Miriam and Dad day

Spring is here!  We might live in a light industrial area, but the road to our street has got to be one of the prettiest around Arlington this time of year.  This is the view from Anastaya's bus stop.

facing North, Haggen is hidden on the right, you can see some of the cars in the parking lot

standing in the same spot, facing West

Miriam has been waiting for her special day for a long time.  Today, it was finally here!  Dode took her to the Children's Museum in Everett, planning to stay just for an hour or two and ending up spending four hours there.  He said she was like a kid with ADHD, bouncing from place to place.  After that, they went to the China Buffet in Everett where she loves the huge chandelier, pizza, and jello squares.  (There's nothing like a chinese buffet for finding great pizza!)  Then, it was off to swimming at Forest Park.  One of the best parts of the day in Miriam's opinion is riding with dad in his truck.  There's no airbag and she gets to ride right next to him.  It's quite a treat for her.  (I wish I could still find it a treat to ride beside my husband in my 18 year old truck, the glamour of the truck is long gone for me.)

We had a busy co-op morning.  We had 83 baskets, our biggest yet.  The truck was 1 1/2 hours late which meant my driveway was beyond full.  People were parking in the street, the grass, everywhere.  People were leaving and coming back.  People were asking in hesitant ways if they could use my bathroom (of course!).  We had kids in the tree house, kids on the zip lines, kids in the house, it was quite a party.  Everyone seemed to take the wait with good spirits.  When the truck finally got here, it was a complete zoo trying to give the volunteers jobs to do.  Hopefully everyone got an equitable amount in their baskets.  One of my friends sat inside and watched.  When I ran in to grab something, she mentioned that she couldn't believe the chaos.  It's crazy, but I kind of like it.  (As long as my children don't keep coming up to me and asking me questions totally unrelated to what I'm trying to do, things like "Do we have any more milk?" or  "William is making funny faces at me, can I send him to time out?") Here's what we got this time, I was worried everyone would grumble about the parsnips, but several people were pleased. 

Now I have to figure out what to do with parsnips.  I have a delicious eggplant dip recipe I'm going to make.

Miriam and I finished off the day with a soak in the hot tub.   

Here she is in her new swimsuit from Old Navy.

Jacob Dickson spray paint artist

Jacob fancies himself the next great Michelangelo of spray paint.  The previous renter here had for some readon stuck the back of a semi truck next to the garage.  We turned it over to Jacob for a spray paint studio.  Imagine our surprise when driving up the highway behind our house, we realized that the painting wasn't all happening on the inside! 

Unfortunately, his desire to show off his talents runs in opposition of City of Arlington, Public Nuisance Ordinance 1286 which prohibits, "The existence or maintenance of graffiti or other defacement of public and private property, including walls, rocks, bridges, buildings, fences, gates, vehicles, signs, road surfaces and other structures, trees, and all other real and personal property within the City."  We let him enjoy it for a few days and then he painted over it.

Miriam worships everything about Jacob and loved it.

All teenagers should have a little sibling to keep them human. 

Now that he's painted over his studio exterior walls, he's planning on making some fish ( see the public art project "Some things fishy in Arlington") and doing grafitti magic on them.  Hopefully that won't run counter to the law.  He'll still get the exposure he wants because we'll stick them on our hill.

St. Patrick Day Funny

We were sitting around the dinner table talking about St. Patrick's Day.  Miriam asked what it was and we told her it was the day you need to wear green or you get pinched.  She looked at me with a worried expression on her face and said, "I think that day we should just stay home."  It's tough to live in a society with such strange (and painful) rules! 

Here's my going all out St. Patrick's Day decor.  I bought two shamrock garlands at Dollar Tree (the best dollar store around) and had fun with them.

 $2 worth of green cheer.

Happy St. Patrick's Day to you!

Bathroom Update

Our downstairs bathroom is probably the 2nd most important room in our house in the morning after the "useless room".  (I'll give more details about that in a future post.)  It holds all the church clothes for everyone, Dorrel's work shirts,  and is the shower everyone but mom uses.  It is also the only way to get to the laundry room where William and Miriam's shoes live.  It was finally time for an update.

