I feel like yellow is a risky color. I didn't want it too pastel. I didn't want it too mustardy. I didn't want it so flat and washed out that it looked dirty. I didn't want crayon yellow. I'd heard that Ben Moore's Hawthorne Yellow is a good bet and I happened to have that color card as well as a few others so I pulled them out and without saying anything about any of the shades asked Eric which one he'd pick. He immediately pointed to the Hawthorne Yellow so we decided to go with it.

Based on my paint use-up rate in the tiny bedroom I bought two gallons for the much bigger dining room and started the paint job at about 9:00. As I was cutting in I was feeling pessimistic. The color looked to me just like the pastel-yellow that had already been in the room. But I kept at it and, after an ice cream break got out the roller. It was amazing. Eric was working in the next room and he kept teasing me about my euphoric exclamations about working with this paint. It coated the roller nice and evenly and rolled on to the wall so easily. And once I was filling in entire walls, I started to like the color more, too. I kept rolling and rolling, barely even breaking a sweat and then noticed something. I was barely using any paint. I did the entire room with a half gallon of paint. I figured that even when I came back to do the second coat in the morning I'd only use one gallon on a pretty large room. But I came back the next morning and realized that 1) the color was even more fantastic dry and 2) no second coat would be necessary.

I'm a total Benjamin Moore fan now. I'm sure that the existing yellow paint on the walls helped with the one-coat coverage. There were actually just a couple of thinner spots that I touched up later, but those spots were enough to show that the rest of the walls were evenly coated. And now we have another gallon-and-a-half left over for our dining room although the timing on that is to be determined. Eric is now totally sold on the power of a good paint job to transform a room and he loves the color. He's not totally sold on the need to move all the books out of the dining room so I can paint behind the shelves (the bookcases are backless). Here are a couple shots trying to capture the color: it's quite bright and cheery in full sun but in other light looks more gold and muted. Very versatile color.

You aren't "supposed to" use bright white trim in a yellow room but it's what I had and I like the crisp, classic look of it.

So, my two cents on two popular brands of paint: skip the Behr and pay the extra for Benjamin Moore. Totally worth it.

Now, a word about equipment and approach. When I bought the Behr paint I also bought brushes, rollers, trays, an edger, an extension pole and whatnot. I generally chose the cheapest version of everything. When I bought the second round of paint I upgraded several of the components and I was much happier. Here's a few tips based on my (still limited) experience:

When it comes to things you are going to hold in your hand for long stretches, comfort is key. I switched from a wooden roller frame and wooden extension pole to ones with more of a padded grip and it made a huge difference. I got blisters painting the first room and was able to paint the second room despite the blisters. You also want the roller frame and extension pole to have a nice tight fit so there's no give while rolling up high.

I like to use a trim cup when cutting in since it is easier to get up and down a ladder with something smaller. The cheap plastic one from Home Depot was very uncomfortable but I was very happy when I switched to the red and black one pictured. My hand slid through the handle easily, and it has a really strong magnet to hold brushes up out of the paint when you are climbing up and down the ladder. Nice.

Throughout all the painting projects I used a variety of roller covers in a variety of price points. I didn't notice an appreciable difference in the result. Roller covers are, technically, washable but they take forever to wash. In the future I will get the least expensive roller cover that does the job and toss after each use. It's just not worth my time to wash and reuse. Even the "expensive" roller covers cost only a few dollars each. It is really important that the cover fit really snugly to the frame but this depends more on getting a good frame than on the roller, I think.

I feel the opposite about paint brushes. A good paint brush is very important but you usually pay for the quality. If they are cleaned immediately and thoroughly they will keep going for a long while. They are much faster to clean than roller covers and the cleaning effort is totally worth it. When buying brushes I just picked up the best thing available at each store. Here's two I really loved pictured along with my brush comb (for cleaning out dried bits of paint):

The one with the blue handle is a Wooster Shortcut from Home Depot. It's fantastic for edging and trim work and the nice short handle is very nice to use (you hold these brushes like a pencil, not by the tip of the handle). When I bought the second round of paint I wanted to get a second once since I was doing a lot of painting all at once with a couple different colors I needed more than one. They didn't carry the Wooster brush so I bought the Elder and Jenks brush instead. It's also a 2" angled trim brush and I actually liked it a bit more. It has a nice thumb indentation and the longer bristles made it nicer to use.

Brushes that didn't work as nicely for me included the Purdy angled brush. The long handle made it awkward and the narrower size was annoying. I also have a 4" brush from Redtree (a Newark company!) that was used for the floors. It was okay but a brush with longer bristles would have been easier to use, I think. The only other option when I bought this one was a brush from Benjamin Moore. It did look nicer but it costs over twice as much.

As for cutting in or "edging", I used two different approaches. I decided up front that I was going to skip painter's tape. I've seen professional jobs with and without tape and I've seen amateur jobs with and without tape. My take-away from these observations is that you can get good at any method you choose to stick with. I personally prefer to keep things as simple as possible and cut down on time-consuming prep work. In the first room I used an edger from Shurline (pictured above). These come with pads that you dip in the paint (or, as I did, paint with a brush) and then roll them along the trim and ceiling for a nice, clean line. They work pretty well at eye-level but less well on an extension pole. I made a lot of mistakes with the edger. I also thought the color and texture of the paint looked considerably different than the rolled on paint (it's different when you brush, too, but the difference seemed more pronounced with the edger). I had to do a fair amount of touch-up work and then had an edge to clean up after I was done.

In the second room I cut in the entire room free hand with my trim brush. It felt slower but it didn't actually take me any longer and I didn't really make any mistakes. I think I'll save the edger for painting stairwells (no way am I going up on a ladder in a stairwell!) and otherwise stick to using an angled brush.

Finally, I didn't use a drop cloth. I put everything on a big garbage bag in the middle of the room. I dripped a couple times but I just kept a wet rag handy and cleaned up the drips immediately. The professionals who painted our last apartment made a much bigger mess than I. I also highly recommend my ten-in-one multi tool pictured with my roller frame and trim cup above. Among it's ten uses are opening paint cans, pounding them shut again, and opening bottles. Of beer. Totally essential.

As a brief aside, I was glad to see that pretty much all the painting supplies I used were made in the USA. You don't see that too much these days. Anyone know why that would be the case with paint brushes? And feel free to offer up your own painting tips in the comments. I have a lot more rooms to paint and next time we turn over that apartment we'll need to paint the whole thing. I'm all for hearing anything to make the job even easier next time around.

The new counter tops

2011-07-05T08:30:00.000-05:00

Remember the old kitchen counter top? The counters in our tenants' kitchen was usable--people had been living with it for years before we moved in. In fact, the owner of this house lived on the second floor before we bought it. But whenever we showed someone the kitchen in person the counters were the first thing they commented on. It was old, beat-up laminate in a wood grain pattern. The miter corner was not joined at all and there was a little piece of molding resting in the wide crack instead. It looked bad and interrupted the function of what limited counter space there was.

We spent a couple of days dragging the kids around Home Depot and Ikea exploring options. We actually really liked several of the options at Ikea. They had a few laminate patterns that were fairly nice and also a sealed butcher block counter. And the price was right! We could have gotten all the counter we needed for less than $100. But there was one big problem with the Ikea counters: no backplash. I'm not a huge backsplash fan myself but the old counters had a 4" integrated backsplash that rose to meet that faux tile sheet of plastic with the stick on green leaves. As you may have intuited by now, I think that wall treatment is pretty horrendous (and it's even worse in person: all chipped and spotted). We talked it over and I, in my usual burst of pre-project optimism said, "I don't think tiling is that hard. Maybe we should just put in a tiled backsplash." And Eric, in an extremely uncharacteristic burst of co-optimism said, "Okay, sure."

So that was our plan: Ikea counters, new tile backsplash. We headed into Home Depot with this plan in mind. We confirmed that the laminate counters available for special order there were a lot more expensive than at Ikea and we browsed some tile. Then, purely by chance, we wandered past the section of in-stock, post form laminate countertop. They sure don't advertise this option! There are three or four pattern options and it is sold with both straight and mitered ends in a variety of lengths. And it has an integrated 4" backsplash. And it was pricing out to less than $200. We considered for a few minutes and realized that we had no idea what we'd find under that sheet of faux-tile plastic. And we realized that we'd probably be biting off more than we could chew adding yet another brand new project to our list.

That was a wise move. We tore up the kitchen the next day and we could see behind the old backsplash that we'd be dealing with at least two layers of old tile. As much as I hate the plastic backsplash, we decided to just go with it for now.

We were able to transport the countertop sections home in our van fairly easily. I wasn't able to convince the guys at Home Depot to load the ten foot section in the car for me. They were pretty well convinced that a section of laminate countertop firmly wedged between seats the entire length of the car could defy all laws of physics and somehow attack my baby on the way back home. They insisted on loading it onto the roof rack instead.

The countertop sections in stock at Home Depot come in several standard lengths. We bought a ten-foot section and a four-foot section, both of which had one end already mitered to meet in the corner. We just needed to cut the four-foot end down to the size we needed, cut the sink hole, and join the corner. Simple, right? Sort of. We suspected that the previous countertop corner had not been joined because either 1) the previous owner liked to take short cuts and 2) the corner wasn't square. We were right on both counts. We were able to determine fairly quickly that the corner wasn't square. But how to work with that situation?

If we could have dry fit both counter sections at the same time, it would have been obvious what to do, I think. But we had to cut the shorter end down to get it to fit at all. We thought and talked and thought some more. Eric measured, I cut.

I'm more scared of power tools than he is which makes me more careful which makes me more precise in my cuts. We put the piece in place and it looked promising.

Then we put the long section up and we had a gap just like the old counters had had. We weren't worried because we planned to actually install the miter bolts underneath that help join up and seal that seam. Eric was the hero to crawl under the counter and have at it while I stood up (holding Gregory at this point, I think) telling him how things were lining up.

In the end . . . it didn't exactly work.

The mitered corner was almost, but not quite, perfectly flush. And the whole section was almost a half inch short where it met the cabinets.

This is the one point in the whole project where we honestly knew the "right" way to do something and we just chose not to. If I could go back and do one thing over it would be to first level the base cabinets in the kitchen. I think that one step would have fixed a lot of the "square" problems and helped that seam quite a bit. But it was a vast improvement over the previous situation.

And as for the half inch short situation, we fixed it:

We primed a piece of scrap plywood and jammed it into the gap. Then I ran a bead of caulk on either side of it, let it dry, and painted the whole thing. It looks pretty darn good.

Once the counters were in place we cut the sink hole. We read lots and lots of online tutorials about how to do this and several articles said it could be done after the counter is installed. This method might work on new, standard cabinets. But it didn't work for us. And the counter was already glued in place. If you ever install a countertop--cut the sink hole first!

I won't go into all the details but it involved lots and lots of Eric measuring things, breaking jigsaw blades (not the saw itself which I may never let him touch again!), and unconventional use of 1" drill bits. We definitely didn't use a recommended approach. But the sink got back in and Eric successfully reconnected all the plumbing and installed a dishwasher.

This, all told, took much of two days though there was also a good deal of painting going on at the same time. By the end of this project we both felt a bit mentally exhausted from the sheer volume of large tasks we'd just done for the first time (I had made exactly two-and-a-half circular saw cuts prior to cutting into an expensive piece of countertop).

But the end result was completely worth it. We went from this:

To this:

I think it's an improvement. I didn't have time to nicely "stage" the space (ugly crooked curtains!) because I think I took this picture about one minute before the new tenants were due to arrive. We did not replace the green floor or paint the paneling but we may do the floor next time we turn over the apartment or down the road if our current tenants end up staying for a few years.

Kitchen Cabinets

2011-07-04T09:00:00.000-05:00

Part of our big kitchen overhaul for our upstairs tenants was to repaint the kitchen cabinets. I'm a big lover of natural wood, especially when it's beautifully crafted and carefully finished. Unfortunately, neither of these things was true of these cabinets. The very odd arrangement of shelves, doors, and drawers was difficult to make sense of. We asked ourselves over and over through this entire renovation, "What were they thinking?" The doors were pretty much just slabs of wood that had been shellacked within an inch of their lives--hinges and all. It was streaky and drippy and ugly.

The drawer pulls and knobs were even worse--ugly brass-like edges with a wood-like center.

The first thing we did was pull off all the doors and pull out all the drawers. This, of course, took much longer than we expected thanks to the thick layer of varnish over everything. Eric worked at getting the doors down and I worked at getting the hardware off and after a few hours we had a stack of doors, a bunch of drawers, and two zip-locs full of ugly hardware.

The next step was to rough up the finish on the doors so they'd accept primer and paint. This step isn't always necessary but, as I've said a few times already, these really needed it. I didn't completely strip the wood, I just took off the shine:

That step took a couple hours (doing just the front of each door).

Next I used painter's tape to lay out a large plastic drop cloth in the front room and laid out all the cabinet doors. This part is probably the biggest obstacle to taking on this project--it's hard to find the space to lay out cabinet doors so they have a few days to completely dry. I used inexpensive mini rollers to roll a coat of oil-based primer over the front and edges of each door and I brushed primer all over the face frames and sides of the cabinets themselves.

The actual priming and painting went very quickly. It took me about an hour per coat to do all the cabinetry and doors. The disappointing thing was that it all required a coat of primer and three coats of paint to look nice and finished and even. My plan was to use white paint on the cabinets and use the same white paint on the paneled walls in the kitchen and all the trim throughout the house. Thinking ahead to the potential for yearly (or even more frequent) apartment turnovers, I wanted an off-the-shelf shade of white that would be easy to grab quickly and keep around a gallon or two at a time. So I went with Behr's Ultra Pure White in Semi Gloss. I don't exactly recommend it. I made the color decision standing in the middle of Home Depot with a screaming baby while Eric was trying to get a quote on countertops. We were running late and I didn't have time to give the paint color decision my usual agonizingly obsessive treatment. And, for some reason, I thought it was urgent I buy the paint that day. As if I wouldn't be back to Home Depot again for weeks (when, in fact, I think I went three more times before even getting to the paint step). I went to the paint shelf, saw that there were several "off-the-shelf" shades of white, ran to the color chip rack, randomly grabbed a whole bunch of whites trying to figure out what they all were, gave up when I couldn't find them all, thought "It's white, how much can it matter?", and ran back to grab two gallons of the Ultra Pure. Dumb. I know perfectly well that color matters quite a bit.

I put the Ultra Pure White on the cabinets first and after two coats I was in the middle of panicking when Eric wandered up and said, "Oh, I don't really like this shade of white." (This from a guy who rolls his eyes at my enormous collection of paint chip cards). I had a mini-meltdown and considered starting over. Instead, I calmed down a bit, rolled on a third coat and then touched up some of the trim. The shade was virtually identical to what was already on the trim and the color looks much, much better when it isn't under flourescent lights. But it is very bright. And I'm not sure that I shouldn't have gone with High Gloss paint for the cabinet doors. But William walked across a few of the doors after they were dry but before they were installed so I was able to see that the finish was nice and "scrubbable."

