overheard

Me: "And Jesus sat on the Mt. of Olives to teach."

Grae: "Olives? Did he squish them?"

Me: "What? No."

Grae: "Were they super strong olives?"

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Grae: "Mommy?".

Me: "Yes Grae."

Grae: "How does Ironman wipe his nose when he's in his suit?".

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Grae: "When you throw garbage on the ground, it's called glittering."

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Me: "Girls, Obama won the Peace Prize!"

Lauren: "Why are you surprised, he does command the wind and waves and heals oceans you know."

Me: "Oh yeah, I forgot he was The One."

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regency

The girls were invited to a costume party a few weeks ago and requested to be Eleanor and Marianne Dashwood from Sense and Sensibility. We started by watching the new version put out by the BBC and then went to Joanns for fabric. Lauren found a great purple striped fabric and Maddie went with a bright and cheerful pink with a print for the underlayer.

The dresses went together pretty quickly after I did a test bodice with muslin. I'm glad I did as Maddie's dress needed some tweaking.

This was taken a few minutes before they left for the party. I made them purses out of wool interlock and lace scraps.








I love the backs of the regency gowns.






They had lots of fun and hope to be able to wear the dresses sometime soon.

bikes

So this has been a great summer of firsts for us. I took all 6 kids for a week of camping all by myself. Ava had 13 horse back riding lessons. Ellie lost her first teeth and Lauren had braces put on hers. The older girls are taking piano lessons, will learn to swim in a few weeks and they taught themselves to ride bikes.



Up until 3 years ago, we lived in apartments. There was nowhere to ride or store bikes so the girls never learned how to ride. A great friend gave us a bike and in the course of one weekend, they were off and riding just fine. We took them to our Goodwill Outlet store and found 3 almost brand new bikes; one for Lauren, one for Maddie and one for Ellie. Ava kept the gifted bike.



We were just about to buy Ellie training wheels when she surprised us by riding all by herself. They are having a ball and we go nightly to the school behind our house and ride, ride, ride. Grae and Molly spend the time playing on the playground.



This has been a very busy and expensive summer, and fall is shaping up to be the same way. We'll replace horse riding lessons with girls choir and bike riding with tearing up the upstairs. We're crazy.

Oh and our house appraisal went through fine. We needed to get $220,000 and the appraiser valued our house at $259,000. Wow! We bought the house for $185,000 three years ago so we were happy! This house has a lot of our blood, sweat and tears in it and we love it.

I finished Grae and Molly's quilts and I will show them later. Love picking fabrics for the quilts - sewing them, not so much. I found it boring sewing straight lines but the free motion quilting was fun. I made many errors but you can't tell without really staring at it so that's good! Well, off to sew diapers.

goodwill finds

We were browsing the Goodwill Outlet store for bikes and I stumbled upon this.



My heart stopped beating for a minute while Brian flipped opened the lid to reveal this...



The price: $15.00. I tackled a sales clerk and asked him to tag it as sold. It was mine. The machine came with the original manual and I discovered it was a Singer 201-2 Centennial model made in Feb. 1950. Only 25,000 were made.

We then discovered that it came with the original binding foot, ruffler foot and hem foot but no all purpose foot. After plugging it in and discovering it ran great, I called our local (very local as in only a few blocks away) sewing repair shop and was told they love working on old Singers and specialize in it. I'm going to have them rewire it (original fraying wires). I was also told they would find an all purpose foot for it.





The cabinet it came in is in very bad shape and I don't know if I want to sand it and restain it or paint it a bright yellow or orange or blue. I'm going to see if I can find out how old it is.

This is the top:


So anyway, I'm beyond excited as I've wanted on for awhile. Lauren has claimed it for herself when I die but I told her she could use it now while I'm healthy.

We did find bikes for the girls but that is another post.

overheard

I was sitting on the couch with Grae and Ellie and we were discussing the divine and human nature of Jesus. Sounds academic doesn't it.

Grae: "Did Jesus have a nose?"

Me: "Yes, he was a man."

Grae: "Does God have a nose?"

Me: "No, God is a spirit and doesn't have a body like we do. Jesus has a body."

Grae: "Did Jesus have hair?"

Me: "Yes, he had hair and wore clothes and he even went poop and potty."

Grae: "Jesus didn't go poop!"

Me: "Yes he did, he was a man. He probably even threw up when his tummy hurt."

Ellie: "Did baby Jesus wear a diaper?"

Me: "Yes, probably."

Grae: "Did he wear a Bum Genius?"

Me: "Um, no. They weren't invented back then."

Grae: "Did he wear a pocket diaper?"

Ellie: "Grae, he probably wore cloth diapers like Mommy makes."

Me: "Well Ellie, they didn't have bamboo velour then. Maybe he had some of linen?"

Grae: "Did Jesus have eyebrows.."

Here we go again...

dresser before & after

Here are some not so good pictures of the dresser. Once I get our bedroom painted, I'll take some pictures of it in action.

Before:


After:






I really, really, really love it and it makes me happy to work on labels everyday. I feel so organized.

nothing

Well I'm supposed to be waking Molly up from her nap, or cutting diaper doublers out, or hanging clothes on the line but here I am blogging. I wonder what excuses the pioneer women used for not doing chores? Or did they always do their work? Oh well.


This isn't done yet. I need to get some tie backs for the curtains, touch up the paint and finish putting knobs on the hanger.


Sneak peek at our new door.

We are super close to finishing Grae & Molly's bedroom. I'm just decorating it now. It looks so different then before. Much better. We are in the process of refinancing our house and have an appraiser coming sometime. So that means rushing around fixing things so that he appraises it high. We need to prove we have 20% equity in our home so we can drop PMI and lower our interest rate from 6% to 5%. This will result in a $350 savings each month. Can you believe it? We can make our payments now but how great will it be to have some extra money every month. It's going right into savings to help build our 6 month emergency fund.

We are in the process of canning anything we can find. So far we have canned blueberry jam and we're getting ready to can peaches (I hope). We didn't plant enough beans to can those but maybe we can find somewhere to pick. Then on to applesauce, pickles and whatever else we find. Our garden is doing great and we're just about ready to pick and eat our grapes. They are so good off the vine.

So that is an update. Not much but I really do need to go wake up Molly so she isn't up until midnight tonight. That wouldn't be fun.