Chef Messy

plans

So, hanging out in the cowboy bachelor pad has made us realize the necessity of figuring out a more suitable abode, ASAP.  The necessity of saying "OK.  Full steam ahead."  I'm not really a full-steam-ahead sort of girl.  I like to agonize over little pointless decisions, so you can imagine the heartburn I'm having about all of this.  Building a house?  Choosing the plans?  Picking where it goes?  Deciding which trees to chop?  What?

And then there's our Pocatello house.  Sell?  Rent?  Even just the cleaning involved to be ready for either option is overwhelming to me.  I can't even get my laundry done and I'm supposed to have this place ready to sell?  Seriously?

And yet, I'm excited.  We've been meeting the neighbors, the new church social network, and they are the nicest people ever.  Matt has been meeting the kids his age, in particular, another eight-year-old boy (which he's excited about) and an eight-year-old girl ("It's complicated..." he says) in his church class.  We've been traipsing around the property, plotting out where things will go, spotting owls, talking about alpaca and chickens (or not), imagining the possibilities...

In some ways, it seems so perfect that I'm just certain something will go wrong.

Well... There was this...

We had picked out the perfect spot and planned to cut a path in through the brambles from the main road.  Then we drove to the other side of the bramble patch and found this.

I called my dad up.  "Dad," I said.  This behemoth on the side of the road.  What is it?  It's ugly.  Mom and Jen both agree.  Please tell me I can get rid of it."

"Dear," he said.  "That is the irrigation well for the whole farm.  The entire female population of this family might vote that it's ugly, but my vote trumps all.  The pump has to stay."

Well, then.  Ruin my fun.

Maybe we can build a nice hedge?

So, anyway.  Plans.

Back yard.  Dad says that he can't move the pump, but he can at least haul some of the random farm junk behind the barn.  These trees are gorgeous in the summer.

Side yard (where the driveway will go.)

Front yard bramble patch.  Ryan's got the machete out (any good excuse to use the machete...), we've recruited some of the farm guys to help, and we will probably start chopping through this mess tomorrow.    I'm thinking I should go out and supervise this project.  The men on the farm (Dad!) can get a little chop-happy.  (See that owl in there?  I love owls.)

This is where my imaginary alpaca will go.  And my imaginary soccer field.  And my imaginary fire pit.  And my imaginary teepee.

And some randoms...

Mangy.

Even though my dad refuses to move the behemoth, he continues to be the most generous man on the planet and bought me an iPhone last week.  And I've never had an iPhone before, so I am really excited about this, which is probably obvious here.  Instagram really is as fun as they said it was.

in which i lose my craft room to fighting boys and co-sleeping girls

Once upon a time, my blissful mental picture of my future family involved two brothers that would happily share a room.  Two twin beds, side by side...  Matching quilts...  A place for all the toys, which would, of course, be happily shared...

Even though I only had one kid when I found this house, I bought it with that nice little mental picture in mind.  As long as we had less than four kids, they could happily share the two small bedrooms upstairs, meaning the downstairs bedroom was reserved all for me and my mountain of fabric.

Fast forward several years, two kids, and one reality check later, and that lovely little bubble of thought has popped.  Because my boys, despite the six-year age gap, fight nonstop.  All the time.  Without cease.

It's SO surprising to me!  They are in two different stages of life.  What on earth can they possibly have to fight about?  And yet, every time I turn around, Matthew is using that one judo move he knows to throw Jonah over his shoulder and onto the floor, or Jonah is throwing a train at Matthew's head.  They fight over toys.  They fight over space.  They fight over the piano and food and how many more M&M's one of them had than the other one.

Drives me bananas, it does.

And the reason this is room-sharing (or not) situation is all complicated is that I have reached the point where I really want Sofie out of my bed.

Co-sleeping.  It's awesome in those early months, especially if you are recovering from a C-Section and nursing and all that.  But at five months, babies get it all figured out.  They know that "crying it out" is always going to end up in their favor because they are right next to your head.  They know that any time you roll over or sneeze or blink or twitch, this signals an invitation to wide-awake 2 a.m. party time.  At five months, co-sleeping makes an abrupt and noisy transition from warm, snuggly extra snoozing with a little squishy newborn to the seventh hell of baby sleep positions.

I love her.  She is adorable.  But I want her OUT of my bed.

And herein lies the problem.  Matt is in the big room.  Jonah is in the tiny one.  Plan A of moving Jonah into Matt's room turns out to be a really horrible idea.   So, bottom line, not only I am losing the battle of keeping the peace and sleeping, I am also losing my sewing space.

