Home Improvement

Over Christmas break, the girls and I spent a good deal of time going through toys and stuff in their room and getting rid of/donating quite a bit of it.  I loved it.  They weren't thrilled at the beginning, but I think I brought Charlotte around to embracing the catharsis by the end of the project.  We had a vision of a long, two-person desk for the one wall and Derek made it happen.  I am usually terrible at taking snapshots, but I made an effort to document the process.

Here is everybody helping paint the desk.  Yes, we paint in the family room.  Doesn't everyone?

Here are a few before shots.  They had a sort of pale lavender color and pinkish, flowery wallpaper.  The previous owners of our house loved their wallpaper borders, that's for sure.

Our paint color choice was a long process and the color palette changed a couple of times.  Then, we narrowed it down to four colors - a deep purple, a bright blue/turquoise, lime green and hot pink.  Then I looked around and realized these four colors are everywhere.  I always think it is funny how your taste is informed by trends without you even realizing it.  Heidi also painted Kat's room these four colors a few months ago, so the cousins coordinate with each other. :)

This girls got tents for their beds out of the deal, too. The carpet is the big thing that still needs to be replaced. Someday we'll get the whole upstairs done.  For now, every time someone spills juice or ketchup or something, I take some quiet solace in the fact that nothing could really make me hate the carpet any more than I already do.

The desks Derek built.

I found this image on iStockphoto and fell in love with it.  I bought it and manipulated it in Photoshop to make a mural for the girls wall.  Debbie Pisacreta helped me over Christmas put the colors into it.  It all sort of came together.  Grace took one look at the mock up and burst into tears.  Apparently, she didn't share my vision.  It took a while, but it grew on her.  She helped me paint some of the parts and she did the birds with stencils.

This was the original image for the mural




This is my PS mock-up (i did my own tree)




Here is the finished product.

From the other end of the room (excuse the bad flash photography)

I enjoyed the painting project.  As full as my days are the past few months, I looked forward to working on it.  I painted, like, 15 leaves a day for the most of the month of January.  It reminded me of painting the mural on Charlotte's wall before she was born.  All those evenings after work, listening to music and painting while I waited for February 1 to finally come around so we could meet her, our first baby.  

When we put up the tents for the girls, we had to move Grace's bed frame so that her mattress would still fit under the top bunk.  So, we finally got around to taking down Eli's crib and he inherited Grace's bed frame, with a new mattress and a set of Thomas sheets.  He was totally cool about it.  He didn't even glance at his crib, where he had slept every night for 3.5 years, sitting in the corner.  He just walked in and climbed up on the bed and beamed, "Eli's bed!"  

Here's the before of his room (which I hope to be next to redo).

Eli has the worst wallpaper of all.  He also has pink carpeting and a little half-bath inside his room that has a pink sink and a pink toilet.  Nice!  He also has my grandfather's pinball machine in his room.  Pretty cool.

Eli's bathroom is that door on the left. I figure for a boy with 2 older sisters, having your own bathroom may be a really good thing.

Charlotte made Eli this picture and hung it up for him.

If you have made it all the way to the bottom of this very long post, I have a question.  We have been playing around with ideas for Eli's room.  He has a cool roof line in his room, so I think we are going to do white walls and a colorful ceiling.  He likes animals alot.  I came up with this design, with animals going all around the room and I bought some sets of silhouettes online..  Derek and the girls all contributed ideas.  We are down to three color palettes.  What do you all think?  The background color is for the ceiling (and the grays are the doors and windows).  I like the quilt for #2 best and I think I lean towards that one, but I think the overall favorite in the house is #3.  You can click on the image to see it bigger if you feel like it.

Kind of a boring post.  Thanks for reading!

Year of the Dragon

I missed it by a week now, but I wanted to post on the Chinese New Year.  This is the Year of the Dragon.  This is my favorite because Derek and I were both born in the Year of the Dragon (different dragon, Derek likes to joke) and we met in the Year of the Dragon.   It's been a wonderful 12 years.  I look forward to seeing what the next 12 bring, and the next 12 after that.

It's a little before Derek's birthday, but I thought I would also use this post to add to my running list of reasons why I married the man of the century.

