My blog

This morning I turned on "Curious George" to hypnotize my children, and trick them into forgetting to burn down our house, while I took a shower. That plan was a raging success except for when I emerged from the shower my kids had some kind of mysterious mania for windsocks. We've talked about windsocks before in a passing way, (like a: literally I drove past it at 45 mph while my kids asked about everything they saw out the window and one of those things was a windsock-kind of way.) I don't know what George did in that episode, but their passing interest in windsocks had bloomed into a full-blown obsession in the time it took me to wash my hair. They begged to make a windsock, and McBoy gleefully explained how he planned to hang his brand new socks, which he loves, on a nail outside...awesome... To save the footwear in our house, I convinced them we should make a cool fish windsock and I'm actually pretty happy with how easy it was and how cool it turned out. Ste...

My parents have been living in their house for about 15 years. During that time  zero dogs and zero cats have lived in the house. The previous owners put a doggy door in the door between the garage and house, but even if we had a small animal it wouldn't have been able to use the doggy door because it was boarded shut to conform with fire safety regulations. So this un-used and un-usable doggy door sat there for years and nobody ever looked at it or thought about it until one day my mom decided she wanted that door to be painted black. My dad painted the door and suddenly realized that he hated that defunct doggy door: Once he pointed it out we all wondered how we possibly walked past it for so long without doing anything about it, because now we all hated it. But how do you remove a doggy door? Google had lots of ideas for putting a doggy door in, but not for hiding one. So my dad made a plan to get rid of the doggy door: Using a bit of trim and some bead board he made 6 panels (3...

I made a painting, a great big watercolor painting! I was pretty nervous to try out watercolors but my dad, and my friend Sara Gourley gave me a lot of good tips and encouragement to get started. So I watched a hundred youtube videos and got to work. You have to soak watercolor paper and then tape it to a flat surface so it won't buckle while you are painting it. I taped mine to our card table. Unfortunately that table is made of some kind of space-age plastic that nothing on this earth can stick to. After about the 3rd day of painting all the tape let go. Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!  But I already had a lot of paint on it so I just decided to work with all the buckles. I do not recommend this, unless your life is just so easy that you are looking for a way to make it difficult.  Luckily the paper I used was really heavy, so things worked out in the end. I'm happy with how the painting turned out, but I am probably most impressed with the frame Handsome Bryc...

Things have been busy around here. Here are some pictures of what we have been up to: Ewan's first football game! Daddy reading stories McGirlie's birthday! Sequioa National Forest with Grandma and Grandpa McEwen! McBoy's birthday! And finally, Halloween costumes! Buzz, Jessie, Woody, and Sid: Seriously, I was Sid! Why didn't anybody recognize me??? Doesn't everybody watch these movies non-stop??? Sheesh, Halloween is the worst.

As I mentioned earlier, I have been working on revamping our bedroom as a surprise for Handsome Bryce. Also, as I said, it turned out not to be a total surprise because I am not very sneaky. (Bryce saw a picture of these curtains which I left on the desktop with the name "Secret Crazy Curtains.") Be prepared, they are pretty crazy. Here is the room before:  To me, the curtains we had were fine, just resoundingly ok. The peach and green paint, were not fine though. First I painted the peach parts white, and the green parts tan. Then I needed new curtains. I looked all over. I soon discovered that I hated every kind of curtains currently sold in stores. They were all too twee, too generic, too grandma-ish, too ugly, too cutesy, too too too mainstream! Yes. I am a curtain hipster. I realized that I didn't want curtains, I wanted art. The only way that would happen was to make them myself. So I bought a $5 flat sheet from KMart and did this:  Much dramatic! So style! Wow! Soo...

I had a plan to surprise Handsome Bryce for Valentine's Day. I wanted to redo our cool (but unfortunately peach/orange and green) bedroom. It turns out, that is kind of a time consuming project, especially with two little kids, so I bumped it to be an anniversary surprise instead. It also turns out that two little kids have totally reduced my ability to be sneaky, and I ended up leaving clues everywhere by accident. So Bryce got surprised by the plans and pieces, but not the finished product. You can still be surprised though! I'll post finished pictures as soon as I finish painting. Here is a sneak peek at my redecorating project: Blue Pug Sculpture I want our bedroom to be comfortable and pretty, but still look like a bedroom where a man lives. So I have been looking for decorations that are neither pointless hoarder-items, nor floofy frilly girl-stuff. I was pretty excited when I stumbled on these dog sculptures by White Faux Taxidermy , but they were a little out of my pric...