Let Them Eat Cake

'Nuff said.

Our House

I have a hard time falling asleep almost every single night, because I can't seem to turn my brain off. Last night my brain was obsessing about our house and how much work we've put into it to make it ours. Of course I've put these pictures in backwards, but you can deal with it, because it's my blog, and I screwed up. :) The latest project we finished was our garden.
This is only a partial view of this section of our yard. When we bought the house, this was all grass, but it didn't have a sprinkler system in it, and I figured it would serve it's purpose better as our garden. We dug up all the grass the first year we lived here and planted our garden in that horrible dirt. We've since put in all this bark and the raised beds. James also added an ingenious sprinkler system to that side of our yard.

Before the garden was the extra room in our house! When we bought the house, it was only a three bedroom house. It become increasingly clear to us that we are going to be in this house a long time, so James became more and more obsessed with the idea that he could build an extra bedroom, from nothing, above our living room. I'm so glad he did because we love our play room with the huge walk in closet!

About a year before we built the room, we remodeled our entertainment center unit thingy. This is the "after" shot.

This is the before.

A nice improvement, don't you think?

Putting the tile in our house was one of our very first projects. Oddly enough, this is the one that James was the most scared of. There was carpet under our dinner table, and that just did not jive with me. We ripped out all the linoleum in the house, and part of the carpet, and put in this tile.

Aside from these obvious projects, we also replaced the carpet in the whole house, put a ladder up into our attic and put down boards to walk on and store all of our "junk", we put hardware on all of our cabinets, and we painted, of course.

Of course, painting this whole wall was later a waste since this is where the new room went. But it was our first painting project in the house, and we were proud of it.

You can tell that we've put a lot of energy into making our house, OUR house. We've really enjoyed all of it. I often joke about hating our house because it's a measly 1500 square feet, we owe about $40,000 more on it than we bought it for (due to the tanking economy, not our own stupidity(though that is arguable)) and we hate the HOA that is tied in with living here. But, I got a wake up call a couple of days ago.

James and I are forging forward into an investment venture. It involved meeting with a financial guru, of sorts, to give us some advice on how to get started. He laid out two different plans for us and the first one involved us renting out our house. I've always thought that I would like to move into a bigger house, with no HOA, but when he suggested that we move, I immediately knew this was not an option. I love our house and cannot foresee any immediate plans to move out of it. I think we'll make it work for us as long as we possibly can.

Bake Sale!

There is a charity yard and bake sale happening in my neighboring neighborhood on Saturday. I heard the words "bake sale" and my brain took off, thinking of all the wonderful things I could bake! I also had to try and figure out what I should bake that would make the most money. This is to help someone out, after all. :) I hope I made the right choices. Today I made these cupcake pops!

I told James to take my picture with all of my hard work. We have hardly any pictures off me, and my argument was that when I die young, the kids won't have any pictures of me to look at and remember me by. My argument didn't work, because he didn't pick up the camera. I had to take this picture myself. I guess that makes me full of myself. Oh well.

I also baked 3 red velvet cakes on Monday. They are in the freezer for now, and actually only 2 of them will make it to the bake sale. I gave the other one to James' boss. That's a whole other story, but I'll just say that his boss deserves more than a measly cake.

Tomorrow I will bake miniature lemon cupcakes. Let me assure you that these are little bites of heaven. I was going to bake more, but I was surprised to see how many people signed up to bake stuff, so I eliminated the pumpkin rolls and caramels from my list. I'm sure James is grateful. He usually cleans up after me in the kitchen, after all.

I hope I've caught some of your taste buds attention and maybe I'll see some of you at the yard/bake sale on Saturday! If you want to come and you don't know where it is, shoot me an email and I'll fill you in.

Trying It Out

I'm stealing an idea from my good friend. She recently posted on her blog a list of her 10 favorite things in that moment. So, when the mood strikes me, I may do this randomly, and, hopefully, my lists will differ. We'll see. :) Oh, and there is no order to this. Just what comes to mind.

1. My children laughing. James knows I enjoy this so he recorded them laughing and put it as my ring tone.
2. Cream cheese brownies. It's actually ridiculous that I would limit this to just cream cheese brownies, but in order to keep this list more interesting, I'll limit the baked goods to this one item.
3. House. I'm in the middle of season 4 and I'm addicted to it.
4. Seeing James the first second he gets home from work. Having him home brings a sense of completeness to the day.
5. McDonald's double cheeseburgers. I've been in love with the 5th day James and I were married.
6.Great friends and family members who do favors for me because they love me. They are indispensable and I don't know what I've done to earn those great relationships.
7.My bed. I LOVE our bed. It's big, it's comfortable, and it welcomes me each night with it's loving, metaphorical, arms. I'm not sure why we aren't allowed to sleep for 12 hours each night. Oh well.
8. Going out to eat, because I really don't enjoy cooking dinner. I'll make cake or cookies at the drop of a hat, but dinner is not something I enjoy making.
9. A clean house. Because, you know, that only lasts for about 5 seconds, so I enjoy it while I can.
10. Toes. I really love looking at and playing with Logan and Lizzy's toes. I know most people can't stand feet, but I'm a foot person. I guess.

I Love You

She poops every day and makes me change it, she makes me feed her 10 times a day, I wipe her snotty nose every five minutes, she makes messes with everything she touches, she screams every time she wants something, somebody was mean to her, and just because she feels like it. She can do all of these things every day if she wants to and I won't care...too much.