Fess up Friday: Possibly ironic

Technically it is already Saturday here in Korea where I am writing this, but since it is still Friday there in the US where most of you will be reading it... it still counts, right?

With all the moving that we do, I kinda keep waiting for us to be somewhere for a while before we go get nice things.  Ya know, so I know they'll fit into the house that we'll finally be in for more than a year, so they don't get messed up in the move...etc.  But it never happens, so I'm left with a mish-mash of stuff that is left over from decades ago, and careers ago, when we lived in tiny apartments as young people with no money to buy anything nice thing anyway.

And it looks like that.

Factor in my lack of decorating skill and after 3 months of arranging,
this is the best I could come up with for my living room.
                             Pretty darn sad.

 

And yes, the TV is sitting on top of a coffee table...

the one the movers put the end table legs on.

My new friend came over the other day to provide some much needed help.  In a few hours, she had done what I could not.  She made my crappy furniture look not so crappy!

I still have curtains to hang and decorations to pull out of boxes,
and please ignore the toys, books and the wreath stashed on top of the bookcase,
but its already 1,000% better.

It got me thinking though...
I wonder if it would be considered 'ironic' that I am pretty bad at decorating yet pretty obsessed with decor related blogs and magazines.
I think I've been tearing images from magazines for 15 or so years.
I've got a big fat file of them.
And now I scour 'shelter' blogs like nobody's business.
But why?  It obviously has not helped me.
The only time my house has looked nice is when friends have helped me out.

I'm thinking what I should start scouring instead is gift magazines :)

Before and After: Sitting Pretty

It is well established that I am not good at decorating.
I'll have a spot or two in the house that looks right, but that's about it.

I'm not very crafty either.
But every once in a while I do have a project that works out well.

We recently moved from a house with a huge patio.

I loved sitting out there.  It was my happy place.

Now we live in a highrise with a patio that is 1/4 the size of the old one.

I still love sitting out there,

but all of the furniture we had on our old patio does not fit.

Since we don't have enough storage space for the extra chair from the set that won't fit, and since I didn't already have an office chair, I decided to use it for that.  But it would not work as is.

Besides the fact that the current outdoor fabric didn't match the indoors,

it had also been outside for years, so I set about trying to remedy that.

 I decided on new fabric and ordered it.

I was so excited that as soon as it came in, I sewed up the new cushion covers and new pillows right away.

I'm pretty pleased with the results.

Now what to do with the rest of the house...

Moving On (Part 2 of 3)

To read Part 1 go here.

One year after our 3rd move in 3 years,  it was already time for our next assignment.

Back to Vandenberg Air Force Base, California.

The housing at Vandenberg was split into two locations.  One group of houses were on base, the other group of houses were just outside the base gate.  This was the group we ended up in, way back in the back.  I loved it because we were on a corner lot just across from a nature preserve.  I could see the mountains and trees from my kitchen window and thoroughly enjoyed the occasional encounter with the wildlife.  We lived here undisturbed for 3 whole years!

And then...

The base decided to close down the housing outside the gate so they moved us to the housing on base.

And then...

The military decided to turn the housing on base over to be run by a private company, and that private company decided the street we had just moved to four months earlier (and just finished painting) would be the first street of houses to be torn down for new ones to be built.

So then...

They moved us to yet another street.  On Christmas Eve. 
My husband left for a 6 month training in Nevada a few days later.
We already knew we would be moving to our next station when he returned.  UGH!

This would be 3 moves in 1 year.

To read Part 3 go here.

Growth Chart

There are the obvious times when we are proud of our children.

Like when they learn to tie their shoes or score a great goal.

Those are times when they have learned to do things

that others may see and take notice of.

But then there are the more subtle moments.

Like when you overhear your toddler saying,

"Yes, please." and "Thank you so much."

- completely unprompted by you!

    Or when your children,

who normally fight loudly with each other,

instead quietly say to each other,

"I don't like it when you do that.  Please don't do it again."

While I am certainly proud of big moments,

like starting 4th grade,

I am more proud of little ones,

like learning to solve conflict with a classmate.

Because when it all comes down to it,

I am not as proud of the kinds of things my children learn to do,

as the kinds of people they learn to be.

Top Ten Tuesday: Hawaii

When I found out we were moving to Hawaii, I was beyond excited.  I didn't want anyone to pinch me in case I was dreaming.  When I got there, I found that it was all I had imagined it to be and more!  We loved every minute of living in paradise and everything about it suited us just right.
Well, almost everything...

Now that we've moved away here is a list of ten things I do and do NOT miss about Hawaii.

I do NOT miss:

1. The cockroaches
 
Need I explain?  EEW!

2. Geckos and gecko poop
Now I don't have a problem with critters.  In fact, we caught a few lizards in the yard and kept them as pets.  One mother laid an egg that hatched and we enjoyed watching the little baby grow up.  I was so super sad when a gust of wind knocked the cage off the porch into a nest of fire ants and they all died from the bites.  But the geckos, they come out at night and 'chirp,' and the noise really bugged me.  And the poop!  They poop on everything and it is SO hard to scrub off.  EEW!

3. The fly poop
During the rainy season, the flies migrate indoors by the hordes.  They leave little clusters of brown poop 'spots' on random places on the walls (just out of reach but right within eyesight) and in the corners of the windows and it is hard to scrub them off!  Plus, just EEW!

4. The smell of mildew on the towels

If you don't move the clothes from the washer to the dryer within like an hour of the end of the cycle, your clothes will smell like mildew.  Its hard to get the smell out and it really gets fragrant when you sweat.  Eew!

5. The red dirt

I know it made a lot of money for the Dirt Shirt company, but it cost me a lot of money replacing all the the clothes that got stained with it because it does NOT come out.

I DO miss:

1. The sun
The first two weeks here in Korea were monsoon.  There was a blanket of gray clouds that hung just over our heads and blocked out any hint of the sun.  We've have many sunny days now, but it is just not the same.

2. The rainbows
The sun is always shining in Hawaii, even when it rains.  This makes for the most beautiful rainbows!  They never got old for me.

3. The air
Hawaii is listed among the best air quality in the world.  It is not just the quality though, it was the smell of plumerias and other flowering plants and trees that always perfumed the air.

4.  The beaches
We didn't go very often, which is especially sad because we lived 5 minutes from a great one.  But just being near them, knowing that we COULD go, and seeing them everywhere we drove, was perfect.

5. The color

Ahh, the color.  So vibrant, so beautiful, so plentiful!  The plants, the trees, the sunsets, the sky... 

Eye candy, no, soul candy.

This alone would have been paradise enough for me.

Social Butterfly

Today is my daughter's first day of kindergarten.

 She went to kindergarten last year too,
but technically she was a jr. kindergartener.

 She could not have been more excited for today to come.

 I'm pretty sure she asked one or more times a day for the last
two months if she got to go to her new school 'today.'

She's a social butterfly and she can't wait

to be surrounded by friends all day!

 

"See my new lunch box and water cup?"

She's not even to her classroom yet and already she's socializing.

Spread your wings, Sweet Girl.

You are beautiful when you fly.

What do you do all day?

A hour after I had scrubbed the kids' bathroom from top to bottom, I returned to find it covered with a whole tube of toothpaste.  The counter had the most, but the walls, the floor, the bathmat, the mirror...they were all covered too.

My friend told me the other day, that the question was posed, What does a stay at home mom do all day?  and the answer was that they spend most of their day just trying to keep the children alive.

As I stood there in the bathroom that I had already cleaned three times that day, I thought to myself, She is so right!  The portion of the day that I do not spend trying to keep them from killing themselves or each other, I spend trying not to kill them myself.