The thing that was holding me back from doing anything were the harvest gold bathroom fixtures. How do you make them look a bit less dated? Swapping them out wasn't really an option because while there are lots of white toilets out there, finding a white urinal that would match up with the installation holes of our current one was impossible. (I love the urinal for its easy to clean aspects and can't give it up.  If we ever build a house, there will be a urinal.)  A few weeks ago I replaced the light over the mirror with a new one that gave off a lot more light. The room felt cold and sterile.  It was finally time to change the wall color. I had an almost full can of paint left from the hall re-do (hall re-do) and decided that the yellowish cream color would coordinate well with the harvest gold fixtures. (My official paint shirt is a worn out church shirt of Dode's.  You can see the evidence of past painting projects splattered across it.)

When we moved in, the vinyl floor was terrible.  Here's a patch of it in the closet which we never covered. It might have matched the gold bathroom fixtures but that's about the only good thing I can say about it. 

We'd bought a large piece of vinyl flooring for the kitchen in the house we'd lived in before but never got around to putting it down.  Before we moved in to our current house, Dode replaced the vinyl floors in all the bathrooms with "our" vinyl.  It cost us nothing and was a great update.  We also replaced the cracked and discolored sink in this bathroom with a new top and I installed a closet rod in the closet for our clothes and this bathroom remained that way for the next five years.

 Once I repainted the walls, it was time to work on the sink cabinet.  The hardware on the cabinet had been painted and was very dated so I'd removed them and planned to put in new ones.  Unfortunately, the 40 year old cabinet did not have the standard distance between the holes on the hardware and I couldn't find any new knobs.  I absolutely refused to put the old hardware back on so we lived without knobs and handles for five years. 

I'm a big believer in faking it when it comes to home improvement and decided that I'd just fill in the old holes with fix-it-all (a just add water spackle mix), sand them down, and drill new holes that would match up with current hardware.  I made a bold move and painted the cabinet black with paint leftover from the popcorn machine table top.  We also made the bathroom safer by changing out the ordinary outlet with one that has ground fault protection.

The shower stall had a hard plastic folding door that was so hard to clean.  We have hard water that turns everything brown.  Scrubbing that off takes harsh lime removers that give me an asthma attack every time.  The children also weren't the most patient with opening and closing it and it had developed cracks.  I bought a plastic shower curtain and shower rings.  When it gets dirty, I can just throw it in the wash.  If it doesn't survive, I'm only out $2.97.

 I also replaced the boring frameless mirror that was showing water damage along the bottom edge with a fancier mirror.  I think the bathroom turned out pretty well. 

I think it looks even better in person!

Of course, no home project would be complete without a set back.  When we took the old mirror down, we found that they'd wallpapered the room around the mirror.  There were seams all around the edge of the mirror.  Our new mirror wasn't the same size so it took several coats of fix-it-all (and several days of waiting for those coats to dry) to cover the seams before I could paint.  The kids complained about no mirror in the bathroom and the dust from the fix-it-all everyhwhere. 



Is the bathroom now perfect?  I am resigned to living with harvest gold toilet and urinal.  Maybe it will come back in style some day!  But, what kind of torture is it to give a mother of six children a WHITE bathroom floor?  It's a nice quality vinyl with no signs of wear, but it's white, as in shows every speck of dirt.  It only takes one trip through with a dirty bare foot that's been playing outside to leave marks.  At least when people come over they can see for themselves if the bathroom is clean or not.  Someday I just know Dode will surprise me with a new bathroom floor in the delightful color of dried mud.  Until that day, I will continue to cast distainful looks at my bathroom floor.

Dode's giant heart

A few years ago, Dode built a giant heart from PVC pipes and Christmas lights.  In case you're wondering how you too can have an enormous heart in a tree next to your house, here's some photos.

Look closely, do you see the heart in the tree?

The heart is hanging in the tree by a rope and pully.  The pully stays up year round and when it's time for the heart or our giant Christmas tree, it gets lowered to attach things to it.  The rope is attached to the black pipe.

Dode went through all our strands of Christmas lights and stole all the red ones.  He taped the all red strand to the PVC pipes.

The bottom of the PVC pipes is held together with a couple of dry wall screws and the lights are taped onto the pipes.