Oh, well.  First world problems.

So, as I'm plotting the big move and planning a new room for Matt, I am realizing how much I really love Pinterest.  SO handy, that Pinterest.  I spent a while today going through ideas, trying to figure out what to do with paint, furniture, bedding, etc.

I love that all of these ideas are in one place!  I used to keep books like this.  I'd spend hours tearing photos out of magazines, pasting them in.  So, Pinterest is pretty much the new idea book, except for that it is easier and cheaper and you don't have to worry about reglueing everything when your glue dots lose their stick.  I don't even think I have a magazine subscription anymore.  (I wonder how much the magazine industry hates the Internet, and blogs, and Pinterest, which have collectively rendered them somewhat obsolete.)

So, as I'm looking at these photos, I'm thinking that this room is going to have to involve gray paint and stripes, with a pop of color thrown in somewhere.  Matthew keeps lobbying for me to paint the entire room fire engine red, which is not going to happen, but I'm still trying to get his input so that it will be a space that he likes.  Decorating is fun.  It sortof takes the sting out of losing my crafting space.

As for figuring out what to do with all of my fabric, and my sewing tables, and my computer desk, and everything else that has piled up in that room, Pinterest is a little lacking in ideas there.  Hmm...

(Photo credits: All from this board.  1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12)

why don't we live here?

We've been playing in Neely again.  And now I have some thinking out loud to do.

OK, so, out in Neely, there is this really old house, with this really amazing yard.

Here's the thing, though.  That house is not a house you could live in.  This house is over 100 years old, which, in and of itself, is not a deal-breaker.  Our Lexington house was 150 years old and we loved it.  However, the primary occupant of this house was my old bachelor cowboy great-uncle.  He was a great guy, but he was... well... a bachelor, with a bachelor's idea of home maintenance.  I'm sure you see where I'm going with this.  There is mold.  There are snakes.  The floor is falling in and I'm sure one wall will cave in eventually.  The brick has been eaten away by gophers on one side.  And then there are the ghost stories.

Long story short, I am not willing to live in this house, and the fact that nobody else on the farm has moved in there means that probably nobody else is either.

But, oh, the yard... Such a waste of a great yard...

A great yard in a great area.  This is the view to the North...

And if you take a quick four-wheeler ride with the kiddos...

(Any snarky comments about calling child protective services on parents who take their kids on four-wheeler rides will be promptly disregarded with a hearty laugh.  Wouldn't be the first time.  We are unapologetic farm people.  Plus, we drive REALLY slow with kiddos on board.)

Anyway, a quick four-wheeler ride will take you to places like this...

And this...

And this...

I want to live out there.  I really do.  I want my kids to be by goats and four-wheelers and the river and the farm.  I want to not be ten feet away from my neighbors.  I want a yard full of trees and a barn in my driveway.  So, I got to thinking about that great yard and that old nasty house...

And I thought, why not just tear it down?  And start over?  And build a little farm cottage with a big front porch, like this or this, right over the top of the old foundation?  Remember this old place in Virginia that I loved?

Just imagine that house instead of the one that's there.  Wouldn't that be amazing?  And then the yard could be mine!

It's something to think about.  Would you do it?

the stockings were hung by the chimney with care

Who am I kidding.  We don't have a chimney.  Once upon a time, we had a wood-burning stove, but we chucked that because we knew it was never going to get used.  So, when it comes to hanging stockings, we improvise.

 

5 inch photo frames + 3 yards of ribbon (cut into 4 equal pieces) + nails = stocking holders for people who don't have chimneys

And now Santa doesn't have to be confused about whose stocking is whose.  Matthew has been rather concerned about this.  Now all we need is a "magic Santa key," so that he can get through the front door.

If you want the printable for the red and green polkadot photo frames, here you go.  Just pop in a 3x3 (at 300 dpi) photo and print as a 5x7, then cut off the white sections when you pick it up.  (If you look at my photos, the polkadots are too close to the frame.  That has been fixed in the printable.)

Just click on the above images to open them up at full-size.  Then, just right-click and save to your own computer.  (Both frames are at 300 dpi.)

So, looks like our decorating is complete, and just in time!

 

the petersen family vs. the half-dead, shorted-out, moulting, 7.5-foot, christmas tree

I've been trying to put up our Christmas tree for three days.  We inherited this behemoth from my Grandma three years ago, after she lost patience with it.  And, all things considered, even though it is generally held together by twistie-ties and love, it has been a good tree. 

