the cut rate re-upholster

UPDATE: ah ha, here it is, Harts is not really to blame.


About 3 years ago we bought these chairs (and the table) off a couple in Fremont vis a vis Craigslist. I only recovered 4 of the six chairs, mostly because I ran out of steam, but also for a few technical reasons.
And those two that didn't get recovered, they got crustier and crustier because they were the kids' chairs. I was mortified anytime that an adult sat on one by mistake.

So Kid C and I recovered them. She really did help. She sat on the chair while I screwed it in, like a weight pushing down on it.

Now when yogurt gets dribbled onto the chair pad, I can wipe it off easily.

I got the material from Hart's in Santa Cruz, although I'm slightly peeved about the purchase of the "oilcloth."
I paid about what I would have to buy it online, but since I was already there in town, I thought I'd get it in person. However, when I inspected it closely at home, I saw that they had just taken regular cotton fabric and "laminated" it with clear contact paper. And that's not an exageration, it's really clear contact paper on top. Hello, I could do that. Annoying.
But it is a cute pattern, I just hope it holds up like the real stuff.

Baby Tuesday

We had a big day at the beach with Grandpa Phil this morning. Complete with dumping sand in food, getting in the water with clothes on, and tantrums when we left. I didn't take any photos, because there wasn't a moment I could have safely pulled the camera out.
Anyway, that's why Baby Tuesday is a tidge late today.

Every Monday after lunch, while Baby R naps, it's "cooking time" with Kid C and me. Yesterday, Baby R didn't sleep becaue Kid C was such a blabbermouth in the hallway outside of his room along with Mojito barking his cabeza off out back.
So he got to join in the fun, and this is what happened:


Chocolate cupcake mayhem.


It was funny, so I let them smear chocolate frosting on each other.


He wasn't happy about being cleaned off later. Not..one...bit.


Earlier in the week on a cleaner day, the kids helped harvest vegetable from the garden.
This was the highlight of their week. Way more than the cupcakes.

'
she's "got the beat" er beet, and he has one of the many artichokes.
It's NorCal, we're all about artichokes.


He's actually looking at the camera, otherwise this isn't the best pic.

And at eBay, it was Bring Your Kids to Work Day. Woo! They make a big deal out of it, even in the recession. Morale is key, I guess.

And we stood in line for Kid C to get her face painted. Even though I told myself I could paint her face any day I wanted to, I knew that that was the equivalent of "no you can't have a slurpee, we have drinks at home."




A friend of mine joked that she was ready for the commune now, with the rainbow and all, and her name being what it is, and that she never wears shoes, the list goes on and on.
If someone made me a good commune offer, I might just take them up on it, y'know.



Daddy's soccer field has been transformed in to a fair.
I like it better this way. I'll take a jumphouse over a game of soccer anyday.


Captain Underpants and his partner Chiquita Chonies!


Yes, I gave the underwear a test drive to see if he was one of those potty-prodigies I hear about.
He wasn't, he peed in them about 30 min later.


This spiderman-bath-science-lab was given to Baby R for his birthday.
But he's been on a "NO BATH!" streak for a couple of weeks now, and I brought it out to sweeten the deal.
He didn't take the bait, and once Kid C saw it, I couldn't put it away again. So I let her play with it.
She love love loved it.

Alot.

it's done now

okay, my video is done, complete with music, and corrected text.

go me.

and for my next trick...

for our school compassion ministries, I made the following items:

comedy event invitation

If you are Allison reading this, you may notice that your boyfriend is featured as one of the performers.
Well, I needed to represent funny people that will be in the improv troupe. I didn't have any photos of those people looking funny. But I did have one of Ken!

t-shirt for volunteers at schools


I can't wait for them to print these. I want one. I have been wanting to use a MLK quote on a shirt for a long time. And booya, there it is.

natural inside, artificial outisde

Kid C and I dyed our hair. Hers is more subtle of course, but she was pleased with the result.
She didn't get a fake nose stud like me though. I gotta draw the line somewhere, ha.

I will continue doing the fake one, until I can figure out a way to pierce it myself without paralyzing my face or passing out.

cleaning feels like I finished a marathon

I used my two hours of kid-freedom today to clean out their dirty-dog rooms.
And I feel so much better! You'd think I lived in there.
It helped motivate me hearing a talk this morning about boundaries at MOPS.
I had cleaned last night, the living room and Kevin did the kitchen.
And then I got pumped and cleaned out baby stuff out of Baby R's room (indirectly to make way for a real bed for him). And then I just had to put all of Kid C's crap back where it goes. She is just like me, she can tear a room up in no time.