To form the heart shape, the PVC pipes are bend down to the cross piece of pipe where they are screwed on.

See the black pipe?  The two pieces of white pipe are screwed to it along the outside arc of the heart and at the inside point. 

Once the cross brace is unscrewed, everything stores flat in the rafters of the garage.

Here is the heart in all its glory.  It's suprising how many people we run in to who have seen our heart. 

Dode also hangs it for our anniversary in November. 

President's Day Weekend

Another weekend gone and what do we have to show for it? Saturday started with the produce co-op. We sold out at 72 baskets. The truck was a little late so the baskets weren't quite ready when the crowd arrived but we got everyone out of here pretty quickly.

 Then, it was time to make lunch because my mom and Greg were coming up to pick up their produce. They suprised Jacob with a new guitar and razor. With Jacob's curly beard, small bumps called "pseudofolliculitis barbae" form when he shaves. His skin is light enough, that any blemish leaves a mark that shows for a very long time so he tries hard to avoid the bumps. This razor is supposed to help. Then, it was time to go to Grandma Dickson's 90th party. We had a great time, thanks to all the hard work Viv, Sheri and Janice did.




Sunday was Valentine's Day and we celebrated with three kids sick with nasty colds. How romantic! Dode bought flowers for his young ladies. For me, his big girl, he sewed a pillow filled with rice. The idea behind it is, I'm always cold at bedtime. We heat our house with wood and our bedroom is always the coldest room in the house because it is over our unheated "useless" room and we always have our door closed. Once we warm up the blankets, I'm fine but waiting for those blankets to get warm can be tooth chattering torture. I can stick the pillow Dode made in the microwave to have my very own hot pad. The thing weighs about 10 pounds so it'd also make a killer game of bean bag toss!


Monday we took the kids geocaching and after looking high and low for the cache, finally gave up. We thought we'd be going on a 3/4 mile hike near Pilchuck Falls but when we got there, the gate was open so we drove right to the cache location. It was at an decomissioned campground. We spent a lot of time walking the woods, looking under every fern, but came up empty handed. The kids enjoyed throwing rocks into Pilchuck Creek. I took the girls to the park for some playtime while William was sleeping.

 

Isaac and Mom day

Each year, Dode and I each try to have a special day with each of the children.  It definately takes some advance planning to get everyone their special day.  In January, I "claim" each child's day on the calendar to make sure it happens.  Isaac's day with mom is 1st this year.  Isaac loves to ski.  We started him on skis when he was three and he pretty much owns the mountain.  He starts talking about skiing in August and can't wait.  Skiing is not a cheap sport.  We only get him up a few times a year.  We heard from a friend that he could get $8 night skiing tickets through work to Snoqualmie Pass and I decided it would make a perfect Isaac/Mom day.  We were able to get in 6 hours of skiing.  It was a sheet of ice when we got there and it took him a few runs to get his ski legs back.  Soon, he was bombing down the hill.  We drove up with friends and I think part of his favorite part of the day was falling asleep resting his head in my lap on the way home.  He is a still my sweet, cuddly boy.

Popcorn Machine redo

Bear with me, I'll get to the popcorn popper mentioned in the title once I set the stage. 

We are on a mission to have the coolest house around.  It helps when you start with a pretty great house. 

We have an indoor fire pole,

small stream perfect for wading, rock hounding, and building dams,

area of tall grass for hiding out in, Dode mows a few trails through it in the summer,

and lots of asphalt for bike riding. 

We've added the coolest treehouse ever (which sits out there in lonely splendor until friends come over). 

Notice how one of the slides actually comes out of the stump, all Dode's idea. 

We also have a zip line, with plans for a big boy one that will go over the stream next summer,

something we call the "spinner" (we stole the idea from Uncle Bill Dearinger)

and a hot tub

In order to increase our coolness, I bought a popcorn machine. 

It's inexpensive and fun to make popcorn when friends are over.  The kids also take it to garage sales at their friend's houses and make a little money.  We put the popcorn popper away when not in use to keep the novelty of it going but therein was the difficulty.  Where to store it?  We tried storing it out in the garage but the temperature fluctuations caused condensation to build up on it.  Condensation + salt = bad news.  I was able to find a safe spot for the top in one of the closets in my room but I was left with the dilemma of where to store the bottom trolley part.  I came up with the brainstorm to turn it into a table.  I think it turned out great.  We cut a piece of plywood for a table top and Dode nailed some boards underneath that fit snuggly into the top of the popcorn trolley.  I added some rope trim from Lowe's to give it a more finished look and painted the entire new table top black.  The top lifts off easily to transform it back into a popcorn making device. 