#48.  You think big.  I never know exactly what new plan for world domination you are going to start hatching next, but I always sincerely look forward to finding out.  Whether it's big in the figurative sense of ambitious, far flung, ballsy or high concept (or perhaps all of the above) or big in the literal sense of the 2200 square foot addition you are designing for our (already 3700 square foot) house, it's go big or go home.  I'm with you, babe.

We took these last night and I was really looking forward to editing them.

The loves of my life

This one is actually my favorite.  So typical.  Something didn't go Grace's way.  No idea what.

Tomorrow my oldest baby turns 8 years old.  Holy cow.

 I remember so clearly taking this picture from across the room in the hospital bed.  It seems more recently than 8 years ago.

 I also found this one while poking around.  There's a little more gray in the beard now.
Derek has no real wistfulness for the tiny baby years.  But he was really, really good at them.

 A portrait of two middle children.  I think Derek and Grace share the bond of being the middle child in their family, and the contrarian streak that seems to go with it.

 This one looks to me like an actor's head shot or something, with a 6 year old photo-bombing it.

Another Daddy and Grace shot that I love.

I didn't shoot just Derek and Eli last night.  But I still wanted to post this old one of them together.

Two Mohr men regard each other.

What more can I say.  My favorite part of every day is you, Derek.

Gracie

I looked out the window the other day and the snow was coming down in big fluffy chunks the size of a fist.  It was really pretty.  I quickly lobbied Grace to come outside for a picture.  She is wearing a sleeveless dress under the coat and has bare legs.  By the time we got out there, the snow was back to the normal, fluffy stuff. We still shot a few frames.  She wouldn't put her tongue back in for me.





Grace still gets so frustrated when something doesn't live up to her expectations.  Sometimes it is something like her facepainting at the winter festival wasn't what she expected, so she cries and I get mad because it is rude to the nice teenage girl who painted it.  I don't want to invalidate disappointment.  It's an authentic emotion.  But how to teach her how to also be polite and grateful?  Sometimes she is edgy and her expectations are so completely unreasonable that nothing will make her happy.  Again, I feel for her and her levels of anxiety and frustration.  But the net effect on her behavior is not at all acceptable.

It is becoming a problem for her at school.  She hates to get answers wrong.  She had a timed math test where she was supposed to do 30 simple addition problems in 2 minutes.  She can do the addition problems.  Everyone she did at home was right - no errors.  When I set the timer so she could practice the timed test, she had an honest to goodness panic attack right in front of me.  Picture my little 6 year old still scratching away with her pencil at this page full of addition problems with big, fat tears streaming down her face and her chest heaving faster and faster until she sort of started hyperventilating.  This is not good.  Then, she gets mad and turns the bad feelings outward, and comes at me for distracting her or yells that the chair is too low at the table or the pencil is not sharp enough.  It's not pretty.  In fact, it's downright ugly sometimes and I lose patience more than I'd like to.  The heart of it, though, is a very small girl who is having some very big feelings. I remind myself of this when she's screaming at me.  Not screaming, exactly, to be fair.  More like loud, vehement but also sort of pathetic whining.

We are very confident that Grace has dyslexia.  Her reading tutor (who is wonderful) totally agrees.  The word dyslexia seems to be not always in vogue, but it's clear to me from reading up about it that it fits Grace to a tee.  So this compounds the frustration for her, I think.  She has to work extra hard to do things that are obviously coming naturally to so many of the other kids.  She really tries so hard (even though she sometimes masks it with outbursts).  It's tough to watch.

This is her spelling test.  She got two wrong.  Not because she spelled the word wrong, but because she had two letter reversals.  She told Derek that she can't remember which way the s goes.  But notice she had it right other places on the test.  She says she always feels the d looks wrong to her (when it is written correctly).  She was so upset this morning that she got two wrong. I didn't know why at the time, but I came into the room when she was vigorously and violently brushing her own hair while sobbing about how, "it doesn't feel straight!!!  It doesn't feel STRAIGHT!!! Why doesn't it FEEL STRAIGHT?!?"  Grace's hair is poker straight, i have always marvelled at it's ability to fall back into it's flat shape no matter what.   Derek just looked at me over her head and said, "she's upset about the spelling test."  Enough said.