The hardware solution I came up with is one of my favorite things about the whole kitchen project. Cabinet hardware is expensive. The least expensive option was knobs from Ikea that I only sort of liked and they would have run me $35 or so. But there were also the hinges to worry about. They were a coppery color and gooped with varnish. I really didn't want to go to the trouble of replacing the hinges and having to fill all the old holes and drill all the new holes for new hardware. Not to mention that buying hinges to match the knobs would have really added to the cost. On a whim I picked up a can of oil-rubbed bronze spray paint:

It was less than $6 so I figured it was totally worth it to see if I could spray paint the old hardware before buying new. The picture makes it look black but the resulting color is very deep brown with just a hint of sheen.

I laid it all outside:

And sprayed a coat on each side (letting them dry in between) and then a third coat to touch it up a bit. There were a couple stray drips here and there but, on the whole, they look like brand new knobs.

I was stunned at the result. I got pretty much new hardware in the exact color I wanted for $6 and was able to reattach it all in the existing holes.

More pictures coming of the kitchen put back together.

They liked the floors!

2011-07-02T10:07:00.003-05:00

Our tenants arrived yesterday evening. They took a couple of days driving out from Milwaukee and called us at about 3:30 from the road to let us know they thought they'd be here at 5:30. At that point we were still operating power tools and walking around with paint cans in their apartment. Home improvement always takes longer than you think and I'm not sure if the hard deadline we had made it more or less stressful. I finished cleaning their kitchen at 5:29 and we left a few details unfinished.

Nothing we did to their apartment came out perfectly but we kept saying to ourselves, "We haven't made anything worse." The one thing I wasn't one hundred percent sure about was the wood floors. They looked so much better than they had before . . . but they were still old, beat up floors. Our plan had been to carpet both rooms and I worried that tenants would wish we'd done that. I had taken a couple of people upstairs to "show off" my work on the floors and they always entered the apartment in the front and first saw the brand new, perfectly installed flooring in those rooms. One friend even began to effusively compliment me before realizing we were in the wrong room. The reaction upon seeing the rooms I'd actually done myself was always polite, but definitely not gushing.

But the tenants genuinely like them! We took them up for their first viewing of the apartment in person (they took it sight unseen after viewing lots of pictures and detailed floor plans and write-ups from us). They examined the front two rooms and then we took them back and the first thing they said was, "Wow, these floors turned out great!" Music to my ears.

So, keeping in mind the horribly abused floors we began with, here is the previously carpeted bedroom:

This room was also repainted but more on that later.

And here is the room previously covered in very old vinyl tile:

The petrified glue on this floor did a number on my sanding pads and I ended up prying a lot of it up by hand with a paint scraper. And in this picture you can see a patch in the floor over on the left. When we pulled up the old floor that patch was three painted boards and we weren't sure they were going to be nice wood. One of the boards actually had some writing on it but the writing wasn't clear enough to read before the sander obliterated it. I was glad once we cleaned them up to see that the boards were oak just like the rest of the floor. Eric really wanted to pry up the boards and look for buried treasure (definitely wouldn't surprise me around here) but I was too creeped out by that idea and decided we had other priorities.

After my seven-hour day with the rented floor sander I used pretty much every minute of free time for the next three days using my random orbital hand sander to attack stubborn spots. The floor doesn't obviously slope or bow in any one direction as old houses often do, but it's definitely not level, either. I cleaned things up a lot but I also discovered all of my perfectionist tendencies coming to the fore. Every time I eliminated one nasty spot, the remaining ones looked that much worse. Eventually I decided that in order to finish our other projects and preserve my sanity I had to call it quits.

I did lots of research on finishing methods. I've refinished some of our furniture and some of the new pieces I've built but I figured floors would require a different approach. I quickly discovered that people have really strong opinions on this topic. After reading lots of opinions from professionals and other DIYers I opted to skip the stain and apply three coats of water-based finish with a 4" brush. I bought a 200 oz. jug of Zar Ultra-Max in semi-gloss. The front rooms are more of a high-gloss finish but I thought the older floors would do better in a more muted treatment and I'm really pleased with the result.

You can get lambswool applicator pads that attach to a long pole and apply finish that way but I'd read about some people having a lot of trouble with left-behind fibers. Since I knew I'd need a 4" brush for the edges anyway, and since the rooms were small and we were trying to stay under budget I opted to brush on the finish over the entire floor. I won't go so far as to say this was a mistake. I did it and the finish itself is awesome no matter what you think of the condition of the floors underneath. But if we ever do our own floors, I'm definitely going to give the pad-on-a-pole set up a try. My knees are never going to forgive me for crawling around on wood floors for days on end and I was totally wiped out after I was done. I also found that it was very tricky to pour out only as much poly as I needed for a particular spot and I repeatedly--through all three coats--would overestimate and accidentally splash some poly to a spot I'd just finished. I'd then need to do these crazy yoga-esque moves where I'd kind of brace myself with one finger against the baseboards trying to reach the drops and blend them into the floor. The upside to doing it all with a brush is that it was really easy to see those kinds of mistakes before they became harder to deal with.

So there's the floors. I have a few more posts on the counters, cabinets, and paint jobs, so those of you who eat this home renovation stuff for breakfast have a lot to look forward to!

The Freewheel is here!

2011-06-22T12:20:00.004-05:00

The Freewheel is here! We've actually had it for about ten days now and we are loving it--the entire family. There is definitely a bit of a learning curve; even small adjustments to a wheelchair require a period of readjustment. But on the whole we are all very enthusiastic about this contraption. Joseph used to handle standard city sidewalks with relative ease but now he positively flies down them.

He and Margaret race to Mass every morning now (she on her bike). Joseph doesn't balk and flinch coming down every curb break wondering if he's going to face plant in the street. He's started to experiment getting up and down curbs on his own and, when he's hesitant, we can easily get him up and down large curbs ourselves without stopping to adjust his anti-tip bars and then bump him up and down backwards.

Eric took the kids to the farm last week to pick up our milk and eggs. We've been going to this farm for a couple years and it's always been sort of a bummer because Joseph can't really get around and see much of anything. He's always said he wants to be a farmer and we've sometimes gently pointed out that wheelchairs can't really get around that well in fields. This trip to the farm was completely different. He bumped himself right up into the farm store and then tooled around with the other kids looking at animals. He handled the gravel, he went up and down grassy hills. It was awesome.

We take walks in the neighborhood as much as we can after dinner in the summer. Last night Joseph was able to wheel onto the grass with the other kids and try to catch fireflies. We haven't been to the beach, yet, but we may try that soon. Exciting times.

Progress

2011-06-16T10:02:00.006-05:00

Yesterday I zipped down to our Home Depot Tool Rental store and got myself 24 hours with a random orbital floor sander. Our Home Depot is staffed with equal parts really competent people who are over eager to help me hunt down everything and load it into my car and young, lazy, jerks who openly mock women who claim to be competent with power tools and like to make a big show out of lifting 80 pounds into someone's car (I'm not ashamed to admit that I can't lift 80 pounds but this seems within the comfortable range for most 20-year-old men, right?). I was disappointed to find the latter type on duty yesterday but after suffering through thirty minutes of incompetence I was on my way back home with the sander and a huge stack of crazy expensive sandpaper.

In a classic, novice DIYer moment I totally forgot to budget for the sandpaper. Or, more, I thought, "It's paper. How expensive can it be?" Fortunately, Home Depot sends you home with gobs of it and then credits you for anything you bring back and I was able to return quite a bit of the finer grit paper.

William was hoping that he would be the one to operate the sander (I briefly toyed with the idea of renting him a mini bulldozer for the day but I couldn't fit it in the minivan):

Eric was actually the first to take the sander for a spin and, as you can see, the first pass gave some impressive results:

But he quit (at my request) after a few minutes and I started in. And I'll freely admit here as well that I vastly underestimated the amount of work involved in getting these floors back in shape. The sander isn't really hard to use. Honestly, if it weren't for the "Danger: Risk of Explosion" thing emblazoned everywhere you could probably close the door and let this go for a few hours Roomba-style. It's self-propelling and has four randomly-orbiting pads on the bottom so it sort of drives itself around on its own and the operator sort of keeps it in check and gently guides it to spots that need a little more action. But despite using 36-grit sandpaper and despite spending a full three hours in each of these tiny bedrooms (they average at under 10x10) there were still stubborn spots left over.

I don't know how long a job like this usually takes and I'm sure there's some degree of technique involved. It's possible this is just an insanely dull, slow project. But, in retrospect, I probably should have either started with 24-grit paper or opted for a "drum sander". Although that would have left me with a lot more edge clean up.

After three hours in each room I did a nice slow pass in each room with some 80-grit paper and called it a night. By this time I'd spent a full seven hours wrangling an 80-pound vibrating machine on a hot day while wearing a respirator and ear muffs. I was pretty much ready to collapse. But I paused for a minute to snap this shot:

Those are black sandals. I'm glad I had the foresight to wear washable footwear for this project.

The results? I'm a bit of a perfectionist so I have slightly mixed feelings. There are some really stubborn beat-up spots left:

I'll spend some time with my hand-held sander today and tomorrow to see what I can do to make those disappear. But the overall effect is, I think, very positive:

That picture is before sweeping, vacuuming, and finishing. I'm looking around at the wood floors in our apartment and realizing that they contain lots and lots of imperfections and discolorations but I definitely think of our floors as "nice." So I'm hoping our future tenants will have the same reaction.

And if anyone can weigh in on the type of wood we've got here I'd be glad to know. Here's a picture of one of the more interesting sections wiped with a bit of Murphy's Oil to bring out the grain for the picture:

I assume this is oak but the grain seems so much more interesting than usual and it is really varied. Maybe I'm just not used to unfinished hardwoods. We're pretty sure these are original floors and we think the house is about 100 years old (yes, we bought a house not knowing the exact age, welcome to Newark). Someone suggested staining the floors a dark color to hide imperfections but I think, imperfections notwithstanding, it would be a crime to hide this gorgeous wood.

I'll post another update when we're all finished. Oh, and the kitchen is still happening but we jumped on the floors first so as to give the finish plenty of time to cure before the tenants arrive.

Wood floors!

2011-06-15T10:55:00.006-05:00

Remember when I mentioned that the front of our rental apartment was really nice? This is a shot of one of the two front rooms, looking into the front room. Nice paint, nice details, and really gorgeous hardwood floors. They look like they were probably very recently refinished.

We love wood floors not only because they are easier on a wheelchair but because they are so gorgeous. They are the norm for floors in our area and--once you've got them--much less expensive to maintain than carpet. This apartment has two back bedrooms. One of them had an old blue carpet with an iron burn right in the middle. The other had ugly, old vinyl tile. We really wanted to replace both of these floors with hardwood but that would have put us over budget on this whole project so we were planning to install new carpet in both bedrooms.

The other day while we were up here dismantling the kitchen I idly asked if we'd looked under the carpet in the first bedroom. Eric pried up a corner of the carpet and found . . . hardwood floors! I'm not sure why we were surprised. I guess I figured that the old owners wouldn't have covered up wood floors if they had them. We then popped up one of the vinyl floor tiles in the back bedroom and found . . . more hardwood floors!

It took about ten minutes to pop up all the tiles and make a big, enormously heavy pile in one room.

But it took the better part of two days for Eric to get all the staples out of the floor in the first room. Whoever installed carpet in that room apparently had the philosophy, "If one staple is good, twenty must be really good!" We are constantly asking ourselves what the previous owners were thinking when they fixed up this house (though their many DIY shortcomings have so far not deterred us from taking on projects ourselves).

And now we have floors that look sort of like this:

Not pretty but I think they are salvageable.

Kitchen Renovation: Before

2011-06-13T13:14:00.002-05:00

I wish this were a post all about MY kitchen renovation but it isn't.

You might remember that we bought a two-family house and that we have our first tenants arriving on July 1. We are confident that we have quality tenants arriving and we sincerely hope that they love renting from us and stay for a long time. As any landlord will tell you, turning over an apartment is generally something to be avoided. It costs money and you lose rent during the time it takes. For our first stab at being landlords we wanted to be careful to pick people we had confidence in and we budgeted a couple months' lost rent as part of our move-in expenses so that we could afford to wait for these folks to move in. That also gives us the time to do work in the upstairs apartment if we want. The new tenants have seen lots of pictures so they knew that the apartment they agreed to take had a kitchen like this:

This is actually a perfectly acceptable kitchen for our neighborhood. There are a few luxury condos around but, for the most part, this is a fairly middle-of-the-road kind of place and there are plenty of worse kitchens out there. This one is on par with our two other rentals in the neighborhood and only slightly less-nice than what we have now.

The front rooms of this apartment are nicely painted with gorgeous new hardwood flooring. The back of the apartment has that kitchen, a slightly vintage bathroom, and two small bedrooms with icky flooring. We really wanted to do something to make the back of the apartment more closely match the front both in an attempt to keep our first tenants as long as possible and then turn over the apartment as quickly as possible when it's time to find new tenants.

Some of the problems in this kitchen include a big gaping "open area" that is just crying out for a dishwasher:

Really ugly faux-wood laminate counters with a seam that was never joined:

A plastic "tile-look" backsplash with, um, stick on green leaves:

Green vinyl flooring, and wood-paneling:

The older range is in an unfortunate spot as well.

These old houses have covered fireplaces and the stoves are often oddly-placed as a result. But there was no way to move the stove without starting from scratch with the cabinets and we're not looking to invest that much money into a rental kitchen.

The plan: replace the countertop, including by extending it under the window up to the refrigerator. Install a dishwasher under the new stretch our countertop. Paint the wood paneling (it's old, thin, yucky paneling, not super-nice wood, don't worry!). Paint the cabinets and update the hardware. I haven't ruled out updating the floor with new vinyl tiles but that isn't in the plan at the moment. It is the easiest thing to do in a year or so either in between tenants or to show our appreciation for tenants that stay on. And we're doing all the work ourselves and calling it "practice." I hope the results are nice but I don't think the results could possibly be worse than what we're starting with.

Stay tuned for updates!

Back from the Midwest

2011-06-13T12:53:00.003-05:00

Our mostly-annual Midwest road trip came early this summer. Eric's grandfather died on Palm Sunday and the memorial service was held at the end of May in Madison, WI. We left the minute Eric's semester ended (I picked him up at the curb outside his office with a loaded car) and spent ten days away arriving back home very late the night before an all-day meeting Eric had to attend. The timing definitely meant that we spent far less time in St. Paul that we would have liked but given how much we have going on this summer, a shorter trip was probably in order anyway and this forced us to do it.

Eric mostly grew up in Madison so he is always happy for a reason to spend some time there. The memorial service was lovely. Grandpa was very popular and had many old friends in Madison. He was also a veteran of World War II and the military "presentation of colors" at the end was very moving.

I think the highlight of the whole trip might have been the family reunion that evening. Eric's Great-Uncle Ted hosted the entire extended family at his house for the evening. The Iltae are a very musical bunch and Ted's two sons brought out their instruments and entertained us all with song after song after song. I was amazed at the memory these guys had. There was lots of jamming, too. Joseph and Margaret both wanted in on the action with the mandolin:

Joseph actually had pretty good technique thanks to his violin lessons.