On a side note, kettle corn is easily made at home if you have a popper that uses oil.  We add 1/8-1/4 cup of white sugar to the oil before pouring in the popcorn.  Sprinkle with salt and enjoy!

weekend fun

Saturday started off early when Dode took Isaac and some of Isaac's friends mountain biking at the Pilchuck tree farm.  They ran in to the search and rescue out there practicing and were told they looked like part of a group of some sort, it was the friends of Isaac group.  Dode is a good sport to take this many kids.

In the afternoon, we took the kids to the park.  On the way there, Miriam said, "I sure hope they have a firepole."  They didn't so later after we got home, I guess she decided it was time to attempt ours.  (For those of you who aren't aware, we have a firepole inside our house.) Down she went, too fast the first time and hurt her foot.  We thought that would quench that desire for a while but within minutes, she'd set up pillows and blankets at the bottom and was going down the pole over and over again.  She is such a daredevil!  We've had adults who've decided they don't want to do the pole after looking down the hole and here is our four year old petite premie doing it without fear.  (I'd originally written "princess" but Miriam has informed us that princesses don't go down fire poles!)






 

In praise of zip ties

I am absolutely enamored with zip ties.  They have got to be the most useful thing ever invented.  I use them all over the house.  One of the best gifts Dode has given me was a large pack of assorted sizes of zip ties.

The dishwasher had a broken spot in the silverware tray.  Utensils would fall down and make it so we couldn't pull the bottom tray out.  Two zip ties solved the problem!

We have a gate around our woodstove to keep the little ones away.  We weren't sure how to attach it to the floor until we thought of the handy dandy zip tie.  We can cut it to vacuum up the debris and secure it back in place.

In my house, I am the official hanger of outdoor Christmas lights.  Zip ties make it easy to attach things to the railing of the deck.

We use zip ties to attach our den flags and pennants to pvc pipe flag poles at day camp.  Easy on and off and a great way to recycle the flag poles year after year.  We just put two button holes on the edge of the den flag and they're good to go.

The license plates on our cars are held on by zip ties.  The netting that encircles the trampoline is held on to the support posts with zip ties. 
Zip ties also come in handy when I need to send something to school in William's backpack.  The problem before was, while he was on the bus, he'd go through the backpack and things got lost.  Now, everything is secure until his teacher gets the backpack and cuts the zip tie.  Problem solved!


My favorite zip tie story is a long one.  Our first mini van had a lot of miles on it and lots wrong with it but the price was right.  Over time, Dode was able to fix everything except the lack of a emergency brake pedal.  It had a manual transmission and we just left it in gear when we parked.  Everything was great until a small metal clip that went on the bottom of the gear shift wore out.  Sometimes when I'd shift, it would slip off and I'd be stuck in neutral.  Dode showed me how to pop the hood and reach down beside the engine and get it back on.  I practiced the manuever several times in the driveway and was reasonably proficient at it.  When I'd go somewhere, I tried to avoid shifting on long bridges because I was worried I'd be dead in the middle of the lane, with my head in the hood trying to slip the piece back on.  Due to the lack of the emergency brake, 6 year old Jacob would have to unbuckle and press down on the brakes while I slipped the piece back on and we'd be on our way.  It was not an ideal situation.  I remember one time where it happened on a hill and we had to do a ballet manuever to trade off who was pressing down on the brake.  We had no money to replace the van so I just did my best to have a good attitude.  The trusty zip strip came to the rescue.  Dode stuck on on the shaft, holding the cable tightly against it and not allowing the metal piece to slip off.  Problem solved with a 10 cent zip tie!   We drove the van for several more years after that fix!

One thing I've learned with zip ties is, if you're using them for something temporary, leave some slop in the circle so you can slip your scissors in and cut it when you're done.  Otherwise, you might cut something else that you don't want to (I've done it!)