I love a bargain!

Here's something I love: I love when you go into a store that you weren't even meaning to, and find exactly what you need for half the price you were thinking it would cost. That's what happened to me today and I am stoked.

I had a bunch of errands to run, one of which was Target to try to find a little back pack for Burgundy to use as a carry-on bag for our trip to Chicago. I figured Finn would use his current backpack, even though it has only one huge pocket so it's not great for organizing little things.

I had to stop in a different store that was holding a skirt for me which the store in the mall didn't have the right size. So, ok, another stop, ugh. But then I go in and they have THE cutest little bags! With LOTS of pockets and zippers for organization, they are right out of the Pottery Barn kids catalog (which I might add, every single year, when their little book-bag issue comes out I drool over it because bags of any kind are an ultimate weakness for me - especially little, tiny, mini-sized bags for cute little people), and I even wonder if they are the ones they used for the photo shoots since they all have Ivy League junior names embroidered on them, such as: Sawyer, Mateo, Camden, Payton, Sennet,etc. You know, the ones you see in the catalog.

So, they had back-packs in 3 different sizes, PERFECT sizes for Finn and for Burgundy (who will now be going by Emmet & Makay), and even one that was a fun size for me, not too huge (just call me Walter). I LOVE it! Oh and by the way, these bags cost $6 for Indi's and $9 for Finn's and mine, when they are $40-$70 in the catalog. (score!) Cute, by the way that they chose the same colors. They had the red with blue, orange with brown and pink and purple. They both chose red. Cute.

Obviously they are super cheap since they are embroidered with names already, but for that price who the heck cares? I will either leave it as is, or I can buy a cute patch to sew over it. Things like that make me happy, and honestly make me glow all day long. Maybe that makes me materialistic and shallow. Maybe it just makes me a girl.

wow... annoying.

Hopefully you, dear reader, don't mind too much that this, my virtual Dear Diary, is usually a sounding board for my annoyance.

So, I have a piece of paper, a receipt as it were, from when we signed up for baseball saying that baseball ends on the 16th. We were going to go to Chicago on the 14th, but knowing that, we deferred our Chicago trip for a week so that Finn would be here for the end of baseball. Last week, Finn was sick and coughing his head off so we didn't go to baseball at all Tues or Thurs.

We got to baseball tonight, and there is no one to be found. Luckily there was a girl still in the recreation office, luckily she let us in even though the office was closed, and luckily she found a lady there who luckily was in charge of the sports and knew what the deal was. The deal was this - baseball ended LAST week.

This annoys me on several levels.

1st, I have an official receipt telling me it ends on the 16th and I even asked 3 people about it to make sure so we would be here for the final week.

2nd, we pushed back our vacation so Finn wouldn't miss the last week and he missed it anyway due to illness.

3rd, pushing back our vacation wouldn't be such a big deal EXCEPT that Cody has some mystery illness as of yesterday. Flu-like symptoms, feeling like shit. He has been in bed in the basement all day. If we were leaving tomorrow, I wouldn't worry about us catching it. I would feel bad leaving my sick husband, yes. But, and perhaps this makes me a cruel, heartless person, I am more worried about us catching it right as we have to leave.

So if we now have a whole extra week of being exposed to whatever the hell it is, well, if you know me you know how I feel about people in my house getting sick. Let's just say I dislike it.

So at the moment, I am highly irritated. In my head, if we knew it ended last week, we would be leaving tomorrow and avoid further risk of infection. As it is, if we are all getting a flu just as we need to get on an airplane, well then I suppose we will not be getting on a plane at all.

So, now, I need to stop being annoyed and be positive and think we ARE NOT going to get sick. It would probably also be helpful if I could say I AM NOT going to get annoyed. Easier said than done.

how much can you chew?

You shouldn't bite off more than that. For a while there, I thought maybe I had, but I finally got it all finished. You saw my photo/dream board. So that's done. Concurrently with that project, I was working on another project: the fishy bathroom re-do. I painted the fishy bathroom about the time I painted (& repainted & repainted) Finn's room. It didn't really turn out how I wanted it. I never loved the color.

So, a while ago, I told my friend Kelly that I loved the color of her bathroom. She offered me the paint she had left over which was super nice. Cody says I am no longer allowed to accept free paint under any circumstances. A free half-gallon of paint turned into a monster, as you will see from the pictures.

Kelly's husband does finish-carpentry and I'm sure what took me many weeks would have taken him like an hour to do, but you know, sometimes you just gotta do this kind of stuff yourself! I've often thought if my life was quite different I might have been a carpenter myself. Well, here is my foray into finish carpentry. So firstly, Lowe's cut all the boards for me. Then Cody RE-cut all the boards for me to the proper lengths I needed, everything else I did myself. I did this wainscoting, to imitate the look of panelling, whatever you want to call it. I also had to rip off a chair rail and all the baseboard. Oh, and I put up a frame around the mirror which I've always wanted to do, which I really like how that turned out. And I always forget to take decent "before" pictures until I am headlong into the thing, but oh well.

And one last thing, big thanks to Cody, for coming home from work exhausted, and going out to the garage to cut boards for me on several occasions with minimal complaining, to Jim & Paula for lending me your chop saw & nail gun (wish I had a picture of me wielding the nail gun!), to Kelly for the free paint, to Jeff for being great at what you do and inspiring me to want to do a good job to impress you and your wife (and for the free paint), and to Levi, who probably would have rather been using the nail gun, but who watched my kids for a while instead so that I could nail all the boards up... I couldn't have done it without you guys!!

FISHY BATHROOM: BEFORE

FISHY BATHROOM: AFTER