We spent some time tooling around Madison. The kids were excited to see houses where Eric had lived and schools he had gone to. We drove back to St. Paul with Eric's brother Ben Sunday afternoon. We made our traditional pit stop at the Norskie Nook and ate way too much pie. I thought this view of Ben was really fun:

He and William, discussing alternate views on fashion:

All in all, it was a lovely, if short, trip. I hope we can make up for it a bit next summer. We have several very good friends in St. Paul and it is hard to see them only once each year.

The Best Birthday Present Ever

2011-05-22T19:39:00.003-05:00

After a delicious breakfast this morning the whole family packed in the car and headed a bit south to the New Jersey Abilities Expo. This is a four-day annual event that we missed last year due to travel so we were excited to check it out. We weren't sure what to expect but since it was free of charge we figured there was no harm in stopping by.

The atmosphere was great. It was nice to see so many wheelchair users including lots of happy, healthy adults with similar mobility as Joseph. Every exhibitor was great (including some great wheelchair-bound professionals) and, of course, it was all very wheelchair friendly. Even when Joseph and William managed to team up and plow a power chair through a couple of exhibits there was nothing but good-natured chuckling.

We found several exhibits that we expected and were looking forward to. Many car companies had accessible vehicles on display. We saw lots of configurations for rolling into vans and heard a bit about adapting cars for hand controls. That's a few years down the line, of course, but it's nice to know what's out there. We stopped by a few bathroom renovation tables to pick up information. That project isn't imminent, either, but eventually we hope to have a roll-in shower and roll-under vanity on the main floor. We even happened across the vendor who consulted with us on Joseph's wheelchair and he made a couple of significant on-the-spot adjustments for us.

Then we happened across what I'm starting to think might be the Best Birthday Present Ever: the FreeWheel. In short, FreeWheel is a portable, removable third wheel that you clip on to the front of your chair. That might not sound so impressive so let me back up a little.

Joseph's wheelchair is a fantastic machine. It's really a state-of-the-art manual chair. Wheelchairs are designed with the two large wheels that the operator pushes and then two front casters down next to the footplate. The casters keep you balanced and they swivel and all so they're great and totally necessary . . . as long as you are on a nice, level surface. If those casters hit even a very small bump at any speed the entire chair pitches forward and the operator is either thrown out or, in Joseph's case, suspended in his chair with his face planted in the pavement. Joseph has dumped his chair many times and we are glad that the only injury he has sustained thus far is a scraped chin. But it is a terrifying experience for him (and for me). And it takes some work to get him upright again.

Joseph deals with this caster problem pretty well. We walk around our neighborhood every day and often go out for all day jaunts in New York City. Joseph has gotten pretty good at paying close attention to little bumps in the sidewalk and he just pops a little wheelie to jump the bump. Most of the time this works fine but it means that Joseph uses a lot of energy paying attention to the ground (especially in a new setting) and not as much paying attention to his surroundings. And we we are often stuck at a street crossing with crowded or non-existent curb breaks which means that Eric has to manually bump Joseph up and down. If I'm on my own with the kids this situation can be dangerous if I'm trying to keep an eye on the other three, get a stroller out of traffic and get Joseph up and down a curb. Let's just say I don't take all four kids out on my own all that much.

And then there's the problem of all the "non-smooth" surfaces. In our own neighborhood there are cobblestone driveways or patches of sidewalk that are impossible for Joseph to wheel on. Grass is nearly impossible. Gravel is impossible. Sand is impossible. Going on a trail in the woods is impossible. Ice and snow (even a little bit) is impossible. There are so many places we simply don't go because they aren't wheelchair friendly.

We've known for a long time, of course, that you can get three-wheel bikes. The problem with these is that they are high-end racing models and they are completely impractical unless you are actively working out. You wouldn't, for example, commute to a friend's house in one of these because they'd be impossible in a house. They are also outrageously expensive. What to do? Eric has been brainstorming for awhile how to jerry rig some kind of bicycle attachment to the wheelchair. But someone beat him to it. Check out this video:

Now, an important disclaimer. This wheelchair user is obviously very physically fit and in the prime of his life. Joseph won't be doing quite all those things. But let me emphasize that every single thing pictured in that video is impossible or very nearly so even for that guy without the FreeWheel. If you go to the FreeWheel website you can see other videos--including some of kids--and read more about this.

And the best thing, as you saw in this video, is that the wheel is completely portable and removable. You install a small perch on the back of the chair and the five-pound wheel hangs securely. When you want to use it, you just detach and clip it on to the footplate. The entire round trip is less than a minute. We talked for a long time with the inventor (a quadrapalegic dad who wanted to play in the yard with his kids) and we are extremely excited about this. We couldn't pick one up today because they attachment mechanism needs to be custom-built for a child's chair but we will be calling the measurements in very soon.

I don't think it is an exaggeration to say that this could be life-changing for Joseph.

As for what Margaret and William got out of the Expo, they call these their "I Love Joseph" tatoos (don't worry, they're temporary):

Thanks to Robyn for the "rugged, dirty boy pictures".

Any green thumbs in the family?

2011-04-15T20:09:00.005-05:00

Anyone who has talked with Joseph has probably heard about his farming dreams. It's not a constant thing with him but, once or twice a year, he gets on a long kick about how he wants to move to a farm--either right now or when he grows up--or farm in our back "yard". Joseph, of course, would also be the first to tell you that, "Just in general, I really can't wheel on grass." Which isn't exactly true but it's definitely not the best surface for him.

Anyway. We have long wanted to do some container gardening so that Joseph can get at what we're growing but we've moved every summer since Joseph was old enough to help plant a seed so we've never taken the plunge. With all we have going on right now, large-scale container gardening isn't a big priority but Eric really, really wanted to try out some lettuce this year. We both have mouth-watering memories from the summer Eric house sat for an older couple who told him to please harvest and eat anything that was ready in the garden while they were gone. Almost every night we went out and picked ourselves an amazing salad.

I can't claim much credit for this project. Eric did all the research and found that lettuce does pretty well in a pretty simple container. My basic contribution was to pick up the lumber during my weekly Home Depot run (during which I discovered that a 10-foot 2x6 board is the largest thing I can safely move to a lumber cart while wearing a baby). Then, during classic "let's do a project" mode at our house, Eric was working from home and pointed out that since the two little boys were asleep I could go out and set up the planter boxes. I was more than happy to do that all on my own but, of course, both boys woke up early and Eric ended up coming out and doing most of the work himself after all.

The kids were jumping out of their skin with excitement. Joseph and Margaret alphabetized the seed packets and placed the seeds carefully.

But William wasn't too pleased when he found out that we hadn't just built him a huge sand box to dig in all the time (I also can't claim any credit at all for this magnificent outfit of his):

Fortunately, there was plenty of watering to do so all three kids got to help with that.

Joseph has checked several times this afternoon and reports that we don't have any plants sprouting quite yet. We're actually a little late to the game with lettuce planting for New Jersey but we're supposed to have lots of cool, rainy weather for the next couple weeks so we're hoping that something will grow. If we have success we may look at what we can plant later in the season or expand things a bit next year.

And Joseph has now decided he wants to be a botanist when he grows up and is requesting that our next home schooling unit with the Rice boys be all about plants (click on that link for some more pics of my kiddos and a peek at what we did this week).

And please excuse our rather sorry-looking patio. We have a construction site next door and they put up a chain link fence inside our property line which we'll have to investigate at some point. And, just generally, the patio was left in a sort of chaotic state. But, living in the city, any outdoor space at all is a bonus so we're happy to have it.

New Shoes!

2011-04-07T09:33:00.003-05:00

Posting about the kids' new shoes is a little odd but this is the kind of thing I get asked about a lot. Plus it gave me an excuse to snap a few cute pictures of a couple of my kids for all you grandparents out there.

If you've ever asked yourself, "What does Susan think are the best kid shoes?" wonder no longer. These are Keen Newport H2s. We first got a pair of these handed down to us the summer Margaret was one. I'd had a heck of a time finding summer shoes that were decently supportive and not sporting Dora the Explorer and Margaret was picky about comfort. Given that she was already walking several miles a day sometimes at that age, I was fine with finding her shoes that worked.

There's an endless debate--especially with children's items--about whether to spend extra for "quality." In general we choose the "budget" option whenever it is feasible. But these shoes are a definite exception. They retail regularly for around $50 a pop which is a lot to spend on kids shoes. But a few times a year the price bottoms out at around $35 which is only a bit more than a decent pair of shoes from Target. And these shoes have other benefits that justify the high price.

First, they are built like tanks. The kids log miles and miles of walking in these shoes and they hold up amazingly well. The original handed down pair of purple Keens is in storage and Margaret's pair from last year will join them. They both still look almost new. I have been burned in the past paying more for something thinking it will last well enough to pass down to the next kid but these shoes have renewed my faith in quality.

Second, the design of the shoes lets us replace other pairs we might normally buy. These are closed-toe but have plenty of breathing space. They are waterproof! And they don't stink! For summer these are the only shoes Margaret wears. They pass muster for me as Sunday shoes because they never look dingy and we walk to and from church. They also work during transitional seasons with a pair of socks. So, other than these Keens, the only other shoes I need to buy are a pair of boots for winter and two pairs of "holiday" shoes (one for Christmas, one for Easter) which I usually find for about $10 apiece. That's not too bad for a yearly shoe outlay.

Third, the kids love them. These arrived in the mail yesterday afternoon and William has not removed them except to change his clothes. He slept in them. That was a real treat when he crawled into our bed in the night and we got kicked in the ribs. Keens don't really work for Joseph's feet but William's shoes will definitely be kept for Gregory and we'll continue to save Margaret's in case she ever gets that sister she's praying for.

So there's my little treatise on kids' shoes. Next time someone asks me about this I can just point them here rather than re-typing all of these fascinating thoughts. And if, after reading this, you are ready to run out and buy some for your kids, two warnings: all Keens run small so you might have to size up and some kids hate them. The first two pairs we owned were given to us by a family whose girls refused to wear them. So I would recommend finding a place to try out your first pair. I bought them last year during the semi-annual REI sale and this year found them online (Shoemall.com) for 20% off and then added an 8% Ebates refund on top. Both times I paid $35.

The hinterlands

2011-04-03T11:16:00.006-05:00

I have no idea what is wrong with my camera. Anyone want to guess why all my pictures seem slightly blurry and low-resolution? I know I'm not the world's greatest photographer but usually I can manage to keep my hands steady. I'm going to post these anyway because it will give you an idea of what I'm talking about.

The back "mud room" which is in need of some serious organization.

I didn't accomplish anything on my "Little House Projects List" this weekend. Yesterday we headed to a birthday party around noon for both the children of some good friends in our neighborhood. We intended to stay for two hours, tops, and then come back home to get something done. We had such a good time visiting with everyone that we stayed until it was time to come home and put the kids to bed. Perhaps this afternoon I can put a dent in our bedroom which currently looks like a rummage sale exploded all over the place. Eric did manage to cross something off his list by installing a programmable thermostat. I just love these things. Nothing beats rolling out of bed in the early morning to a house that is already nice and warm.

Eric didn't make all those holes--he's actually pretty competent with a drill. We're guessing this is at least the third thermostat in this spot though the last one was pretty old so it doesn't make sense that the old holes weren't patched.

In the meantime, I will entertain you with a little tour of our basement and attic. Our goal, while house hunting, was to find a home with a big enough ground floor for the entire family to live on permanently. And when I say "entire family" that includes having more kids, I hope. But we soon realized that we weren't going to find a city house in our price range with three good-size bedrooms and enough leftover living space to keep us all from driving each other nuts. We continued to rule out single family homes because they tend to have all the bedrooms on the second floor (they also cost just as much, or more, than the two-family homes and make up only about 20% of the housing stock in our neighborhood). So we were left with finding a two-family with a couple main-floor bedrooms and a finished basement.

We definitely have mixed feelings about the usefulness of a finished basement. Joseph can't get down there so we don't want to use it on a regular basis for much of anything but as our family grows, something will have to give and we'll need the space. We're still working out the details of all that. For now, our main apartment is about 1200 square feet with two bedrooms and we're all fine with the space that gives us for now.

That ledge makes a nice little pantry overflow space. Lots of tomatoes! We found them for fifty cents a can and stocked up.

As you head down the back stairs from the kitchen you come into a pretty nice, well-lit room. It's messy! But it's a basement and we're still unpacking. This room currently houses our laundry and chest freezer and storage items that we need to access more frequently: tools, bulk food items, etc.

There is an "L" off to the back with some built-in closet space and we have some plans to organize that entire nook to hold everything that will live in this room permanently. Then we both feel like this room could be nice enough for a bedroom for us, for one of the kids, for guests. This room can be closed off completely from the rest of the basement which as you'll see boasts a second kitchen:

This is also "L" shaped and is big enough for one or two to "eat in". There is a nice large room beyond it.

It's a bit spartan at the moment but we have successfully hosted a couple sets of guests down here already. Margaret spends her rest time down here each day. When she isn't sleeping she likes to dance in front of the big, mirrored closet.

There is also a basement entrance from the front hall and that comes into this rather large entry-way space and you can see there is a second full bath off to the right there.

We hope the basement space might be a nice way to be hospitable to people needing a place to stay. Eric's department has a few new hires coming through this summer. It would be easy-enough to give someone a little studio apartment and still close off the laundry room for our family's use. But we may just keep the space all for ourselves. Once we are fully unpacked we'll have a better idea. We've also looked into converting one of the stairwells into a residential elevator which would allow us to have a much bigger house available to every member of the family.

And if that's not enough space, we've got an attic! The stairs in our entryway lead up to the second floor apartment (for which we have tenants lined up to arrive in the summer) and also to the attic entrance which is a separate, locking door off the landing. The attic is a huge, well-lit space. Currently we have long-term storage up here (outgrown kids' clothes, Christmas decorations) and Eric set up a desk with a few storage bins and a spare door. It's not fancy but he loves having a "home" office two floors away from the family. He can actually get work done from home now which is a huge boon for an academic with an irregular schedule.

With some new flooring and a coat of paint the attic could be quite lovely. It's set up for heat though we haven't been able to make it work yet (we knew about that problem before we bought it). The ceiling isn't very high but the various "rooms" are all large and there are lots of them. We are toying with the idea of making this Margaret's room in a few years.

These pictures really don't show how big this space is. It's a bit more than we know what to do with!

Out the back you can see our brand-spanking new roof, just put on yesterday. Nothing says "I'm a homeowner" like forking over thousands of dollars for a new roof. Fortunately we knew that we'd be replacing this flat section before long and got the sellers to kick in for it even though they swore it had never leaked (and we believe them). But we had a terrible wind/rain storm our second weekend here and ended up with a puddle on the floor of the second floor kitchen. So now we have a new roof. And though you can't tell from this terrible picture, we have a view of the Manhattan skyline from this roof. There might even be a chance of putting in a little deck up here down the road, though that's certainly pretty far down the list.

This isn't the prettiest view of our immediate neighborhood which is actually quite lovely. There are some luxury condos going into a vacant lot next to us at some point in the not-too-distant future.