What I notice about the test is this - see on the word 'dish'.  She first wrote a q and erased it, then she wrote a b and erased it, then she got it correct by writing 'dish'.  Same on 'pen'.  You can see where she erased both a q and a b before she put the p down.  She fixed 'best' once, from initially writing 'pest'.  In my head I can see her sitting there agonizing over not wanting to get it wrong and writing letters and erasing them and still not being sure that they "look right".  She knows it's supposed to be a 'd'.  She doesn't think the word is spelled pish, with a 'p' sound at the front.  She just gets it backwards when she tries to write it.  There are a total of 13 p's, d's, and b's on that test.  Imagine having to work so hard one each one of them.

Gracie will learn just like we all do how to deal with the challenges in her path.  I'm sure this won't be the biggest one she finds in her life.  She's got so much going for her.  She'll do great.  It is much more heartbreaking to watch them struggle then I ever would have guessed it would be, though.

Happy 2012

This is Eli outside with one of his favorite possessions, our Kindle Fire.  He watches Thomas movies on it and plays games and sometimes pages through books.  Our guilty confession:  we sometimes let him take it to bed with him and watch in his crib before he falls asleep.  When I go in to cover him up he is sleeping with the Kindle still in his hands, cuddling it.



If you happen to be using it when he comes in the room, he usually tries to acquire it immediately.  He sometimes says, "Eli's turn!" when he wants something.  It's more of a statement than a request.  He also will sometimes take something (usually the Kindle or my phone) right out of my hands.  When he does this he always says without fail (and it's the only time I have ever heard him say this), "thanks for helping!"  He says it pitch-perfect, with that lilting, fake-bright tone that teachers sometimes use.  I wonder who in his life takes things from him while using this ironic phrase.  It is a funny example to me of kids giving back what they get.  I do not find Eli taking things from me by force funny, however.  We're working on it.

This is Eli after I told him that we couldn't take the Kindle to the playground with us.  When he throws a fit (which happens unfortunately more frequently lately), he makes this really sad face, more than a mad face.  He puts and frowns and protests.

It's really quite pathetic.

He also sometimes hurts himself, or pretends to hurt himself.  He used to bang his head on the floor when he was mad, which makes everybody uncomfortable and is hard to watch.  Not repeatedly over and over (thank goodness).  Usually he would pout, walk purposefully to a spot, kneel down and bump his head on the floor.  Sometimes harder than others, but there was obviously some control to how hard he let his noggin contact the floor.  Now, he sometimes will just touch his head and tell you it hurts when he is mad.  Or, he'll purposefully bump his knee on the wall, and then present it to you with a frown.  Most common recently, he wipes his finger along his pants or the wall or something and then holds it up to you, as if he just got a splinter.  I don't quite understand the point of this.  It goes something like...Me:  No, Eli.  Don't touch that!.  Eli:  Bumps finger and then holds it out frowning.  "Ow!  Hurt!  Hand hurt!"  Is he trying to deflect the situation from my hollering at him to his "injury"?  Is he trying to communicate his pain and upset over being yelled at and over not being able to do what he wants?  Maybe a way to ask for comforting?  It eludes me.

Here is Eli on a happier occasion.  Kid loves his junk food.  He takes it really seriously, too.

Advent

The girls and I made this advent calendar out of $.99 mini stockings.  I think I was more excited about it then they were.  I love Advent calendars.  The only real crafting involved painting glittery gold numbers on each stocking, but that it about as crafty as i get.  We agreed that Derek or I would fill each stocking individually on the night before the appropriate day.  There is just no way that the Middle Who would be able to resist the temptation to look in every single one on Day 1. I have 4 small gifts for them to go in those slightly bigger stockings.  The other 20 days are really small trinkets, but they'll love them anyway.

More lifestyle photography.  This image shows:  my horrible family room/kitchen wallpaper, the plastic covered, non-working fireplace, the splintery, faux accent beams in my family room and that wonderful ceramic cat missing an ear that Derek saved from his Grandmother's house (I think) and has always had a spot in every one of our homes (and always will).  This image is cropped funny so that it doesn't show the baskets of crap toys-that-never-get-played-with that are sitting on the hearth.