I'm almost done with a mural on the wall you can't see. But I won't show it until I'm done.


The walker, the portacrib, and the box of bibs and other random stuff is OUT!
That little kitchen is going out soon too, I just have to decide whether to send it by Greyhound to Kevin's brother, or to take it to the MOPS-Swap.

Baby Tuesday

Kevin banged the camera a few times and got it to upload the photos. Hooray.


Easter package from GiGi! Woo!


This is his favorite book. Grandma and Papa Thayer got it for him for the ride out to TX in February, and I didn't know we had left it until GiGi mailed it back. Oh the splendor of the Planes book. (This one is a close second or tie, because it has 3 pictures of helicopters.)


Kid C got this dress from GiGi, just in time for the Easter egg hunt. She put it on right away.


This was our Palm Sunday family activity. Egg decorating. I blew out the insides of a bunch of eggs and then got some spray glue and glitter and let them decorate. And then Kid C and I made the golden tree and strung ribbons through the eggs to hang them. I didn't take photos of any of that taking place, but...


...I did take pictures a few days later when we dyed eggs the old fashioned way and then ate them for lunch.


All looked like it was going well and then--


--yep, he spilled his dye. Oh well, time to eat the eggs.



When I ask them to say "cheese", they end up just saying it in any direction.
I've started asking them to say "ham sandwich" instead.


Can you tell what they are waiting for?...


...It's an eternity when you're at a birthday party...


...and the cake is sitting there on the table, but it's not time to eat it yet.
It's a discipline tester for sure. This was a little birthday we hit before the big egg hunt.


And here we are. Dressed cute and ready for egg snagging action.


We each had our spring colored knit cardigans. What's an egg hunt in the park without a pastel sweater and a ruffled dress?

You say Yucatan, I say Me-catan

20 years ago, my best friend at the time Courtney Chancellor would tell me about how her family goes down to Cozumel (or as I heard it "Cozy Mel" and that confused me) and scuba dive on vacation. She was scuba certified and they had a grand old time.
I tried not to act jealous. But I was. I was also jealous of her piano lessons, and how her dining room walls were upholstered with the same fabric on the chairs and the drapes, but that's another story. (I should have an entire blog post devoted to her, and her house/family one of these days).

And last year we started watching Mexico One Plate at a Time with Rick Bayless. We began tuning in when it was one of the few shows that came in HD.
But we're still hooked, because that man is so mellow and charming that he could be talking about AmWay or buying timeshare properties and I'd still listen to him. Anyway, he goes on and on about the Yucatan and how wonderful it is.

But the final straw was, as I said before, the Mythbusters Shark Special. Kari Byron (who I think I could totally do her job, but whatever) was sitting there on the boat in the Caribbean and I said to Kevin "I want to go too." And I expected the standard "no." But he said "maybe" which is the closest I ever get to a "yes" from him, about anything.

So I am proud to announce that tonight, with many thanks going to the desperate-slump travel industry, Travelocity, my mom, and Kevin's mom, I booked our [Aug] 5 yr anniversary trip to Cozumel tonight (!).

It was so incredibly cheap for the flight and a week's stay. Now, it will be baking hot in August and the flight down there is koo-koo-ka-choo (1 stop in Tacoma and another in Houston, with fat wee-hour lay overs) but I'm not too good for it.
This *is* the silver lining to the economy in the crapper.

We'll be staying here.


I think our vacation goals go something like this:

Mine: Scooter renting (possibly VW renting), as many days as I can. Spa treatments. Chachki shopping. Possibly some culture somewhere.

His: Sitting on beach. Reading. Fishing.

Ours: Snorkeling.

So we have one thing in common, maybe we'll do that everyday? Who knows.
We do know that we are not interested in: bars/nightlife, zipline/climbing, or scuba.

Less than four months and counting...

let's not kid ourselves

this is a muumuu. They are calling them "maxi dresses" now. (which is weird and makes me think of both this and this).

Anyone who looks good in this dress, would look way better in a "mini" dress.
And tube top holding up that much fabric? That is asking for trouble.

my own travel channel

I have found these resorts, that aren't completely for the rich and famous, but that I'm nowhere close to booking. Way out of my league.
They are purely beach destinations.