So there you have the far reaches of our new home. It's an enormous amount of living space if we can figure out how to best use it. Fortunately, we have plenty of time to figure that out.

The little guy

2011-04-01T19:07:00.002-05:00

Gregory has been busy outgrowing his clothes and generally charming our socks off lately. He's a little smile factory and the flock of surrogate grandmothers at our church all know they can get a big grin out of him if they run over after (or during) Mass.

He has his moments, of course, but I would say he's our most easy-going baby so far. Maybe I'm just getting better at being a mom. He sleeps for nice long stretches day and night. He mostly puts up with his violently affectionate older brother. He lets Margaret over care for him. Joseph has developed a real knack for entertaining babies lately and he's been trying his tricks on Gregory. We're all pretty smitten with him, even Robyn:

Who can hold Gregory while teaching my children anatomy:

In the top picture you might notice two items of interest. The first is that, yes, that's my baby in a basket of (clean) laundry. What can I say? We're baby furniture minimalists. All of my children so far have hated those little infant seats after the first three minutes or so. Plus those rocking seats are just too tempting for two-year olds. So I don't choose to take up valuable square footage with something that is mildly entertaining at best and life-threatening at worst. But I was really sick last week and needed to get some work done on the computer while home alone with Gregory. On a whim, I plopped him in the laundry basket and he played there happily for about thirty minutes.

The other thing you might notice now or in future pictures of Gregory is the big red spot on his chin. That's a hemangioma (sometimes called a "strawberry" or "stork bite"). These spots are fairly common but more often seen on the scalp or back of the neck. Joseph and William both had them on the backs of their necks. Gregory's is a bit worse and in a more concerning spot. Very rarely, they can grow large enough to interfere with feeding. Our pediatrician sent us for an ultrasound which we had today and it doesn't look like we have anything serious to worry about. But the spot could get quite large and red over the next year or so. Typically the spots fade and completely disappear by age five. So, now you know that that is and you don't have to wonder if Gregory's taking it on the chin from his older siblings on a regular basis.

I hope to have more fun house pics this weekend. I have a slew of exciting projects including Unpacking the Bedroom! Installing Hooks in the Entryway! Hanging Lamps for the Kids! And all sorts of other excitement. Stay tuned.

We need some color in this place

2011-03-28T13:41:00.004-05:00

Painting the front two rooms is definitely not a necessary project. The current paint is in great shape. When we moved in, the plan was to keep it for quite awhile. But the more I live with the eggnog colored semi-gloss in every room of the house the more I dislike it. And I definitely want to show off our new curtains against some darker wall color.

Don't these look so much nicer ironed?

We also have a lot--a lot--of orangey wood in this house. We are definitely fans of wood and two of our rental houses over the years have had gorgeous dark wood trim that we wouldn't dream of touching with a paint brush. But in this house we have thin, orangey wood trim that is not pretty. It is not even installed very well. It doesn't even match throughout the house. We are planning to replace all the trim and add some crown molding at some point down the road and in the meantime I plan to feel not the least bit guilty painting all the trim. Also the last person to paint did a really sloppy job and a lot of the trim is splattered in eggnog semi-gloss anyway. We'll still have plenty of natural wood in our floors, the pocket doors and much of our furniture.

Since we don't plan to hire someone to paint for us and we have limited time for projects that require emptying whole rooms, I'm also planning to be okay with adding paint color in stages so I wanted to spend some time coming up with a color scheme we liked. One of the things requiring paint is a large piece of furniture which is fairly easy to haul out to the back patio some weekend:

This was the last thing I built last fall before a series of unfortunate events put a halt to all furniture work. I had to assemble it in our kitchen, in fact, and didn't want to paint or stain it indoors while pregnant so it has remained unfinished for months. This was built for a very specific spot in our old apartment and I'm so glad it fit nicely somewhere here. I loved building this. Every step came together just beautifully until I got to the drawers. Plans came from my favorite Alaska mom and it turns out that 1 x 12 stock is a different size in Alaska than the Lower 48. But I think if I paint it I can fix the drawers with plywood and the whole thing will look nicer.

Anyway, here's our current thinking on paint color:

The red is for the side table in the dining room. And I might give our red bookcase a new paint job as well. It's a color pretty close to this now but is very beat up. The greens are for the walls. We're thinking that the darkest green will go behind the bay windows, the next darkest in the dining room/library, and the lightest on the other living room walls. Then I'm thinking about white trim throughout. I like these greens--they come across as more gray depending on the light but since they're actually green it should feel warmer than gray would (gray is quickly becoming my favorite color. Is that depressing?).

I feel pretty settled on those painting choices but I'm not sure about the ceilings. Ceiling white? Or one of the greens? Something else? And I'm also not sure what to do with these louvered closet doors (there's another set behind the other end of the sofa). Paint them the same as the trim? Or one of the greens? We want to get rid of these closets someday but that's a big project and we have to live with them in the meantime. I would be hesitant to add a third color to the room because we have a good amount of color going on already. But I'm certainly no design expert.

Feel free to weigh in. My rule for giving advice, solicited or otherwise, is that you are free to give it and I'm free to ignore it :)

After breakfast

2011-03-24T13:32:00.003-05:00

Joseph can't stop reading.

And the other two are close on his heels.

More than you ever cared to know about my curtains

2011-03-23T13:09:00.003-05:00

The vast majority of the planned projects for our house are purely cosmetic and, for the most part, they are all on the back burner while we tackle a leaky roof, a wheelchair ramp, and investigate a couple of upgrades to the rental unit upstairs (two Ph.Ds are arriving this summer--it'll be a regular nerdery around here). Fortunately, most of the windows in our house look out at absolutely nothing so investing in curtains is not a high priority. In the bedrooms we've just re-hung the light blocking curtains on tension rods that I made a couple years ago. But the bay windows have that public view right out to the street. Sellers are required, I think, to provide window coverings with the house and these windows were equipped with snazzy roller shades. We just didn't want to live any longer than necessary with something that took six tries per window to fully lower each evening.

The first problem was how to hang curtains on bay windows. Ours have three sections but then the wall turns again to come straight out rather than just keeping its angle. Does that make sense? And the windows run right up to that turn with hardly any space between each window. Normally you want to mount the rod bracket at least two inches beyond the window frame and I would have gone even further so as not to lose any of the natural light coming in. We picked up some rods and figured out how to hang them by removing the finials on the center window. This at least allowed us to maximize every centimeter we had. Then we settled on dark wood blinds and sage-green linen curtains. We figured the blinds would be light-blocking and insulating and the linen curtains would be sheer and breezy enough to not obstruct too much light. We could have just mounted decorative panels on the side walls but I wanted slightly sheer curtains that work for blocking the afternoon sun in the summertime.

Definitely should have bought an ironing board while I was at IKEA.

The first glitch was with the wood blinds. I'd seen them at Home Depot for only $20 each. For real wood! But when I went and double checked our window measurement I found we needed blinds just eight inches longer and--get this--that added $38 to the price tag for each blind. No way. We decided that curtains alone would probably be fine and I went off to Ikea to pick up our sage-green linen drapes.

Second glitch: the sage green drapes were definitely more "lime" green in the store. They were pretty cool but they didn't exactly go with the traditional/classic/folk vibe we're going for eventually. There were no other colored curtains that would have let in any light and, of course, Eric wasn't with me so I was flying solo on curtain selection with a hard deadline to get these up before Gregory's baptism party. I reluctantly decided to select a white or off-white curtain which is actually what Eric had wanted in the first place. But I wanted contrast between the walls and curtain. I didn't want to buy any synthetic fabric and I didn't want to dole out the money for linen curtains that matched my walls. Just as I was about to give up I spied the Birgit curtains. Mostly white, yes, but 100% cotton, plenty sheer, and with a really cool folk-art motif in the center that actually match cushions I've wanted to buy for ages for our leather chairs.

Even so, the thing that really decided it for me (other than the embarrassing amount of time I'd already spent pacing the curtain department) was the much lower price. I figured I'd feel less bad about replacing them down the road if they were inexpensive to begin with.

I got them home and we hung them up and--as I feared--I hated them against the cream walls. And then I had a startling epiphany: I own those walls! I can paint the walls! As soon as I realized that, I fell in love with the curtains and Eric and I even managed to more or less plan out the entire color scheme for the living and dining room based on the colors in the flower motif.

They look awesome pulled back to the side and equally great left hanging--they let in a great amount of light all day long. And we've done a few outdoor evening checks and Eric is pretty sure we have nothing to worry about as far as privacy goes.

I got even more giddy when I realized that I could paint just around the bay windows for now to make the curtains pop. In order to paint the entire room we'd need to move the piano and I have a feeling that even if I could convince Eric to do that, we'd have a hard time recruiting even one or two friends to help. The plan is to make that alcove a super-dark green to match the stem of the flower (think a "gray-green" rather than "forest green").

Quick Poll

2011-03-21T14:28:00.002-05:00

I promise that I have a real post coming soon! Part of the delay has been that I was trying to rig up a "two blogs in one" approach so that I could post on the main page about what's up with the kids and in a separate tab on what's up with the house. But I can't do that as easily as I'd hoped.

We love our new house but our list of projects for it is already miles long. That mostly makes me pretty happy and I'm excited to tackle things as we find the time, energy, and money. And I will definitely want to post updates here. I know some of you would like nothing more than to read my endless thoughts on choosing curtains and paint colors. And I know that others of you would rather eat tacks than hear one more person go on and on about home improvement projects.

So, a quick poll. Please take a second to answer via e-mail or by leaving a comment here or on Facebook.

Which of the following statements best describes you?

A. I don't care what you write about! I'll read anything you post!

B. I really just log on for pictures of the kids and I would be very annoyed to open a post about your curtains.

C. As much as I would enjoy reading a dissertation on paint color, it offends my organizational sensibilities to find such things on a blog that is, ostensibly, about your kids. Please start a new blog and send me the address.

Thanks for the feedback!

We're in!

2011-03-15T19:31:00.004-05:00

We've been in for a couple of weeks but, true to my blogging style, I haven't had a chance to update things. And I'm glad to have such enthusiastic support for my little blogging project. I love an excuse to write lots of words about pretty much anything but matching a topic to a willing audience is often the tough part.

Our move went really smoothly thanks to the help of some amazingly generous friends and even a few generous strangers. Actually, I think there was only one mover who neither Eric or I knew, but there were a few we only know very slightly. And there were more than a few who moved all this stuff for us (including our piano!) less than a year ago.

With a fair amount of help we managed to get ourselves pretty well unpacked within a week. Then some friends came for the weekend and we unloaded our storage unit and spent the next week unpacking that in preparation for Gregory's baptism yesterday.

Normally I would be hesitant to put up any pictures at all until the boxes are gone, the house is clean, the pictures are hung, and I am generally satisfied with the state of things. But within a couple days of moving it became obvious that we will probably never feel "done" with our own house. We have very, very long lists of projects we'd like to tackle. They range from huge and necessary (wheelchair ramp, new roof) to small and optional (changing out the dated and mismatched switch plate covers all over the house).

For a brief, preliminary tour of part of the main floor, come inside . . .

The previous owner took us on a tour immediately after closing. She was lovely and helpful and had obviously loved the house. She had her brother in tow and he had personally done much of the work on the house. She claims that the house was in very bad repair when she bought it in 1997. We have no idea how old it is (yes, I know, you'd think this information would be on file somewhere). The realtor thought 1950, the inspector suggested 1940, and the previous owner explained how they had found the old gas lighting lines and capped them off. Maybe someday we'll know the real answer. Some of the original details were preserved:

These wide-plank rustic floors are definitely gorgeous but I'm not sure how long their charm will last. The cracks are wide crumb traps and there are a lot of splintery, damaged spots. But refinishing the floors is pretty far down our list.

The front room has fantastic natural light thanks to the bay windows and we love having a cozy sitting area. The two louvered closets are not my favorite feature. These front rooms are typically used as master bedrooms around here and those closets were added with that in mind by covering over a chimney (and maybe a fireplace?). We are thinking hard about tearing that out, re-exposing the brick and reclaiming that closet space for part of the living room at some point. For now I'm trying not to go nuts every time I look at the off-center couch on that wall.

And, no, that's not one of my kids! We were babysitting for a friend the day I took these pictures.

There are frosted-glass pocket doors separating this room from the dining room but they are off their track so it's an enormous project to get them closed. Someday . . . it's on the list!

We pretty much planned our furniture layout based on memory and the few measurements Eric was able to take on the inspection day. We had decided on this wall for the bookshelves and we figured that I would take at least one unit apart, cut it all down and put them back up to fit the wall. Imagine my delight when the existing width was exactly perfect for the space. The gap on the right is to allow for the baseboard heaters. We've since added the top shelves back on as well so they go all the way to the ceiling. Since those pieces were bottomless two-shelf units I just stood each one on end and trimmed the "feet" to accommodate the slightly lower ceilings here. Then I moved the shelf up a bit to split the difference and create two smallish top shelves. They look great but they are over full already so there may be some new shelving in our future.

The kitchen is probably the best I've ever had. I've had bigger kitchens and prettier kitchens but this one combines good design with decor that is not completely awful. I'm not in love with the textured blue floor tile, the faux-marble paneling on the walls, the faux-marble formica, and the psychedelic wood grain on the cabinets but I can definitely live with it. The previous owners had a stainless steel suite of appliances in here but stipulated in the contract that they would be taking the "stove, refrigerator, and microwave" with them. That was fine with me since we own a fridge, don't use a microwave, and were thrilled to be getting a new dishwasher with the sale. I shopped for a stove (not quite the stove of my dreams but definitely the "we're on a budget version" of the stove of my dreams) and bought it in black. I'm not a fan of the stainless thing in kitchens but I figured the black would match the stainless dishwasher and stainless vent hood nicely.

Imagine our surprise when we came for a walk through the day before closing to find a big, gaping hole where the dishwasher had been! Our agent got on the phone and had a check promised from the sellers to cover part of the cost of a dishwasher (which was really kind since I think it was an honest misunderstanding with one or more of the attorneys). Honestly, I'm on the fence about dishwashers anyway. We aren't rushing out to buy one and for now I'm enjoying an easy-to-clean spot to house my trashcan and recycling. Though I'm open to suggestions for making that spot a little more aesthetically pleasing.

The owners had also changed out the vent hood so I now have a black stove, cream vent hood, and white refrigerator. But that's okay. It's a work in progress.

The rest of our main floor is a nice large bathroom and two small bedrooms. Lots more pictures to follow as we set things up. And as soon as I have baptism pictures I will post those as well. It's good to be home!

We're moving! Again! And more cute baby pictures!

2011-02-27T19:26:00.003-05:00

It's official! Finally. We are moving into our own house on Saturday. Yes, I know, we moved less than a year ago. And less than a year before that. And the year before that. And the year before that. And the year before that. It's not that we love to move--most of those were completely necessary moves that are a normal part of graduate school and new-professorhood. The move we made last summer to our current apartment was completely voluntary but we were very excited about it. We'd spent a year prowling the neighborhood and trolling Craigslist for a rental that could be made accessible for Joseph. We wanted, if possible, a home all on one floor and, most definitely, an outside door low enough and with enough surrounding space to add a ramp. You would not believe how much space a ramp takes up. It's incredible. So last May when we found this apartment that was all one floor with only a few steps from the back door to a spacious patio and was even less rent we were thrilled. The landlord's agent who showed the apartment to us assured us that a ramp would be no problem. We moved in after our big road trip last summer and finally got around to building the ramp in September.