Lifestyle

I really, really wish that I could tell you that this is a picture of Eli sitting in our dirty laundry pile (as if that wouldn't be bad enough).  Well, it's not.  This is a picture of Eli sitting in our clean laundry pile.  And, all of the laundry did not fit into the frame.  The girls literally paw through it in the morning to find clothes to put on.  I used to insist it stay in one of the laundry baskets, but I lost the battle recently.  With the busyness of the season and all, it's totally out of control.  Sorry, Mom.  

This was my first attempt at french braiding Gracie's hair.  She has been growing it for about 6 months and it is finally a little past her shoulders.  Charlotte and Eli's hair (and mine and Derek's) grows really fast, but not Grace's.  

Eli likes to play games in the studio.  Here, he got Charlotte to tuck him under the blanket for each picture.  Then, he pops up and laughs.  He says, "Charlie's turn!" and makes her do it, too.  I think she likes being the big sister.  

Halloween

Long time no post.  I actually have some family shots to share.  Some are unedited and probably will be for awhile.  Here are a few I have managed to work on.

This is as close as I can come to Halloween pictures this year.  Derek took the kids trick or treating, since I teach Monday nights.  Charlotte and Grace made their costumes this year, with some help from Derek.  They were a leopard and a lion.  A trip to the Salvation Army for yellow clothes and hand sewn ears and tails and they were good to go.  They weren't particularly elaborate costumes, but I loved seeing how pleased they were with what they had made.  It was a fun year.  Eli was Buzz Lightyear.  When I showed him the jumpsuit I bought him, he got it immediately. "Buzz Lightyear!?!" he said, incredulously.  "Put on.  Put on."

This year we had the Halloween party at Kat's house, trick or treating at Eastern Hills Mall, a school party, a Halloween birthday party for our little neighbor that catches the bus with the girls, and actual trick or treating on Halloween night with Shawn and Cheyenne.  Needless to say, it was a good haul.

This is not the costume, but some footed jammies that I scored on sale at Target the other day.  He saw them in the bag and wanted them on right away.  He is fully dressed underneath them in this picture.  He wore them for most of the day.

Eli loves to play on the iPhone and has a long attention span for it.  He a dozen or so games that he deftly navigates.  He is still obsessed with letters and numbers.  When he wants to use my phone he asks me, "Let's find the letters?"  He likes to type in Word on any computer that is available.  He always types "D-O-R-O-T-H-Y" first, like they do on Sesame Street in one of the episodes (Dorothy is Elmo's goldfish's name).  He has learned the backspace key, so he types a word and makes an intentional mistake in the middle and then fixes it.  It goes like, "L.  A.  D.  D.  W.  Oops!  Backspace.  E. R.  Spells ladder!"  He makes you repeat the letters as he spells them, and then he tells you what it says.  He can probably spell about 50 words from rote memory.  He can also count to 100 now, though he usually wanders once he gets up past 40 or so.

Charlie is enjoying second grade.  She has read all the Little House on the Prairie books now.  She loved them.  She is missing having her best friend in class with her and I think it has been harder for her to find someone to pair up with at play time this year.  It's all a part of growing up and something that I went through and I imagine everyone reading this did, too, but it can be so hard to watch when you know they are struggling.  Her teacher created a "book club" just for her and another little girl just today and Charlotte was telling me about it excitedly.  They picked mysteries to read together, because they both like mysteries.  Thank you, Mrs. Roswell!

Gracie really, really wants to learn to play the trumpet.  She has tried out Derek's trumpet, and the kid can blow!  She has always been proud of her ability to blow up balloons really big (and I mean, really big!).  So she has decided the trumpet is what she wants to do.  I am struggling to find a teacher for her, since she is only 6.  So far I have struck out on Craig's List and with Community Music School.   We'll keep looking.

Last, a sneak peek of some pictures we took this weekend of Charlie, Grace, Kat and Eli.  There is a whole series of these, and all four have huge grins in every frame.  My shutter speed was 1/200 and I still got motion blur in Grace's hands.  Kid is a bit of a maniac.  We took some great pictures of Kat and Heidi and Dan (and Ben and Boo), too.