Grandma and Grandpa Fiene

Last week we had Grandma and Grandpa Fiene visit us.  Since it was so close to Gus' birthday they came bearing gifts.

 Fritz feels that it is necessary that he is in the middle of everything.

 Big brother John is quick to read things out loud for Gus and Anders.

 Solveig makes a book for each grandchild's 5th birthday.  The book is filled with lots of pictures of Gus.  And Gus is Gus' favorite person.

The book is a wonderful memento that will be cherished for years to come.

 None of the boys likes to be outdone.  John needed his turn for a picture with Grandma Fiene.

 Who knows where Anders was.  I'm betting he was choosing to be difficult.  Anders is the master of making things difficult.

 Grandma and Grandpa also brought a Lego book.  I'm pretty sure John read this book to the boys a hundred times.  And again, Fritz couldn't be left out.

Sophie is getting really good at hiding in plain sight around here.  The better she is at hiding, the more Fritz leaves her alone.

Cleaning or Playing?

These two finds lots of fun things in the playroom when they are suppose to be cleaning.

They are so darn cute.  I guess the cleaning can wait.

Pirate Day

Earlier this month Gus has "P" week at school, where each day had a theme based on the letter "p."  One of the days that week was dress like a pirate or a princess.  I kept referring to it as dress like a pirate day.  Gus ALWAYS corrected me, "It's actually dress like a pirate OR a princess day."  I asked him if he wanted to dress like a princess and he looked at me like I was crazy.   The numerous costumes we own have come to good use.  Gus actually had a few pirate costumes to choose from.

Gus decided on the Jake and the Neverland Pirates costume.

The pirate's dog just wanted to make sure his face was all clean for school.

It All Started with the Vanity

I painted the guest bathroom vanity a light grey.

  I did this for two reasons...

1.  I wanted to see how the lighter paint would hold up to boys kicking and scaling them.

2.  The bathroom is so small I thought the lighter color would make it seem bigger.

 When I finished the vanity I HATED it because it looked horrible next to the paint color of the bathroom.  The bathroom I just painted 2 years ago.  

So the only thing I could do is re-do the bathroom...again.

Before:

After:

 Anders and I had fun going to places like HomeGoods to find things like this rack.

 I got cute glass knobs for the vanity. 

And, a new light fixture and new mirror do wonders for the space.

All in all I think the project was worth doing.  I just wasn't expecting to do it.  I should probably tackle the 400 other projects that are on my list.

Bathroom Vanities

I've been thinking about painting my kitchen cabinets.  But before I obsessed even more than I have already over color combinations, I decided to see if this was even a project I wanted to take on.  So I decided to paint my bathroom vanity.  I figured if the project didn't go well it was much cheaper to replace my vanity than my kitchen cabinets.

Before:

This is the before-before.  This is what the bathroom looked like when we moved in.  Although the color of the walls changed, the vanity remained the same.

After:

It is actually amazing what adding handles and knobs will do for the look.

This project went well, but I realized that, if I want an actual determination of the durability of painted cabinets, I needed to do the boys vanity.

Before:

After:

This vanity actually caused me to re-do the entire bathroom!  

I went with a lighter color to make the bathroom a little brighter.  It is an incredibly small bathroom.

So far the paint is holding up well.  It could also be the hundreds of coats of polyurethane I applied.  I'll give it a couple of months and then decide what to do with the kitchen.

3 Boys in a Tiny Room

All three boys had been begging for quite awhile to share a room.  Poor little Anders was feeling a bit left out.  In an effort to include Anders, and to give John more space, we had switched up the rooms and had Gus and Anders sharing and John by himself.  That didn't cut it. The bedrooms in our house are tiny so I was going to wait to move them all together until we finished off the bedroom in our walk-out basement.  But the boys didn't want to wait that long.  So we headed to Ikea to see what we could find.

We managed to fit all three boys in this small room.  They love it.  Every once in awhile when they are being rowdy I'll threaten to move them all back the way they were.  That gets them to settle down pretty quickly.  Someday I know they will all want their own space.  For now I will enjoy the fact that they love being together...at least when they are sleeping.