The ramp was actually a pretty fun DIY project for Eric and me. We studied lots of ramp and deck plans, Eric did all the math to come up with the design and we had at it. Just the two of us built it over two weekends and the end result was a nice, solid ramp that even looked nice. But far more wonderful than the satisfaction of building something together was seeing Joseph use the ramp. He was, then, almost six years old and for the the first time in his life could get in and out of his own house independently. We cried watching him finally able to follow his 18-month old brother in and out. It was incredible for him and for our whole family. I'm crying now remembering it, if you want to know the truth.

Just a couple of days after finishing the ramp, and on Margaret's birthday, our landlord ordered us to remove it immediately. It would take pages and pages to relate the entire story of our fall from that point but it was ugly. The ramp, as it was, had to be torn down though we do, of course, have a legal right to accessible housing. We explored lots and lots of options for recourse and solutions but over the course of the fall it became clear that for accessibility reasons, and other reasons that I won't enumerate here, we had to move on from this apartment. We were subjected to unreasonable demands on all sorts of unrelated issues, harassing encounters that frightened our children, and--I don't think coincidentally--stolen property. We briefly considered moving quickly into some sort of emergency housing but then decided that the situation wasn't that dire. What we did do, instead, was figure out how we could buy a house.

The nice thing about having our own house (other than not having a completely unhinged landlord) is that we can modify it any way we like for accessibility. But you'd be surprised how many houses cannot be made accessible no matter how much you own it. If we lived in the suburbs the housing stock would be a bit more amenable to ramping but one of our many reasons for living in the city is because the outdoor space is all accessible. Yards and wheelchairs are not a great combination. Our current neighborhood is also one of the most affordable places to live in North Jersey. Eric's commute is definitely shorter than average among his colleagues. But the need for "rampability" and a bathroom with at least the potential for accessibility really limited our options. We also had a strong preference for having all--or at least most--of our living space on one level. We didn't want to create a situation where everyone except Joseph had a bedroom upstairs. In the city where houses are built "up" more than "out", this pretty much ruled out all single-family homes. Two-family homes tend to have bigger floors.

A two-family home also, of course, greatly increases buying power because of rental income and in our neighborhood they tend to be the norm and don't cost any more than the available single family homes.

So once we established our price range and found a realtor we looked at the two dozen or so two- and three-family homes on the market. We ruled out several of them as "unrampable" right off the bat. Several more were fake short sales a common--and very frustrating--situation these days where a home owner in trouble is "listing their home for sale" to buy time with the bank but mysteriously becomes unreachable by phone if you want to actually view the property. In the end we got inside about a dozen homes and seriously considered three of them. Our first choice turned out, on a second look, to be more of a fixer-upper than we wanted, our second choice sold while we were thinking about the first one. So we ended up with our third choice home. In retrospect, as often happens, this one now seems like it should have been the obvious first choice all along and we are quite excited about it. We decided that trying to move quickly would not allow us to search for the "perfect house" but we are confident this house will serve us really well for long enough to make buying it a sensible move.

Getting a mortgage these days is a nightmare. The banks are skittish and picky but everything was finally settled last week and we are closing this Friday, moving in on Saturday. We are all very, very excited to be moving into our own place and into a place that is permanent. I'm looking forward to indulging my furniture making hobby once again (first up--adjusting the floor to ceiling bookshelves for the new dining room). Margaret is looking forward to having an entire finished basement to herself for nap time. Joseph is looking forward to the ramp. Eric is excited about having a home office in the attic--two whole floors away from the chaos that always interferes with his work on days he'd rather not go into campus. There's a lot of excitement all around.

I'll post a photo tour as soon as I can. Until then, I better get packing!

Classical Unschooling

2011-02-18T19:46:00.004-05:00

A few people asked, after my last post, to hear more about classical education and/or/with unschooling. I can't say that I'm an expert on either approach, or at anything at all related to homeschooling. I've been reading on the subject for almost ten years but no amount of reading can prepare you to actually educate real children in the midst of a busy home and we are only just beginning that stage of things.

There are a handful of well-defined home education "philosophies" out there for parents who are putting together their own curriculum and there are lots of more "curriculum-in-a-box" providers as well. But, in my experience, most families use a combination of two (or more) approaches and find that things evolve over time as the children grow. I don't want my thoughts on unschooling or classical education to come to define either of those approaches because if you know another family approaching home education this way, it will probably look completely different. This is one of those areas where I am totally comfortable being a relativist.

An extreme definition of "unschooling," in my mind, is: letting the kids do whatever they want with regard to their definition. I have never actually heard of any family that actually does that, for the record. It's not even legal in a lot of states. I find that an occasional dose of "unschooling" inspiration is a guard against feeling discouraged and defeated. In the midst of a large family and a busy life, there are definitely times when formal school does not happen. At all. During a time of crisis this could go on for weeks. I personally don't think that this is harmful for children and it is encouraging to know that there are whole populations of people, and even education experts who think this is the best and only way to educate children. I have definitely heard of and met some pretty darn impressive kids who came from "unschooling" families so it seems to work, in some form, for some people.

In the materials I've read on "unschooling," several elements attract me. First, it is a very "child-centered" approach. Unschoolers usually see children as inherently intelligent, thoughtful, creative, and self-motivated and believe that, left to their own devices, they will educate themselves (including learning to read) just fine. I also like that children have, in theory, limitless time to thoroughly explore what interests them. Eric and I homeschool, in part, as a reaction against shortcomings in our own education. We both would have preferred more time to really dig into the things that interested us rather than stick to the classroom agenda.

All that said, we don't ever see ourselves embracing this approach fully. For one thing, while all of our children seem pretty intelligent, they definitely differ in the personal initiative area. For another thing, as bad as I am about sticking to a routine, I do know that my children thrive better when we have a routine. And, while Eric and I would have loved more freedom in our education, we also wish that we had been introduced to more of the riches of literature and philosophy and world culture than we were.

Enter classical education.

Classical education relies on the "trivium" concept: children move progressively through three stages of learning first absorbing facts (the grammar stage), then learning to argue (the logic stage), and finally learning to fully express themselves (the rhetoric stage). Home educators who use a classical approach typically have a rich and rigorous program of study with a huge emphasis on the study of history. I was initially turned off by some materials I read on classical education because it seemed to lack respect for the innate creativity and imagination of the child, forcing them to think and learn a certain way. It seemed to view children as empty vessels for the parents to cram with a certain number of facts before it was time to ship them off to an Ivy League school at age 16.

I've since come to see that this is a rather extreme view of the classical approach and just as I don't know any families who truly always let their children do whatever they want, I also don't know any families who approach classical education in that way. And based on my very limited observation of children, the trivium pattern seems to be a sensible one. Also, classical education just sounds fun to me. And that is no small thing when I have to live with and supervise whatever it is we are doing for education around here.

So I tend to say that we are "classical unschoolers" because the materials we use are definitely drawn from classical sources. We plan to teach the children Latin and we will probably use history as a "spine" for most other subjects. But we also think children needs lots and lots of free time to explore and read on their own. Formal lessons are short, we're okay taking days off when we all need a break or a neat opportunity arises or if we are moving for the second time in less than a year and have a newborn in the house (just to pull one example out of thin air).

So there's a nutshell description of our approach and I will try to illustrate it a bit more in the coming months. Feel free to ask more questions about how we got here, what we do, or what we're planning for the future.

The pictures for today's post are courtesy, once again, of Robyn. We get together for science and music activities once a week and last week talked about volcanoes. The kids all loved it but Robyn and I love how unimpressed they look in the pictures. Very funny. The more impressive yeast+hydrogen peroxide combination failed us (turns out that H2O2 expires--good to know!) so we had to resort of baking soda and vinegar. Oh, and Joseph has a loose tooth!

School

2011-02-10T21:07:00.002-05:00

We are still home schooling with no plans to change that at this point. Our year has gone pretty well although it's been in fits and starts. I don't really mind that too much for kids this young. Eric and I have both endlessly researched various approaches to home education and we feel drawn pretty strongly towards a classical approach in terms of what the kids will study. But we also find that a lot of what "unschoolers" say really resonates with us--especially for young children. Five and six-year-olds, it turns out, will pretty readily gobble up whatever they can get their hands on in a pretty self-motivated way and so much learning is going on just through living a rich life on a daily basis. While we definitely have set math and reading work we do for Joseph, I tend not to fret too much if he spends several days in a row absorbed in various books and doesn't crack open his math.

We gave a lot of thought to "grade level" at the start of this year. In lots of states Joseph would be in kindergarten this year and in other states he would be in first grade. We decided to err on the side of not rushing things so we've called him a kindergartner this year though he is definitely doing first or second grade work in some areas. The nice thing about homeschooling is that you can do different grade levels for different subjects. Joseph's abilities don't tend to match his desires, however. He is not eager about formal schooling even though he can easily complete his work when I make him do it. That's another reason I opted to err on the young side with regard to grade level. He likes to be really confident with a skill before diving in and I thought it best for him to feel good about his reading and writing ability before starting in on a classical first grade program.

Margaret has always come along for the ride with regard to school and this year I got her a preschool workbook so she'd have something fun to do while I worked with Joseph. She also demanded reading lessons. I was hesitant to start because Joseph got really frustrated as a four-year old with reading. But Margaret took to it pretty quickly and is blasting through the curriculum. She also outgrew her preschool workbook and the kindergarten one I got her as a sequel is also much too easy for her. Her mind isn't quite the information sponge Joseph's seems to be but she has a lot of initiative and is doing well with reading and writing. I think we'll end up calling Margaret a kindergartner next year and the two kids will do a lot of the more "humanities" type work together as they progress through their education.

We've had a really fun addition to our home education recently. My friend Robyn who lives in Brooklyn decided to pull her kindergartner out of school and finish up the year at home just before Christmas. We've been getting together once a week ever since to do short activities together--mostly science-type stuff, although I tried out some music with the kids last week--and for some playtime for the kids (and, honestly, for Robyn and I!). Joseph and Andrew have always been great friends and it's fun for Joseph to have a friend over every week. William is a huge fan of Robyn's younger son, Isaac (they both share a deep passion for trains) and Margaret is a huge fan of Robyn herself. So it's a great part of the week for everyone and I secretly hope that Robyn home schools her kids for the next twelve years so we can continue the play dates ;)

The pictures in today's post are courtesy of Robyn. I think Gregory is one week old--Robyn has a real thing for capturing crying babies. Enjoy!

Gregory Augustine

2011-02-09T21:12:00.003-05:00

I'll tell you what the biggest obstacle to my writing more on this blog is: pictures. I never think to bring my camera anywhere. If I do think to bring it, I don't think to use it. If I think to use it the pictures are usually terrible. And then I have to coordinate myself enough to upload the terrible pictures and choose a few to publish. It shouldn't be such an obstacle, but it is. I'm sure someone out there understands. Eric is of the opinion that most of you, dear readers, would love to have more updates about our family, pictures or no pictures. So I'm really going to try and post more even if I can't illustrate what I'm saying.

As for now--I do have a few decidedly mediocre shots of our newest addition. This is one seriously sweet baby and if that doesn't come through in the pictures, well, you'll just have to take my word for it.

Gregory came into the world on January 13th at about 5:15 in the morning. He was almost our smallest baby at 7 pounds, 4 ounces. (And if you read this just for the stats and don't like long birth stories you can skip ahead now to the last couple paragraphs). I had initially planned on this one being born at home as Margaret and William were. Honestly, after my 45 minutes of labor with William we didn't think trying to get to a hospital was even a very safe decision. I would rather have Eric deliver my baby and know that a professional is on the way than deliver on the freeway in January. We had a few hurdles, however. First, a VBAC (vaginal birth after caesarean) at home is not really allowed in New Jersey. We found a midwife who was willing to help us given my history of very fast labor and we saw her for awhile. But then around 30 weeks we found that I had a low blood platelet count. That is a fairly common "complication" of pregnancy and doesn't really cause any problems--unless you bleed to death during birth. In a modern hospital that isn't too much of a risk but my home birth midwife thought I was no longer a good candidate for home birth.

We did a little research into local hospitals and found that the closest hospital actually had a group of midwives practicing. I called them up and immediately liked the woman who ran the clinic. She took me on as one of her private patients and we took it from there. Honestly, I liked the new midwife more, she and the hospital were more conveniently located, and her services (unlike the home birth) are covered by insurance.

I was a little apprehensive about birthing in a hospital. I (obviously) prefer natural childbirth and low intervention with regard to both mother and baby. Many, many of my friends have had horrible experiences of hospital birth and being a VBAC really ups your risk for unnecessary procedures and interventions.

There'd been lots of dickering about my actual due date for most of my pregnancy but we finally settled on January 25th. Two of my previous three babies were early so I expected to go early again. I wanted to give birth before Eric's semester started on January 18th and the string of snowstorms we had in early January had me on edge. The evening after one of the bigger storms I was feverishly doing house-buying paperwork at my desk when I got up for a snack and suddenly realized that I'd been having pretty regular contractions. I sat down to time things a bit and realized they were seven minutes apart. Seven minutes is a long time for most people but I'd gone from seven minutes apart to a baby in less than an hour before and didn't want to take any risks. We called our babysitter, called my midwife and took off for the hospital. We arrived to an almost silent labor and delivery ward in the middle of the night and settled in. My labor progressed steadily but (for me) very slowly. I refused to go to sleep because once I'd arrived at the hospital I didn't want to prolong things. But I ended up laboring for seven hours anyway. Most of it was very manageable and I stood around chatting with Eric and the midwife. By early morning I was exhausted and extremely hungry but Gregory was born fairly easily in the early morning. I couldn't have asked for a better setting for a hospital. The room was quiet and dimly lit and only Eric and my midwife were there. Even the nurse only showed up in the last moments and she was a quiet, calm presence who took great care of me immediately after birth as well.

Gregory was perfectly healthy right off the bat and the two of us settled in for our hospital stay. I had initially thought I would stay at the hospital for the full time allotted (48 hours) to maximize my rest. I realized after the first night that there is no such thing as a good night's sleep in a hospital where they feel the need to come in hourly to check someone's blood pressure. I had to argue with a few people for an early discharge but I was able to go home late in the afternoon on the second day.

Despite my ardent love for birthing at home, I have to say that my experience with a normal hospital birth was pretty positive. If we are blessed with another baby I would definitely be inclined to go back to the same hospital midwife.

Gregory has been a wonderful addition to our family. He is a very easygoing baby. The kids just adore him. Margaret has been a huge help holding him for me for short intervals and always ready to grab a clean diaper or change of clothes or make sure he has enough blankets. William is constantly trying to cover the baby in kisses--more kisses than any newborn can reasonably handle, in fact. He is mostly okay with not being the baby anymore though we have a few kinks to iron out in that department. I have noticed that since Gregory was born William seems to be attaching himself more to Joseph which is good for both of them.