But some crazy party must have been going on in the box since the time we put in storage last, ahem, February.  Because when we attempted to put it up on Thursday, half of the branches were falling out by the roots, and only a third of the lights were working.  After spending 8 hours yesterday removing 400 of the 700 lights, testing them in a strand that actually worked, and then throwing up our hands in despair that we would never figure out why this tree that lit up perfectly last year suddenly had three sad little chunks of light that were barely clinging to life, we decided to go shopping for a new tree.

And then we realized that to get a tree even half as good as our tree that sortof resembled a dead bird as of yesterday afternoon, we were going to have to spend around $300, which, because I finally paid off my maternity bill yesterday afternoon (only 13 months later, hooray!), we don't have.

But we DID have wire cutters, and an entire Saturday where the only thing we had scheduled was an outing to build trains at Lowe's.  Maybe if we would have realized that the existing lights had been intricately braided on by a bunch of demented Chinese laborers with a gross misunderstanding of the average life span of Christmas lights, we would have just forked out the $300.  But, instead, we spent the whole. entire. day. clipping off twinkle lights.  One by one.  And swearing at the Chinese.  And reminding ourselves that this was an exercise in thrift and economy.  Which builds character.  And saves $300.

One thousand and three hundred lights, two dozen machine screws, and a whole lot of floral wire later, we have defeated the tree.  I think it looks even better than it did in the first place.  And the best part is when the lights go off, we can just pull off the bad strand and replace it!  And it didn't cost $300.  That makes me happy.

So, Petersen Family-1, Half-Dead Pre-Lit Tree-0.

Except that now I'm way to tired to actually decorate it.

Nesting: Phase 1

I had a big weekend.  We spent a day up in Salt Lake acquiring baby furniture (and getting some major steals from the as-is section at IKEA, hooray!  I'm all for letting my furniture get broken in by other people).  And then we spent the rest of the weekend evicting Ryan from his "office," which has really served as more of a dumping ground for papers and random computer projects than an actual working space.  It took forever, but the room has been cleaned up and painted, and I got all the furniture put together.  I don't know about this whole nesting thing.  It needs done, and better to do it now than when I'm even bigger and more uncomfortable, but my whole body is sure feeling it today!  Feels good to get so much done, though.  I like a good project.

It's definitely bare bones at this point, and I'm still sortof stressing out about the paint color.  I decided on the color scheme after looking at this room (via IKEA)...

... and this room (via Denyse Schmidt Quilts)...

...and this room (via Pottery Barn Kids, but I'm planning on blues instead of pinks, obviously)...

...but my room is pretty small, and that green just seems a lot brighter in person than what I was expecting!  Hopefully it will settle down a bit once I put up curtains and pictures and all of that other stuff.  If not, I can always repaint later.  For now, I'm just going to sit with it for a few days.  I'm not into pastel-ey baby rooms anyway.

I also wanted to let you in on a little secret I learned over the weekend while picking out paint.  I really wanted to use Benjamin Moore's Stem Green, which is one of the colors from their Pottery Barn line.  However, Benjamin Moore paint is about $45 a gallon, and that wasn't really in my budget.  So, I knew that most paint places will custom mix whatever color you want, but I've always wondered how accurate they really are.  When I asked the paint guy at Lowe's about it, he said, "Well, it's pretty accurate, but if you've got the color swatch from Benjamin Moore, we have the formulas for all of their colors already in our system."  Hot dog, you're kidding me!  I had no idea!  Apparently they have the formulas of ALL the major paint companies.  And the color is EXACTLY the same as the Benjamin Moore sample, but I only paid $19.  Happy day.  I love a good deal.

And speaking of curtains and pictures and stuff, I still have a lot of work left to do on this room:

I'm using this fabric for the quilt and a handful of other things in the room:

It's an Alexander Henry 2-D zoo print, and it's a little bit hard to find, but a friend of mine pointed me toward FabricWorm, and she seems to keep it in stock.

And for prints, I plan to buy three or four zoo animals from falldowntree, who is based just a couple of hours away in Utah.  I like the idea of supporting a nearby artist, and aren't these great?

So, yep, lots of work left to do.  But at the very least we've moved beyond pajamas and the kid will have a place to sleep!

Nursery Ideas and Indecision

Now that I know that I'm having a boy, I'm really excited to start doing some of the projects that I've been putting off until gender was official.  First on the agenda is to get going on the nursery.  It's going to be fun, once I decide how to do it.  But with my decision-making skills, the baby could be five years old by the time I finally decide what color scheme I want to go with, let alone the details.