Huts in Tahiti



Merida (Yucatan Penninsula, Mex)



Villa in Thailand
(with that whole political crisis, you'd think they'd be giving tickets and rooms away for Phuket. But oh no, it'll still cost 5,000 bucks for a a flight and week hotel for 2 ppl)


Plush resort in Okinawa
(I remembered this unexpected jewel from a late night tv channel surf. I mean, check it out. It's like the Hawaii of Japan)

fancy salon, eat your heart out

I dyed my hair this morning, it took about an 1 1/2 hrs and cost me 12 bucks. I squeezed it in between my cardio walk and breakfast.



I cut it myself last week, and that was completely free.

This would cost me about 150 bucks in a decent salon. And that is why I don't go to "professionals."

p.s. yes, that's my new orange Threadless shirt! I love it.

tonight I made

I got a cold sore from stress, so I thought I should get some stuff crossed off my list.

Tonight I finished the laos trip shirt and made a new logo for the RUTS guys.




(new web banner)

Please, may there be no more re-dos.

Baby Tuesday

This is the only picture I have this week, because our camera needs surgery. I've been told that the "E18" error on the camera means that there is debris stuck in the camera somewhere. And so that means until Kevin fishes it out, I have only my camera phone and my laptop camera.

We're dying eggs in this picture. We made really fancy sparkley ones a few days prior, and we even painted a little branch gold and hung them on it like an egg tree, but I took photos of that with my real camera. :/

Oh, wait, I just got some off my phone. The kids are nipping at my heels because they don't want me on the computer, I don't know how much more I can upload!...




This link may or may not work.

These links are camera phone videos of the hunting for eggs.

still scheming

Again, I must preface my crazy ideas with, this probably won't happen. But, now we've moved our destination possibility to Kauai. I mean, I still want Caribbean, but on paper, it looks like Kauai might work better for us. It's all still a hazy fantasy.



However-- if we *did* go to Kaua'i, I have already decided that despite the trip being a celebration of our marriage to one another, there will be at least one day of the trip where he gets to go deep sea fishing and I will drive around the island on a scooter.

And in all likelihood, he will sit and read a book and I will go get a massage at least one other day--

--That's the difficult thing about he and I on vacation. We want completely opposite things from a vacation. Snorkling and sailing are the only things we have ever shared happiness in. Otherwise, we drive each other crazy with what we want to do.
So IF we do go on a trip, I am going to try to learn from all of our previously disastrous vacations together and make it so that no one flares his/her nostrils at his/her spouse. That probably means horseback riding will get nixed. I wonder if he'll let me go by myself on that too.

5 yr anniversary trip?

We watched the Mythbusters Shark Special last night and even though the cold northern Pacific waters are just chock full of sharks, the mythbusting team travelled to Bermuda to conduct most of the experiments.

And watching the show made me want to go to Bermuda.

So I looked up how much it would cost to fly there, say, for our 5 year anniversary later this year, and it turns out, it's only 216.00 per person. I mean, that's cheaper than my flight to TX was. Crazy.

And then I thought "well hell, maybe the whole Caribbean is my oyster, maybe I should look at other islands?" Because the price of the hotels there per night is comparable to the price of the plane tickets.
I just want a hut with a swamp cooler, really. Because during the day, I would rather be at a spa or at the beach. I don't need 300 thread count sheets or anything.
But then I don't want to go to a country where I need to fear being kidnapped, like Jamaica or Mexico, or whatever.

I'm not sure, but I'm slightly obsessed with the idea. And if I book the tickets, I think I might eat rice cakes for the next 4 months in preparation. ;)

P.S. I am also working feverishly to get my mom on the Mexico mission trip next week. Yes I said next week. I'm crazy like a fox. It's getting final approval and then she can book her ticket. Those that pray- please pray.

UPDATE: I looked up other locations, and they are not as cheap as Bermuda. And two funny quotes from Kid C in the backyard just now (to Baby R while playing pretend "Mexico Doctor") ""dont ever touch a girl who has arms that aren't working" and "go make some more peas in your peamaker!" That last one sounds like an insult.

today I made

self explanatory.


is it a scary movie, or a sign of faith? you be the judge.



don't go in the water!..oh wait, yes, go in the water!