I have had the easiest recovery from childbirth yet. I love having babies but I do not love being pregnant and it is very wonderful to be able to move quickly, bend over, hold my kids close, and generally have enough energy to get through the day again. My house is starting to get clean, dinner has gotten on the table, and I'm not even too worried about packing up the house in a couple weeks. Life is very good!

More soon on house developments. We are planning to close on a house in a few weeks and though there is no very great risk of things falling through, I'd rather save the details at least until we have the closing scheduled.

Last Minute Halloween

2010-10-31T18:30:00.004-05:00

We've never done much with Halloween in the past. We don't have too much against the holiday, we've just never made much of a priority of dressing up our kids and sending them out for days' worth of sugar highs. And, oddly, we've never lived anyplace where trick or treating was a big deal. In our neighborhood now there are hundreds and hundreds of kids out but they only go to businesses.

This year the kids suddenly "discovered" Halloween and just last night started talking up the complex costumes they were hoping to wear today. We decided that a bit of holiday fun was in order so we came up with some last-minute costumes.

A very scary ghoul:

This picture does not do justice to my amazing face-painting skills. At Joseph's direction he had red and yellow eyes, a green mouth, and black face.

A fairy princess:

The dress is courtesy of Aunt Laura and, again, you can't really see Margaret's very sweet and glittery face here. She was so excited to wear a whole face-full of real makeup and wants to go to church like this tomorrow for All Saint's Day.

And a sad dirty bum:

He was sad that Eric wouldn't let him play with the dirt longer but he cheered up once he realized that we were going for a walk to get candy. William was completely unfazed by Joseph's face but completely freaked out when our baker donned a clown hat and tie and tried to give him a cookie.

Happy Halloween!

Happy Birthday, Joseph!

2010-10-27T20:27:00.003-05:00

Six years have sure flown by.

Joseph is a pretty low-key birthday guy. Margaret just lives for the hype and anticipation but Joseph gets pretty overwhelmed by it. We opted last year to skip a party and lots of presents and take a fun family outing instead and we liked it so much that I think we'll make it a tradition. We have plans for a boat ride around Manhattan for this Friday and Joseph is very excited.

For today we let Joseph choose the menu and we were extremely relieved when he asked for cheese fondue. We also had banana splits which I guess is another Joseph tradition. For breakfast he requested blueberry scones with scrambled eggs and lunch was supposed to be the hot dog truck in the park which had to be postponed due to rain (what is it with rain on this kid's birthday?).

Joseph was also the recipient of books and a book rack:

This is a great gift for him because he often wakes up slowly in the morning and prefers to sit quietly in bed reading rather than having breakfast with us. We're fine with this habit and it's nice for him to have books at hand since there is no way to fit a nightstand near his bed.

Our only other plans for the day were to play Joseph's new games and read his new books. This was especially the extent of our plans when Joseph's wheelchair all but fell apart on the way to church this morning. He was fitted for a new chair back in June and we were expecting delivery next month. We've been nervously watching his tires deteriorate and this morning was the last straw. I called the wheelchair company in what I figured would be a futile attempt to speed up the new chair process and just minutes after Eric finished duct-taping Joseph's tire the delivery guy called up and said that, in fact, Joseph's new chair was on his truck and would we like it today?

Joseph doesn't pose well but here are a couple of shots . . . The changes are subtle but important.

You can see, maybe, that the wheels are the same size but the seat is higher. You might notice that his old seat is flopped forward. We've had trouble with that seat for about three years and it's really compromised Joseph's efficiency. The new seat is very, very solid. The new chair also has permanent rather than removable handles. They are lower and, therefore, less comfortable for the pusher but it's great to realize how seldom Joseph needs us to push him these days. On the rare occasion that he needs help up a hill, Margaret is all-too-glad to give him a boost and these new handles are much better for her. They will also make it easy for Joseph to use a backpack if he wants.

The new chair is considerably wider which is an adjustment for everyone. Joseph says it is "easier to wheel, but harder to jump." The "anti-tippers" on the back can be raised much higher on this chair which will be a good way to transition Joseph towards having a chair without that safety mechanism. Down the road he will want to be able to jump curbs and even negotiate small steps on his own and he'll need excellent backwards balancing skills for that.

Otherwise, the chair is very similar--it was even made by the same company. It should last him at least three years and we're all very glad to not have to worry about it falling apart in the middle of an outing. And, one last shot--Joseph is asking me, "Is this a good pose?" Uh . . .

Margaret did have a birthday this year.

2010-10-27T19:55:00.004-05:00

Margaret did, in fact, turn four almost a month ago. It was a beautiful sunny day and we had plans to go to our small, local zoo. Unfortunately we sort of had a housing crisis dumped on us first thing in the morning and much of the day--and much of the four weeks since--was given over to dealing with an ugly situation. I won't go on and on here but things on that front are quiet at the moment and we are hopeful that we will be happily living in our little apartment here at least until next summer. But we'll see.

I think that Margaret's birthday, from her perspective, was still really fun. Her favorite food is "Porkacheese" (Portuguese--it took us a while to figure that out) which is abundant in our neighborhood so we got takeout from a place nearby and had friends join us for an impromptu birthday party that evening. For Margaret, it's all about the party so she was all too happy that she had a second party with my brother and sister and their spouses just a few days later.

The celebrating continued in that Margaret got birthday money this year. She's gotten birthday money every year, of course, but usually the money is spent solely at the discretion of her parents and it never really occurs to her to have an opinion. This year, though Margaret has almost no concept of what a monetary transaction entails, she was very concerned about her birthday money and how it would be used. After quietly discouraging her from running out and buying the first cheap knick-knack she could lay her hands on, it was settled that the one thing she really wanted was a doll she could dress up. My brief doll-shopping experience has revealed that specially-made doll clothes can add up right quick and I had to admit, honestly, that I am not up for making doll clothes. I was glad to find a good-quality baby doll that was sized to wear newborn baby clothes. We ordered the doll together and it arrived on the Big Brown Truck last week.

Margaret is just smitten with this doll. She named her Lila for reasons unknown to us and has taken possession of all her own newborn wardrobe which I'd saved in case we ever have another daughter. Lila is the first one dressed every morning and gets changed several times a day including into a nightgown for bed. Lila has her own "crib" (the laundry basket lined with blankets) but prefers to sleep snuggled next to Margaret. She's been to the grocery store, to church, and to a Toyota dealership and often joins us at the table. Margaret insists that I take lots of pictures of her and her baby. Here are a couple--first Margaret and Lila doing a dry run in their holiday attire, and then the two of them in more everyday clothes:

Part of Margaret's birthday present was a book rack for her top bunk which I had a lot of fun making for her. I only today got it hung on the wall--shame on me! But I've spent most of the time since she opened it thinking we might move any week. So now Margaret's pink fortress is all set up for her on the top bunk. A friend asked to see some pictures of how we rigged up a canopy for her so I tried to get a few shots but the light in the kids' room is just awful for photography.

Her book selection and flower lamp:

Margaret's bunk from "outside". The fabric is just a "tapestry" from Target. I sewed little plastic rings to four corners (I think they might be stitch markers for knitting) and left a long side hanging. Then I screwed four hooks into the ceiling and just hung it that way.

This is the foot of her bed looking up. Her doll house lives at the foot of her bed as well. Since it's a twin-size bed and she's only four there is still plenty of room for her to sleep. She loves her own space up there and since her brothers can't (yet) get up to the top bunk it's a good retreat when she's feeling frazzled. Which is often.

So, there are some of the birthday highlights. We did finally get in our zoo trip the week after her birthday and we are all looking forward to what our little four-year-old has in store for us this year.

Mommy's new hobby

2010-09-11T15:08:00.006-05:00

It's amazing to me that I can blog on a road trip but then not again for an entire summer. I apologize for being so off and on!

You probably know that the Johnston family moved once again. We decided this very last minute just before our big road trip. An apartment came along that was much more accessible for Joseph and much lower rent than where we were living. When we got back to New Jersey we had two weeks before moving help came and another three weeks after that to clear out of the old place. The long, protracted move was not fun and we are still unpacking. Part of my hesitation in blogging is that every time I think to snap a picture I'm embarrassed by the total chaos that will appear throughout the background.

And after all this time, this post isn't even about the kids it's about me, me me! I've had a few requests for this post and I finally had time to put it together.

Last spring I stumbled across a really fantastic blog called Knock-Off Wood. The blog author, Ana White, is a stay-at-home-mom in Alaska who helped her husband build their own house. In her spare time she started tinkering with tools and scrap lumber and discovered a talent for building furniture. Less than a year ago she started posting her furniture plans on a blog and now she's got 20,000 fans and counting. Ana has a real knack for easy-to-follow plans and fostering a supportive community so that people like me who had almost never touched a power tool suddenly want to refurnish their homes with hand built furniture.

I really wanted to get in on the fun and was thrilled to receive this bad boy for my birthday in May:

Beginning woodworkers can get lumber cut for little or no cost anywhere that sells lumber but I figured I'd want my own saw. With that and Eric's drill I dove into my first project just before we moved into the new apartment.

We'd been housing our books for the last several years in a mismatched selection of bookcases from Ikea and office-supply stores. After several moves they were in rough shape and trying to place them around a home in an aesthetically pleasing way was getting difficult. Our new apartment also has 10-foot ceilings and limited storage. So I had the bright idea to build an entire wall of bookshelves reaching all the way to the ceiling. And it actually worked:

I'm impressed at the sheer size of my first building project, though shelves aren't that difficult. I modified this plan of Ana White's but changed the dimensions considerably. Because of a mathematical error (on my part) I had to build the shelves in two sections so that the top two shelves are a separate unit. This turned out to be fortunate as I would not have been able to handle the building of the units all in one piece. I also left off the back panel and added lips to the back of a couple of shelves. All the pieces are screwed directly into the studs so that we won't have any of these sorts of accidents again.

These shelves really make the room and they are the first thing you see when you come into our house. Here's Margaret welcoming you:

This last week I finished two more (much smaller) projects. When we moved we realized the kids really needed a bigger dresser so we passed mine on to them. That left Eric and I with one small dresser to share. A bigger dresser wouldn't fit in our room, anyway, but neither did our clothes fit anywhere. The closet is long and narrow and had space for something. I wasn't sure about tackling a full-fledged dresser so I built this set of cubbies:

The bins hold some of Eric's things and will also hold baby clothes before long. The bottom cubbies are for shoes. A simple, functional piece I was able to build from real wood for way less than the particle-board versions are selling at the stores.

My third project was a side table. We use the front room where the bookshelves are during the day because it's a nice room with great light. It's the coolest room in the house in the summer and in addition to housing most of our books it also contains the piano, the kids' toys, and Joseph's school desk. We set up the old family roll top for him which is working really well. My rocking chair is near the desk and I use that rocking chair a lot when I'm pregnant and caring for a newborn. Once school started I realized I'd have to quit using Joseph's desk as my side table and get something else.

It just so happened that right across the room was an actual side table that would perfectly suit the space and my needs. It had been unceremoniously dumped next to the futon the day we moved in. When school started here a couple of weeks ago, Margaret announced that the table would be her desk. This is cute and all but I wasn't wild about her storing her crayon collection and precious notebooks right at William's height and, besides, I wanted my side table back. I offered to build Margaret all sorts of cool desks and she steadfastly refused to use anything but this side table.

I'm adaptable so I decided to build this nightstand for myself. After two sets of simple shelves I felt ready for something more challenging. I thought that the drawer, in particular, would be a learning experience on this piece. Here is my version, drying in the kitchen:

I'm really happy with how this turned out. I see a million mistakes in it but I did learn a lot and had fun building it. The drawer is a good fit and actually works! Amazing!

Of course, once this was finished Margaret realized that a school desk with a drawer would really be just the thing for her. I acquiesced and moved the side table next to my chair:

And let her take over the nightstand for her school things:

Everyone is happy.

I am really enjoying working with wood and have a few other projects up my sleeve. It is, honestly, not the most kid-friendly hobby. But Eric is supportive and entertains the kids on the weekends for me and otherwise I pop outside during naps to make a few cuts or do some sanding. The huge shelves were all done before we moved in while Uncle Ben was here to help with the kids.

So, enough from me! I hope to blog more about the kids before long.

Minnesota . . . oops

2010-06-14T21:23:00.003-05:00

So we're back on the road. And the fact that I didn't blog--or even take a single picture--during our whole time in Minnesota is no reflection on how nice a time we had there. We saw many old friends over many meals and had a great time catching up with everyone. We saw lots of Grandma Marga and Larry and Uncle Ben. The kids had a great time getting to know Dunkel, the 1-year-old black lab puppy the Tuthills got just after we moved last year. Margaret was especially good with the dog, begging to feed him and take him for walks everyday. By the last day of our visit even William was beginning to warm up to the dog. Unfortunately, we're all a bit under the weather after all this vacation and late nights with friends and family left little time for blogging.

I do have pictures from our last day on the road before we got to the Twin Cities. We made one last Laura Ingalls Wilder pilgrimage to Walnut Grove the setting for On the Banks of Plum Creek. The book doesn't actually feature too prominently in my own Little House literary experience but the Little House television series was set entirely in Walnut Grove so it remains a popular tourist destination. The kids were excited to see the actual creek.

But I am sorry to say that Minnesota gets a big fail in the welcome sign department. We've been avoiding interstates when possible and the road we used to enter Minnesota wasn't too concerned about welcoming us.

Today we set off on the road again and it was by far the best travel day we've ever had. It helped that we stopped with friends for lunch and so had a nice long break and some nourishing food. It then helped that we got some ice cream for an afternoon snack. Margaret never finishes her ice cream no matter how little we give her and she was kind enough to give William the rest which we didn't notice until after he'd smeared it all over his face and stuck the ice cream cup on his foot.

Good times. The kids all laughed together for a few hours and then all three of them fell asleep. I think today was the one of the only times they've ever all slept at once in the car and it was certainly a first for this trip. Then I fell asleep. It's amazing how fast a trip goes when we all nap.

We're now relaxing in Sturgeon Bay, WI for a day or so before pushing on towards home.

South Dakota

2010-06-02T22:52:00.006-05:00

Today was our only day of driving in only one state. South Dakota is long. But we also purposely kept the drive time a bit shorter for today and tomorrow so we could actually stop at some things we normally zoom past at 75 mph.

First up: Wall Drug. If you've ever passed within 100 miles of Wall, SD then you know what I'm talking about. We started seeing the signs for Wall Drug as soon as we hit Wyoming. The signs are just stuck up in the farm fields and are a bit more on the "homemade" spectrum although that is partly part of their vintage Western shtick. Neither Eric or I had ever been to Wall Drug which is, in fact, a drug store. It opened in 1931 and offered free ice water. It is now in it's third generation of owners from the same family and they still offer free ice water along with 5-cent coffee, amazing homemade donuts and . . . pretty much anything else you might want. The place is massive and extremely kitschy. We barely plumbed the depths of all Wall Drug has to offer but we did check out the fun backyard.
When you're at Wall Drug you just have to participate enthusiastically in all things tacky.

