Fireplace Progress

For all of you interested in my dollhouse, I thought I would give you a little glimpse of how my fireplace for the dollhouse living room is coming.  I built the main part first including all the trim and mantel, then painted it.  Then came cutting, installing, painting, and mortaring the egg carton bricks.  Last night I built the firebox and next I plan to build the chimney breast.  Here it is as of today:

I based the design on a picture that I saw in a magazine of a fireplace that I loved.  As far as figuring out all the "how's" of putting this together, I have been following this blog post, one of my all time favorite dollhouse blogs.  It has the best tutorials! 

I'll keep you posted on my progress, slow and steady wins the race, right?  :-)

Black Eye!

Josiah has a nack for doing the darndest things!  This week it was running into the patio table out back and giving himself a black eye!  (Not sure how, since the tabletop is actually shorter than him, but that's what he said happened!) 

When he first came in I though he had poked out his eye, but after cleaning it up a bit I could see that it was just this cut under the eye.  Praise the Lord he didn't hit another 1/8th inch up, or we would have had a major crisis on our hands!

Awana Store

Last week was Store night at Awana!  For any of you who have ever had kids in Awana you know that this is very exciting for the kids.  :-)  Elijah had almost $100 Awana bucks (Awana bucks are earned for various things from saying verses to wearing your vest) and Emmaline had almost $120!  Emmaline didn't spend much of hers, she came home with only a few things.  Elijah came home with only a few things as well, but he had one big purchase which took most of his money.  Here it is, a Cars clock that cost $50!

He is quite proud of his purchase and has it hanging above his bed in a prominent place so everyone can see it!

Announcing...

Perhaps some of you have been wondering what is taking me so long to get my projects done?  Why not much has been done with my dollhouse?  Why my posts are less frequent than usual?  Well, there is a good reason.  Drum roll, please...  I'm pregnant!!!  The baby is due around the middle to end of September.  Which means the baby could be born anywhere from early September to early October based on my past births, we've had everything from almost 3 weeks early to almost 2 weeks late!

I've been feeling tired (more wiped out than anything, it's hard to get up and get things done), extremely hungry, nauseous, and very very emotional.  So, about normal for me.  Although I don't normally feel this sick to my stomach.  We are hoping that means maybe girl?  If you think about it you could pray for me, I struggle with depression when I'm pregnant and just getting through each day is a struggle.

We are very excited and the kids are thrilled!  They have been telling everyone they come in contact with that we are having a baby.  :-) Another baby will truly be a wonderful blessing!

Dollhouse Living Room

This year I was sooo excited to get started on the interior of the dollhouse, and have been slightly disappointed at the cost of everything.  Perhaps for most folks it wouldn't seem like a lot but for us it is a fairly significant cost.  This past week I was finally able to put up the wallpaper on 2 of the walls in the living room!  Yay!  I'm going for a shabby chic style room, so I choose a pink flowered wallpaper.  I also painted the hardwood floor white.  I've been trying to decide whether to do the floor white or dark for months it seems ;-) and after spending some time looking at pictures of real white floors on the internet, I decided to take the plunge.  I also painted the stairs white for now, not sure if that will be permanent or not.  On the third wall in the living room I plan to do full-length beadboard.  I think it will look great!  However, I put in actual working light switches and I'm not sure how I'm going to cut those out of the beadboard.  I guess I'll cross that bridge when I come to it!

Here is how the living room looks with the wallpaper glued on.  I will freely admit I did a pretty lousy job cutting out the wallpaper.  Fortunately for me, the edge will all be covered by trim!  I propped the beadboard that I've painted in place for this picture and I like the overall effect.  I'm in the process of building a fireplace that will go on the bead board wall, I'll show you all when it's done.  I'm pretty excited about it!

Living room without the stairs

And with them...

Valentine's Day 2012

Our Valentine's Day was spent for the most part just as a regular day.  The kids made Valentines for everyone as part of school, which I forgot to get a picture of :-(.  I did, however, make a special dinner for the family, and remembered to buy a small box of chocolates for everyone.  The kids had fun eating all their chocolates at once!  Any my dear husband even remembered to buy something for me!  I was very happy about that!!!

Oops, it's Wednesday!

Wow, would you believe I completely forgot that today is my day to post?!?  I did all my usual things on the computer (e-mail, etc.) and logged off before I realized that I was supposed to post something today!  Ahhhhh!  Thank goodness for my handy dandy camera, full of pictures from my week which helps me remember what in the world happened.  So, on to the real subject of this post...

My wonderful hubby rented a ceiling sprayer this past weekend and fixed the family room ceiling!  Our bathroom floor has been flooded multiple times and each time it has soaked through the floor and dripped down through the family room ceiling.  So, we had an ugly spot where the texture was peeling off.  Fortunately for me, people almost never look at the ceiling, but still it bothered me.  Now that we are in the process of re-doing the family room I thought it was about time to fix that ugly spot.  Being the good sport that he is, my hubby spent his weekend fixing the spot for me.

It looks so much better!  Now I have to figure out when to paint the ceiling, yuck!

Animal Birthday Party

This past weekend we celebrated Micah's birthday with an animal birthday party!  We kept the party small, just family.  We have decided to limit the birthday parties to just family until the kids 5th birthday.  So, it was a very nice size group.  We decorated with blue balloons and streamers.  I made animal cupcakes, with some help from the kids!  We had cats, mice, and dogs.  We did just one activity, a coloring page.  I figured Micah is so little he doesn't need many things to do, he just wanted to play with cousins anyhow.  :-)  Overall it was a good party!

Rearranging some things...

We moved our TV from the family room to the living room.  This was quite the process and included buying a new TV stand and running speaker wire under the living room floor (in the crawl space).  It took Mark almost a whole day to get everything set up!

So far having the TV in the living room has worked out really well!  I like having the kids right by me when they watch movies and being able to monitor better what is being watched.  It also worked really well for our Friday night movie night, it was soooo much easier to just bring things from the kitchen into the living room instead of downstairs!

The next big project is the hallway upstairs.  I painted the ceiling this past week, now I need to get the walls done...  

We are in the middle of so many projects right now that the house is a bit of a mess but I know it will get better eventually so I just try to remind myself of that!

Mark's Birthday!

In honor of his birthday last week, Mark took the day off from work (when you're self-employed this involves turning down all appointments for that day, not as easy as it sounds...).  We had a wonderful breakfast of French toast, Mark's favorite. 

Playing angry birds on the cell phone while waiting for everyone to finish chores.

Then it was on to the gifts!  Each of the kids bought Mark a little something from the dollar store, my parents had dropped off a gift for him, and I had 3 gifts for him so he had quite the stash to open!  He had so much fun opening gifts, sticking bows on the kids and clowning around.

The rest of the day was spent hanging out, Mark surfed the Internet quite a bit and played his flight simulator.  The kids and I played games together and read books.  Mark's dad stopped by with Mark's card and gift and spent a bit of time chatting.

Reading books to the kiddos.

Counting up all his change to see if he had enough for airplane plans yet...

Mark, shooting his airsoft pistol.  The kids were fascinated by it!

In the evening we rented Rio from Redbox and watched it while we ate some pizza.  Then came cake and ice cream, followed by sending the kids to bed.  :-)  It was a fun day for Mark!