But there are a few rooms I've been looking at for ideas.  This one from Pottery Barn is cute.  Maybe a little *too* baby, but cute.

 

I wouldn't probably actually buy the Pottery Barn stuff (way too pricey!), but I love to look at their rooms for inspiration.  A good deal of my decorating is based on Pottery Barn photos.

Land of Nod always has cute rooms, too.

 

I'm almost thinking I want to do a room that's a little brighter and more colorful, though.  I love this room from IKEA, even though it's more of a kid's room.

 

My friend Heidi made this awesome baby quilt a while back for her son Ty.  I hope she won't mind me showing you here, because I'm thinking if I painted a room this color of green, and then made a quilt something like what she made last year, it would be perfect!

 

Don't you love the print?  It's hard to find, but every now and then it comes up on EBay.

I also love this look from Denyse Schmidt.  (Speaking of Denyse Schmidt, I'm still kicking myself for not getting that "Square Deal" quilt for Matthew from Land of Nod back when it was on sale!)

 

Ah, decisions, decisions.  And there's more where these came from, too!

In which I show you my "food storage" and introduce Herman, Lucy, and Pinky Winky

So, if you have ever been to Idaho or Utah, you know that food storage is a big thing around here.  You won't find too many basements without a room piled floor to ceiling with rice and beans and canned everything.  We'll can it whether it ought to be canned or not.  I remember my Grandma Kendell's storage room was this magical place with shelves upon shelves upon shelves of home-bottled peaches and pears.  Sometimes I actually wonder if she's hoping for the apocalypse, when the entire family will move back to her house and live off her peaches.

Well, anyway, as far as food storage goes, here's how I think we should go about things...

 

Yep, I think we've pretty much covered the essentials here.  12 huge jars of jam in every flavor, 3 bottles of Butter Pecan Syrup, and 3 massive bottles of pie filling.  What more could you possibly need if you are starving?

I have to credit my friend Coleen for introducing me to the Country Canner.  (Speaking of things that maybe shouldn't be canned, do you know that you can get jam made out of pickle juice?!!)  I miss the Country Canner.  We used to make monthly trips up to Harrisonburg to stock up on things, and I brought about eight jars of jam when we moved here.  We finished off the last jar a few weeks ago, and that was a sad day at our house.  Luckily, they will ship you anything they've got, so my mom and sisters and I put in a huge order.  I'm sure the Mennonite ladies that run the place are still laughing, but we are happy to have our jam back.  You can't go back to Smuckers once you've gotten used to this stuff.

We're also still working on the yard.  Ryan took over taking care of the lawn this year, and I can't tell you how much I am enjoying this system.  I do not love taking care of the lawn.  I'm not even bothering with a garden this year (especially not after last summer's square foot gardening flop), and I haven't even planted my usual pots of herbs.  Like I said before, if it doesn't involve air conditioning, I want no part in it.

I did put together some cute flower pots, though.  Backyard Living (which, sadly, is going under) puts out flower pot "recipes" every issue, which makes things much easier for those of us who have not the foggiest clue how to put plants together.  I have two of these on my front step.

 

I think I'm going to name them Herman and Lucy.

And we also have some Pinky Winky bushes waiting to be put in the ground.  I'm not making this up, that's really what they are called.  Ryan picked them up, brought them home, and said, "You got these just because they are named Pinky Winky, didn't you."

 

Wouldn't you?

One of Those Days

So much for summer plans.  It's a beautiful day outside.  We had planned to go to the pool.  Instead, I think the next few days are pretty much going to look like this:

I was hoping yesterday that this was just a bad case of allergies.  We went out and made friends with Ryan's little black barn cat over the weekend, and I think Matthew petted the little guy for an entire fifteen seconds before his eyes started swelling up and itching.  I've never seen a kid more allergic to cats than Matthew is.  Sad, too, because he loves anything that's furry.  He was grouchy and puffy and lethargic yesterday, but explained it away as "It's because I petted a kitty."  I think this is more than kitty, though.  Poor kid coughed all night, and today all he wants to do is lay in bed and listen to Bob Marley and They Might Be Giants.  We always know something is wrong if he doesn't start bouncing around the house by 7 a.m.

In other, happier news, I have a new baby tree.

This is my happy birthday tree, even though my birthday is still a month away.  (I'm turning 30 this year--yikes!)  My mom and dad came and planted it yesterday while I wasn't looking.  When it's a grownup, it will look like this.  They also sprayed my weeds and pulled up the random grass that was creeping into places it isn't supposed to be.  It's nice to be by family.