William's new favorite sign is "horse" and he's had lots of opportunity to practice out here in cowboy country.

Even Eric got in on the fun.

We pushed on through miles and miles of endless, but beautiful, prairie for the rest of the day before rolling into De Smet. I've mentioned here before that I've always been a Laura Ingalls Wilder fanatic. We finished reading the entire "Little House" series to the kids a few months back and I really wanted to check out the town where several of her books are set. The Ingalls family moved to De Smet when Laura was 13. She was married and became a mother there before moving on to Missouri in her twenties. It was really fun to see some sites and drive around the town. Since I know there is at least one other Little House fan reading, I'll offer a brief tour:

Loftus's Store. This was the store that bought the wheat during the Hard Winter and tried to sell it at a hugely inflated price to the starving townspeople. Ironic that it's the one still there.
Pa's office building where the family lived during the cold winters. It was wood then, not brick.

Just after Laura and Almanzo married, the Ingalls family "proved up" on their homestead claim and promptly gave up on farming. They moved to this house in town and Pa proceeded to do all the things he'd actually been doing in town all along to keep the family alive.

The site of Laura and Almanzo's homestead. They tried farming two different sites and utterly failed in both places. After selling this site and burning down the home on the other they moved into town as well before heading to the Ozarks and finally finding farming success.

After having read the Little House books compulsively for years and years and studying the real history of the characters every chance I could get it was really interesting to see the country in person. Much of the country is given over to large-scale farming rather than the smaller homesteading that was going on in the 1880s. This is certainly a loss in some ways but, on the other hand, no one in these families could make farming work in that difficult country with unpredictable weather. It was also slightly disappointing to see so many trees everywhere. When the land was settled up the government was offering "tree claims." You could own the land if you could keep a certain number of trees per acre alive for five years. Almanzo Wilder almost killed himself trying to keep his trees alive on the dry, windy prairie and gave up in the end. But some of his trees are still there. And while it's still a huge, rolling prairie, the groves of trees and windbreaks everywhere really break it up. I would have loved to see it before all that planting.

Eric is reminding me that I've been exhausted and should get to bed but I'm not worried because I've got:

That, my friends, is coffee. Thanks to our new GPS (thanks, Dad!) we discovered this morning that Grand Rapids, SD is home to a Dunn Bros. coffee shop. Dunn Bros. started in St. Paul and is definitely our favorite coffee. And their iced cold press is our favorite drink (I don't even normally drink iced coffee). When we ordered they offered us their new growler full of coffee which can be brought in when empty for a refill at a great deal. No more suffering through nasty hotel and gas station coffee! I've got the growler chilling in an ice bucket overnight and I will be glad for it in the morning.

Back on the road

2010-06-01T22:29:00.004-05:00

Friends in New Jersey who are familiar with both our car and life with small children were dubious that we had successfully packed ourselves into our Hyundai hatchback. I confess that I really, really wanted a minivan before this trip but it did not work out. I opted to get super-excited about getting 35+ mpg for much of our trip and feeling like a logistics rock star with this packing job.

Our situation is definitely complicated by the fact that the wheelchair uses up quite a bit of our trunk space. It doesn't really disassemble very easily so we have to pack around it in a way that allows us to get it out at rest stops without emptying the trunk completely. My strategy is basically to use lots of soft bags so that things can be squished. When we are stopping successively for one night at a time I pack one bag of stuff we use every night and an additional bag for each day's clothes which is then used for dirty laundry. It works even if we do feel a bit funny about carting our unconventional luggage through hotel lobbies. We did opt to leave cloth diapers behind this trip but we also have an entire bag just full of books.

Lest you think the trunk won't really close over all that ;)
We are also fortunate that the kids don't really need leg room. Below Margie's seat is a huge bag of snacks, a bag of drinks, and two small bags of books and activities for the kids. Below Joseph's seat is a portable high chair.

Today's drive was probably the most beautiful and interesting of the whole trip. We started off with a couple hours of driving north with the Rockies to our left. Pike's Peak is beautiful but I was glad to see the greater concentration of high peaks around Denver.

Today was my first time in Wyoming. The combination of rolling hills, high mountains in the distance, and the random spots of sandy desolation were definitely interesting. We saw a real cowboy in action on his horse and saw emptiness to rival Western Kansas.

I'd also never been to South Dakota before today. Our whole year in Minnesota we hoped to make a trip out to the Black Hills and never did. We just loved everything we saw about South Dakota and it was the first time Eric said, "I'd love to have a cabin out here," and I immediately agreed.

We passed the still-incomplete Crazy Horse Memorial. I do not know much of the Native American history of this area though I am well aware that there is plenty of tragedy to go around. This sculpture has been in progress for over sixty years and is quite controversial but I will say that the carving of the face is quite striking.

We saw Crazy Horse on our way to Mt. Rushmore--another controversial mountain carving. The drive up to the sculpture was itself worth the short detour. The rock formations were just amazing. Partway up the hill there was a pull off and we wondered what everyone was staring at until we turned around and caught the above profile of Washington. Further up the mountain were the views of all four presidents.

I remember in fourth grade asking my teacher if we could be assigned a research paper on "any topic we wanted" just so I could write about Mt. Rushmore. I am sad to report that I have retained nothing from my fascination at the time but it was fun to finally see the monument.

Wedding Day!

2010-05-30T23:11:00.005-05:00

Today was the big day. Our good friend, Rene, was married today and her wedding was most of the reason for our visit to Colorado. It's nice, of course, that we got in some visiting with my Dad but we see him pretty regularly on the East Coast. Joseph was the ring bearer and Margaret the flower girl for this wedding and they have been looking forward to this day for months.

But before I get to the kids, I have to gush a bit about this wedding and the family that hosted it. I've known Rene for several years and heard lots about her family. They always sounded wonderful and creative and resourceful but nothing prepared me for this wedding. Rene wanted to be married at home so the first step was to build a barn. That's right. That beautiful building at the top of this post was built by her family in the last month. Her father owns a sawmill/lumberyard but, still.

The upstairs is a loft room that was used for out-of-town guest housing. The bride and groom exchanged vows on the deck there and Joseph is trying out the boardwalk that was built this morning. And lest you think that a wedding in a barn can't be wonderfully elegant, wonder no longer:

The entire setting was lovely. In addition to building the barn Rene's family also self-catered the reception (delicious Cajun food), made Margaret's dress and about a million other things that many people would have hired someone else to do.

Margaret was a lovely flower girl. After getting dressed and getting her hair done she spent a long time meticulously pulling apart roses to fill her basket with petals.

At the rehearsal Margaret had refused to walk down the aisle alone. She insisted that once she had her flower petals she was going to do exactly what was expected of her. But as anyone who knows Margaret could probably guess, she froze at the prospect of walking past lots of strangers so I had to personally walk her down the aisle and get her into her seat. Everyone loved her anyway, of course.

The ring bearer, on the other hand, performed flawlessly.

Joseph took his job very seriously, wheeled down the aisle beautifully and looked quite dapper while doing it. I was not at leisure to take pictures of the kids actually going down the aisle.

My favorite part of the day was after dinner. Margaret was in a bit of a funk, I think, and asked if we could go find her flower basket. We retrieved it from the house and she asked me to come with her back outside. She walked back to the end of the aisle and proceeded to walk slowly down the aisle scatter flower petals the whole way. The photographer caught it all. Then she walked back and forth up and down the aisle until her basket was empty. Then she asked to find Rene who was only too happy to take another trip down the aisle, hand-in-hand with Margaret, this time over flower petals.

Shortly after Margaret had completed her appointed task the dancing began and the shy flower girl became the life of the party. She wouldn't sit down.

She danced with me:

With the maid of honor:

With the bride:

The boys got in on the fun, too. Joseph raced across the room to ask the maid of honor to dance as soon as the dance floor was open to everyone.

And William, who is a dancing fanatic, couldn't get enough. We couldn't quite capture the sheer delight on his face while he bopped around with us. But William spent a good deal of time trying to get as dirty as possible. He spent the ceremony chucking fistfuls of mulch, most of which landed on himself.

He spent the toasts playing around this beautiful spot tossing stones at the Adirondack chairs.

And staring, entranced, at the huge dogs which he loved as long as they remained a safe distance away.

A lovely day for our family and a beautiful start to a marriage for Rene and Bob. Margaret is sleeping in her dress next to me.

Day Four

2010-05-27T22:38:00.003-05:00

We've finally arrived at our first destination in Colorado. Today was our shortest day of driving thus far and while most people would consider Western Kansas and Eastern Colorado as among the most boring drives in the country we enjoyed the novelty of the emptiness for today at least.

Early in our drive we were scanning the horizon and said, "What's that way ahead? Are those tall buildings?" After awhile we determined that we were coming up on a wind farm--the first we'd ever seen. When we first saw the wind farm we were 14 miles away and the wind farm was to our right for 30 miles of driving. Eric and I are lovers of history and have been talking quite a bit the last few days about the first settlers of the West. To put this wind farm sighting--and our speed relative to a covered wagon--in perspective, a settler in a wagon would have traveled almost two full days between first seeing the wind farm and getting to it and then would have traveled alongside it for three or four days. The wind farm, of course, wasn't there in the nineteenth century, but you get my point. I think the Kansas prairie probably seemed a lot bigger at two-miles-per hour.

We got off the interstate a little ways before the Colorado border and traveled on a fast but smaller road. The route had been suggested by my dad whose house we are staying at. It was amazing. There were several points where our vistas--for miles and miles and miles--included no sign of civilization other than the road we were on. Most of the time there were at least some utility poles or another car but not always. There was no place to get lunch so we ate cold leftover Chinese food from the night before, very grateful that we'd packed it in our cooler for the drive.

And here is Margaret at the "rest stop" mid-afternoon:

I took a ton of pictures of her getting blown to bits. She loved the wind and the prairie grass and was running all around. Even William seemed to be excited about the location. Joseph and Margaret professed a desire to live on the prairie in the middle of nowhere.

Colorado began as a continuation of Kansas but changed before long into a high-desert landscape. On a not-particularly clear day we first spotted Pike's Peak about 70 miles away. And, again, we reflected that a pioneer in a covered wagon would have seen nothing but flat land for weeks and weeks and weeks and then one day would see this mountain looming up out of the prairie and still take more than a week to reach it. And we did it in about an hour. Amazing.

I don't know if I'll keep up this daily journal of our travels but I know at least a few readers are enjoying it. The kids are in a wedding this weekend and we will be busy with that for a few days. But I promise to be back before too long. And next Tuesday we'll be back on the road again and headed to Minnesota.

Day Three

2010-05-26T22:46:00.002-05:00

After my post yesterday about how we keep the kids happy on long road trips I briefly considered capturing some video footage for tonight's post. About fifteen minutes before our lunch stop Margaret shifted into full meltdown mode while William just wailed and wailed and Joseph basically sang as loudly as he could in an effort to tune them out. All they needed was a nice lunch break and a nap but it really made me wonder for a bit what we were thinking when we embarked on this adventure.

Today I crossed two states off my "to see" list. Missouri was a first for me. The most frustrating thing about long-haul car trips with kids is that there is very little time to get out and sight see. Urban community and urban development is a definite passion of ours and we would have loved to see St. Louis but we had to keep moving. Fortunately the freeway affords a great view of the city's most famous landmark.

The kids especially loved this huge geyser at the park near the arch. And, yes, we were definitely seeing some weather. We watched but did not personally experience a lightning storm over Kansas City a few hours after this.

Kansas was another first for me but Eric was born there. We've stopped for the night in Manhattan and it has been incredible to watch the Kansas landscape change so quickly just in the distance we've come so far. I'm pretty sure it just gets more desolate from here on ourtuntil we reach Colorado Springs.

The kids are more or less holding up. Joseph, as I said yesterday, is a great traveler. He is just loving the geography of everything. He was fascinated by the Eastern Continental Divide. He loves to see the rivers. He is really excited about seeing the prairie. We finished up a couple months ago a year-long journey through the entire Little House on the Prairie series. He is excited to see the prairie Laura Ingalls lived on as a little girl and we'll be headed through South Dakota next week where she lived as an older child and young adult. Unfortunately her books have also instilled in him a real fear of tornadoes so he was a little on edge during the storm today.

William is really excited about dancing lately so whenever he starts to fuss we turn on some music and get him moving. He's sort of Pavlovian about it--he can't not dance when he hears music. It is very cute.

Margaret is struggling the most but she (and we) are learning how to keep her feeling balanced. She likes to have her window down for large sections of the day so she can get blown to bits by the wind. She has discovered gum chewing as a way to work off nervous energy. And, for some reason, she has developed an odd ritual about making coffee at hotels. She finds the mini coffee pots so inviting and spends an hour or more tinkering with the pot, the sugar packets, the powdered creamer, and the stirrers making us a coffee concoction that we can barely stomach.

There has been some reported disbelief about us fitting into our small car so tomorrow I will try to get a shot of our intricately packed trunk for those of you just love logistical details like that.

Good night!

Day Two

2010-05-25T22:19:00.004-05:00

Hello from Dale, Indiana! Today was our longest day of driving for the entire trip. We managed ten hours of actual driving which translated to a roughly 12-hour day after factoring in all the rest stops required with three little kids. After noting that there were at least six affordable hotel options at every exit we pulled in to the town we wanted to stop in and found . . . two. Eric and I are not hardcore fitness enthusiasts but when we've spent all day in the car we really, really like to get in a swim and a run, respectively. The obviously-more-affordable place offered us nothing along these lines so we tentatively went across the street and found that the rooms were about half price. Amazing! It is very nice to stay in a comfortable place with a chance to work out all the muscle stiffness from a day in the car.

A few observations from our travels today . . . Northern West Virginia is prettier than Southern West Virginia. The ride was pretty today but nothing like we'd seen on previous trips west.

Kentucky is gorgeous. I've been to almost every state that borders Kentucky but never even passed through a corner of the state. We loved driving through the rolling hills and horse farms. We passed an exit for the distillery that makes our favorite bourbon and we were so tempted to stop. But we didn't. I doubt there'd be much for kids at a distillery.

And almost immediately after passing into Indiana we saw a sign for a winery. Oddly enough, we weren't at all tempted to stop and sample Indiana wine.

I know I'm a dork for taking pictures of the state welcome signs but it is hard! I don't know why a sign looming so large in front of me turns out so tiny in the pictures.

My friend Sarah asked how we keep the kids busy in the car. We are far from experts on this. This is the third year in a row we've done a multi-day road trip like this and this year's is much more involved. We are good enough at maintaining sanity all around that we do this every year but there are definitely tense moments. The biggest thing is that we have drastically different parenting standards in the car. I all but ban noisy, battery-operated toys at home but they don't bother me in the car. We pack lots and lots of snacks trying to strike a balance between novelty and healthfulness. I bag them into serving sizes before the trip and the kids can have pretty much as many as they want. I save new books or magazines for the road. I hit up the dollar store for novel and highly entertaining trinkets. We sing, we dance, I act like a total goof ball to keep the kids laughing. William is generally happy if everyone else is happy. Joseph is fantastic at entertaining himself with the slightest occupation (he can draw for hours with a white board, for example) and Margaret requires pretty much full-time attention.

One thing we've found really helpful is to preserve our routine as much as possible. We do family prayer at the same time but in the car. I brought a few school books and we do a short school time in the car. The after lunch stretch is rest time. At the hotel we read the same chapter book we've been using for bedtime at home.

It all works pretty well for us. We'd much rather drive and be on our own schedule and actually see the country than fly and deal with luggage and juggling car seats and getting a wheelchair on a plane. And Eric and I always pack a nice beer to drink after the kids are in bed. So with that I'm off to enjoy a Belgian Ale before trying to finally get caught up on sleep.

Day One

2010-05-24T19:29:00.003-05:00

The epic 2010 Summer Road Trip begins. Today's progress was somewhat unimpressive:

And:

We had originally planned to leave yesterday morning but Eric discovered a fantastic academic conference "on the way" that he had to go to. Sounds a little nuts, perhaps--hitting a conference at the outset of a long road trip--but I agreed that he should go after hearing the roster of speakers. So we left this morning instead and drove a mere five hours to Emmittsburg, MD. Eric actually interviewed for a job at the seminary here so we are familiar with the area. The town is also home of the St. Elizabeth Ann Seton shrine. Mother Seton was the first American-born saint to be canonized. The school where Eric currently teaches was founded by her nephew who named it after her so we definitely feel a connection. While Eric went to his conference the kids and I played outside at the Shrine which was, of course closed. We've been to the Shrine about six times and found it closed four of those times. The schedule is posted, we just never check it.

Emmittsburg is just a few minutes south of Gettysburg so we drove around there for awhile as well looking for cannons. Then we spent some downtime at our hotel in Thurmont which you have probably never heard of even though it is the home of Camp David. Our hotel really plays that up and we are in the "Associated Press" room though from the looks of it the Reagan Room would have been more comfortable. We haven't had any presidential sightings.

Despite my record two blog posts in one night I don't promise a daily log of our wanderings but it should be an interesting trip: Colorado to Minnesota and back to New Jersey. We are driving 4300 miles over nine days for a total trip of almost one month. We'll be hitting five states I've never been to and I hope we'll do enough sight seeing to warrant at least a few more installments here.

Road trip prep AKA Mother's Day

2010-05-24T16:36:00.006-05:00

Mother's Day began quietly this year and without any specific plans. We got to Mass early and then decided to just go for a drive. We've been having fun exploring New Jersey. Prior to living here my entire experience of the state had pretty much been confined to cursing holiday traffic on the New Jersey Turnpike. We've found that we actually live in a pretty neat place. In April we spent one misty, foggy day driving through the small mountains in northwest Jersey. So beautiful. So for Mother's Day we headed south towards the "Pine Barrens."

This area of the state is pretty undeveloped and we were just starting to wonder what we could find for lunch, "Live Bait" seeming like our only option when we stumbled across the Red Barn Cafe. It proved to be the most perfect and delightful location for Mother's Day brunch I could have wanted. A tiny, rustic dining room attached to a plant nursery. The food was incredible, the pies (which are locally famous) were among the best we'd ever had, and when it turned out to be a cash-only establishment the owner handed Eric her business card and told him to mail her a check (we found enough between us once we emptied our wallets).

From there we decided to drive down the coast a bit but we wanted to find some shoreline apart from the beach town culture. We ended up all the way down at Cape May which is the southernmost tip of New Jersey. The beach there is protected and beautiful and there was something for everyone.

Eric caught me on camera pointing out the huge ship off the coast to Joseph.

William still hates the water but is loving the sand.

If you ask, Margaret will tell you she's a "beach fanatic." She loves everything about the beach and will go into the ocean water in May, will lie on her stomach and army crawl through sand and loves running around like some kind of seaside nymph.

Joseph loved the long boardwalk. You can see his hair blowing back from the speed he was using to careen down the ramp. Joseph is doing his best to turn my hair gray.

And the requisite unimpressive shot of my oh-so-photogenic family.

At the end of all these adventures we realized we'd spent about 13 hours traveling which was a much longer day than any we'd planned for our summer road trip. So we ended the day feeling optimistic.

She can sleep anywhere

2010-05-08T19:09:00.005-05:00

When I took William up to bed this evening both kids were outside playing. Our Brazilian neighbors have a six-year-old boy who had finally come home after being out all day and we let them have some rare after-dinner playtime to celebrate.

From the upstairs bedroom I could heard Eric say, "Time to come in, kids. I'm going to bump Joseph up first and then it will be time for Margaret to come in." I hurried downstairs as soon as William was asleep. Margaret has been begging for my presence at bedtime recently and I indulge her while working on knitting projects.

Downstairs I saw Eric and Joseph but neither heard nor saw Margaret. I said, "Margaret didn't fall asleep already did she?" Eric responded, "Check the camera."

This is what I found:

Don't worry, she'd been relocated to her bed by the time I saw the pictures.

What's William up to?

2010-04-23T15:33:00.006-05:00

William is most definitely not up for walking. He has no interest whatsoever in getting around on two legs. But, as my grandmother said the other day, "Don't make trouble for yourself." He's easier to keep track of for now and I don't think there's anything wrong with him.

He has gotten super communicative lately. We're really trying hard with baby sign language because he is a shrieker. I've seen bystanders visibly jump when he opens his mouth to let loose and just today I ran into a total stranger on the street who recognized us from church and asked, "What was wrong with him on Sunday?" What was wrong was that he wanted to be outdoors and I had the gall to keep him in the church building. William cannot get enough of being outside. He wakes up in the morning or from his nap and gleefully points to the bedroom door. Then he points to the stairs. Then he points to the stroller. I put him in and he points to the door. So we've been doing a lot of this:

He's definitely not to the posing for pictures stage yet. He was neither asleep nor sad but very happily hanging out while the kids and I worked on a project. Sometimes Margaret pushes him around a bit. And I've been looking for a good excuse for a walk every day lately because he's so happy outside in the stroller.

One of the signs William has mastered is "more." It's always a big hit for "baby's first sign." He recently exercised his powers of communication to get lots of his new favorite food:

No, that is not my hand in the picture. I would never dream of feeding one of my children Nutella for breakfast.

Although William has definitely arrived at the demanding, shrieky stage of babyhood he is generally a really happy, incredibly sweet little boy. He loves to give hugs--especially to Margaret and I. He prefers to fall asleep cuddled up next to me with his arm around my neck, and we're all having a lot of fun watching him learn and explore.

And does it make me a really bad mother that I snapped a picture before rescuing him when he got stuck in the plastics cupboard today?

Sprucing up the Place

2010-04-08T09:50:00.005-05:00

Ouch. Has it really been over a month since I last posted? Is anyone still reading?

We've been busy here surviving the last few weeks of winter and enjoying the spring (summer?) weather. I don't have any pictures to prove it but we had a wonderful Easter spending Sunday with a priest friend in Manhattan. We went to a fabulous Mass with wonderful music and then took a long walk in Central Park with about 4 million other people. We have a real knack for picking the most popular holiday destinations--we went to Rockefeller Center and St. Patrick's Cathedral on Christmas Day.

At home we've been busy making our house work better for us. We briefly considered aggressively pursuing home ownership because we'd love a home that works really well for Joseph. But we decided instead to save up for awhile and make our current rental work better for us. We love this house and its location so we don't mind staying put for a bit.

Our biggest problem was that the kids were sleeping upstairs. Joseph is getting too heavy for me to carry up and down stairs and we want his bed and clothes and everything to be more accessible to him. We suggested to him that he could sleep downstairs in what we'd been calling the "playroom" which is right off the living room but he didn't want to sleep alone and we couldn't figure out how to fit two beds in there given the constraints of the piano and our "fireplace" (hating that thing more all the time!). It finally occurred to us to try bunk beds. We hemmed and hawed about Margaret being on top but finally decided to go for it. They were a big hit with the kids.

The beds were plain, unfinished pine. I don't particularly care for light-colored wood and they were getting grubby fast. I spent last weekend finishing them and I'm pretty pleased with my first try at staining and coating wood furniture.

Before:

After:

I think it's a big improvement and I'm excited to try my hand at some more wood-working and home improvement.

But, first . . . .

Putting the kids bedroom right in the main living space (there is just a double doorway separating this room from the living room) is awkward for using the living room in the evenings and it meant losing our "guest room." The futon is still in the kids room. We were also left with an empty upstairs bedroom. We moved our bedroom into where the kids used to sleep. It's a bigger room and the design works much better for us while William is still sleeping with us. There is room for our king-size bed, a toddler bed, three large bookshelves and two dressers. The room at the top of the stairs we turned into a sitting room with some on-sale IKEA chairs:

The braided rug was made by Eric's grandmother (Eric's mom made the one in our living room) and the bookcase has been around forever. I'm hoping to refinish it with the help of my new power sander :) The coffee table came to us courtesy of bulk trash day. Twice a month the city will collect anything you leave on the curb and one morning we were headed out to Mass and saw that our neighbors across the street had left out this perfectly good coffee table. Our furniture budget was maxed out after the beds and chairs but this room really needed something. Eric almost broke his back hauling this wood and metal piece up our stairs but it works pretty well.

Also gracing this room is the antique roll-top that has been in my family forever (and that door goes to the stairs):

And Joseph's old bed:

We intended for Joseph to use this bed on his bunk but when we tried it out we discovered that it was about one inch too long. I don't think it's an official "extra long." It was given to us by someone from Canada. I made a bunch of nice pillow covers for all our spare pillows and put a king-size fitted sheet around both mattress and box spring and it passes for a day bed. That's pretty much our only closet there to the right.

This big rearrangement actually makes us more guest-friendly. We can now have a single guest sleep in this upstairs sitting room. Or, if a whole family visits, we can move to the futon in the kids room and offer the entire upstairs to guests. I know you all loved that futon but I hope we can make it up to you somehow on your next visit.

Eric made me promise to finish making curtains before tackling any other furniture re-finishing/building projects. We have horrible vertical blinds in our house. They are so popular in this neighborhood but they are definitely not our style. I've been replacing them with simple curtains in most of the rooms in our house. The top picture in this post is our new kitchen windows. I have only our bedroom left to do. It's nice to make this place our own a bit more. And maybe all these projects will get me posting more often.

Help me out here . . .

2010-02-21T22:15:00.005-05:00

I need help convincing certain adult members of the household that this baby just wouldn't look this cute in pinstripes.

Christmas 2009

2010-01-06T15:07:00.006-05:00

Getting the Christmas post in just under the wire here . . .

We always put up our tree on December 23rd and decorate the next day. Getting the living room ready for our tree required some rearrangement of the furniture and looking for places to set our Christmas decorations required some cleaning. After living in our house for almost five months it finally felt like we'd finished unpacking and I snapped a few shots of our main living area for those of you who haven't been to visit yet.

This first shot is taken from the living room--about where the tree ended up--into what we've called the "play room." The futon is usually down in "bed mode" for guests and also because the kids like to play on it that way. The room was pretty trashed and uninviting but for Christmas became a lovely second sitting room.

The other corner . . .

And the other corner. The "fireplace" is fake and extremely ugly. We removed the linoleum "hearth piece" and the "logs" but that is as far as the landlord would let us go so we're living with it for now.

Then from the playroom to the rest of the house . . . You can just see the tree poking out where the rocker usually is. To the left of the hutch is the basement door. The beautiful french doors lead out to a large entryway and Eric is looking at me from the kitchen. The staircase goes up to two large, railroaded bedrooms.

So, there is the bulk of our home. Sorry to be tedious but I know some have been wanting some pictures.

All three kids helped decorate the tree.

William was actually great with the tree and has been spotted the last couple days pulling down a favorite golden star, sucking on it a moment, and then trying--in vain--to rehang it. So cute.

Christmas Eve we attended Mass at our parish down the street and then came home for cookies and eggnog.

Christmas morning we had our traditional Caramel-Pecan Rolls and pomegranates. The kids love pomegranates and found some in their stockings this year. That day we were on our own and decided to go into Manhattan. We had thought that some of the touristy Christmas attractions would be less crowded on the 25th. We were wrong. It was a very nice day anyway but we had a very brief visit to St. Patrick's Cathedral and a very brief glimpse of the tree at Rockefeller Center alongside thousands of our closest friends. We returned home in time to make a simple but spectacular dinner and then proceeded to get ready for a fun weekend of hosting. Eric's Dad and his wife came for most of Saturday and my whole family was here Sunday. We just love being close to family.

We stretch out the gift-opening through the whole Twelve Days of Christmas because the kids get very overwhelmed by endless gifts all at once. Epiphany (today) is when we exchange gifts for each other. Here are the kids enjoying their new game of Chutes and Ladders. Joseph and Margaret have gotten really excited about games over the last month and they are well-matched. Margaret has a better sense of the big picture--how to win--and Joseph remembers the rules and can read numbers better.

Eric and I gave each other books and William is so excited to dive right into mine:

I am a little too proud to say that I first conceived of the idea of getting this cookbook and cooking my way through it early last summer before I'd ever heard of Julie and Julia. I first learned to cook at all that way: by getting a cookbook and making everything in it. That had been a vegetarian cookbook and I've been anxious to do more with meat and learn about traditional sauces. If only I'd come up with this amazing idea a few years ago and started a blog about it . . . Anyway, I'm looking forward to working with this book although I won't be sharing the results here. Maybe we'll finally see that movie now that life has calmed down a bit as well.

A very happy Epiphany to all!

Cookie fun!

2009-12-22T11:18:00.005-05:00

Growing up my mom made thousands of cookies each Christmas but she never, in my memory, made sugar cookie cutouts. I can appreciate why not. They are a major pain and not really all that tasty. But Grandma Marga did these with the kids in Minnesota last year and I thought it a fun tradition for the kids. We cut out the cookies yesterday and baked them. All our cookie cutters came, in one or another, from Eric's family. We inherited a coffee can of cookie cutters from Grandma Ada--several red Christmas themed ones that we couldn't make work and then a bell, a star, a circle and a "bar" with zig-zag edges. The kids told Eric last night, "We made stars and bars Christmas cookies." Hm. There was also a music note--appropriate from Eric's highly musical family.

Our other two cookies cutters were a wedding gift from Eric's uncle Steve: a cow, and the state of Wisconsin. These people are serious about their homeland.

So the shapes themselves aren't all that festive but the overall effect was very nice, in the end, and we sure had fun.

Margaret was pretty much in "production" mode cranking out three or four cookies to Joseph's one but sacrificing real artistry in favor of speed.

Joseph was very serious about every single one of his creations. Some highlights include a star having a solar flare:

And Santa Claus with his pack and boots. You can see the lone chocolate sprinkle which is his smiling mouth and the cinnamon candy is his "fiery eye." Apparently we need a little more Clement Moore around here.

I went for more whimsy with my cookies creating some festive homage to favorite Wisconsin destinations (Madison and Sturgeon Bay). And, because we prefer our milk from brown Jersey cows, a spotted bovine sporting a seasonally-appropriate red nose.

William napped through most of the project but woke just in time to consume a broken musical note while we cleaned up.

This does not bode well

2009-12-15T10:21:00.004-05:00