Matthew's Art Wall

We have this ugly entryway in our downstairs.  There's really not enough space to do much with it, so I'm pretty sure it's doomed to just never be cute.  But we did improve it somewhat with the addition of a wall featuring the talents of our budding little household artist.  I've been wanting to do this forever.  I think kids should have a little place in the house to look at their projects and be proud.

 

Let me just add that there is no good way to take a picture of this entryway, that no natural light gets in down there, and that our paint color is not really that ugly.

Eventually I'd like to add some smaller frames around the big ones, so that it looks something like the children's art wall back at the Blue Sky Bakery in Lexington.

 

For now, though, we'll just enjoy the fact that the wall isn't bare anymore.  How could these art projects not make you happy?  I plan to rotate them out as he does new things.

 

Oh yes, and the frames?  "Floaters" from WalMart, so that we don't have to worry about mat sizes.  Very handy.

For this Project, I'd Like to Thank Irving Penn and Our Book-Eating Dog Maggie

Here's another little decorating project that I finished quite some time ago.  It's a rare day, however, that my bed is made and there isn't a pile of clothes in some obvious place in my room, so it's taken me until now to get it posted.

 

Funny how the same green that I so hated in the living room is the one that I so love in my bedroom.  Anyway, there is a story to these prints.  Here is a little bit closer look.  If you follow photography at all, you might recognize these.

 

The summer before Ryan started law school, we went to the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. and saw a limited exhibition of Irving Penn's Platinum Prints.  I had seen a couple of these before, but seeing them up close and in person was just a lifetime experience that I will never forget.  The detail with which Penn developed this particular set of prints was just incredible.  I have never in my life seen black and white photography like it, before or since.

Anyway, I bought a book from the exhibit, which met an unfortunate end not long after we got our resident furball, Miz. Lady Margaret Thatcher.  Maggie, as a puppy, was quite the literal connoisseur of books, particular big nice coffee table books.  I know, I know, I've never heard of a book-eating dog either, but doesn't it just figure that I would end up with a dog that loves books???  Though we thought about replacing the dog, in the end it was just easier to replace the book, so I am still enjoying it and making sure it stays out of canine jaws.

Anyway, though the first book didn't make it, most of the inner pages did.  I held on to them, not knowing at the time what I'd do with them, but I'm happy they came to this useful end.  If you're ever looking for a cheap way to get some artwork up, it's really not a bad idea get a big book of art you really love and cut it up (or, let your dog eat it, either way...), so long as the book isn't out-of-print or valuable or anything.  (I wouldn't be cutting this book up now, since it currently costs more than five times what I paid for it!) Even if your artwork doesn't fit standard frame sizes, most framing shops will cut mats whatever size you need them to be.  Our local shop even sells "mat scraps," leftovers from other framing jobs, that they sell for a fraction of the cost of what you'd get them for otherwise.

I decided to use prints from Penn's Cuzco set, partly because Ryan's family has ties to this part of the world (Not Peru, technically, but Bolivia, which is the next closest thing), and partly because I just love the native costumes of the Andean Indians.

 

 

 

These are simple people from the villages of the Andes, and yet they are so beautiful and elegant in their own way, don't you think?

The Photo Wall That Took Me Three Years To Put Together

Even though I take THOUSANDS of photos a year, I never print them.  It's terrible.  You'd think my house would be just full of photos, but until last week I have been guilty of having only two photos up in our entire house, and one of them wasn't even one that I took.

But that's been remedied now.

 

(I think that once you do finally get around to getting your photos up, they should be big!)

This photo wall is a project that I've been wanting to do for years now.  My inspiration is a page out of Pottery Barn that I clipped out some time in 2005.

 

So, it's only taken me three or four years to get around to doing this!  But I'm happy with how it looks.  It's better than the little mirror we had up before (I love the little mirror, but just not there.)  And yes, I've also repainted since I took this next photo.  The green was just a little too Christmasey with the red and kindof had this sickly blue hue, though strangely enough the same color looks awesome in my bedroom.

 

And after...

   

Here's a closeup of the photos we chose.  Most of them are from the beach (both coasts are represented here), which might seem funny since we live so far from it.  But we so love the beach, so that's what I decided to use.  Ryan gets credit for the biggest photo on the wall.  He's turning into quite the photographer.  I rarely like photos of myself, but I love, love, love the one he took of me and Matthew at Oceanside last November.  The light is just perfect.

 

Fun stuff.  I really enjoy a good decorating project.