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Working for the Weekend

It has been such a long week! And it’s only Wednesday! I think it’s partially because I brought my work home with me Monday and worked into the wee smalls. Our sitter is also off for the week, so we are juggling around three different sitters over four days and some craziness that goes along with that.

So I am looking forward to the weekend. It is not CRAZY busy. We just have two parties to go to, and some little visitors on Saturday morning. And maybe a third party, but that hasn’t been confirmed yet. Not too bad, right? So I’m looking forward to a little time to get some things done around the house. We need to make a run to Good Will. A few weeks ago we did some purging of toys from the kids’ rooms and held onto the spoils until we made sure they weren’t going to miss them. They are going away this weekend along with some clothes, books and magazines and other random stuff I’ve been gathering.

I’d also like to tackle one or two projects around the house. There are some that are already in the queue, like fixing Tabby’s shelf and making Ben’s decorative shelves, and cleaning out my office and some others I’ve only been dreaming of. I saw this awesome backyard sign featuring places you’ve been on Pinterest and I really want to make one. Matt and I also want to cover a corkboard with a map of CO so that we can add pins to all of the camping/vacation destinations we’ve been to around the state.

There are also a couple of stores I’d like to check out. Apparently there is another great fabric store in the area, Fabricate, that I would love to check out. I’m toying with the idea of covering our camper’s dinette cushions with oilcloth or similar since (ahem) kids eat there. Athleta, purveyor of my favorite clothes also just opened a retail store in Denver and I’d LOVE to check that out.

I am NOTHING if not talented at jam-packing a weekend.

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Bazinga!

… and other things running through my head.

It’s all been just a little crazy lately. Yesterday we had to buy a vacuum, completely out of the blue. Our housecleaning faeries, as I affectionately refer to them, do not bring their own vacuum with them and since ours died and they were flying in today, a new vacuum had to be purchased. It gave us 10 years of dog hair removal so it probably doesn’t owe us much. Matt and the kids went to Sears to pick it up and the kids were thrilled with the whole process and fought over who would use it first. It really sucks, that’s for sure.

Suddenly there’s this mad race to do all these things … trips, parties, girls’ nights, dinners, weekends-away, etc … BEFORE SCHOOL STARTS. Though in all fairness, there are a few things on the calendar even after school stars, every weekend until SCHOOL STARTS will be filled.to.the.brim. We may even have to move our anniversary trip.

We’ve been cooking quite a bit, but it’s been all super simple stuff … meat on the grill plus nuked veggies with seasoning on them. Super easy and tasty but pretty boring. Life just hasn’t been lending itself well to the use of cookbooks. However, we are throwing our sitter a retirement/thank-you-for-putting-up-with-us-for-five-years dinner in a couple of weeks and I will be pulling out all the stops … or at least baking.

I have some really cool stuff I want to share. Kjersten asked about my digital scrapbooking which I would definitely like to share since I’ve been enjoying it and since I’ve actually been making headway (though less since we got back from vacation, I notice). I also made Tabby her own “Learn to Read” book in digital format, inspired by a project on Playdough to Plato, and put it on the Kindle which was a major hit, so I’d like to share how I accomplished that as well because it was fun and pretty easy.

I have not been running much, though I have been keeping up my bootcamp routine. There are reasons for the lack of running: being out of the routine, things at work being insane and some ennui caused, oddly enough, by a running clinic I took. But I am really wanting to get back into it. Tonight I signed up for a 5K to do with a big group and I’m really looking forward to it. Now to dust off my shoes and get back to it…

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Doodles and Such

While we were on vacation, Tabby and I spent some time doodling – in the Oodles of Doodles book to be exact. Doodle Books, in case you’re not familiar with the concept, are quite similar to coloring books but quite a bit more open-ended. Instead of a full picture for you to color, they provide a backdrop or a start to a picture and you fill it in with your own artwork. She is still very much in the learning-to-draw portion of things, but she and I were able to have a very good time filling up a few pages in the book. I plan to take it along again this weekend while we’re camping.

Yes, camping. Again. I am a bit exhausted just thinking about it, but we hadn’t taken Loki out in a while and we had the camper out to have it serviced, so it just made sense to go. No one was available to join us which was kind of a bummer, but also kind of good. It keeps things simpler and will give us time as a family. I’ve been downloading some books to read aloud to the kids and stuff like that.

I also have a few word games I’m planning to take with us. There’s a great site called Playdough to Plato (love that name!) that’s dedicated to fun learn-to-read games. Tabby is well on her way with the reading and can stumble through a lot of the early readers, but she’s been so into the whole thing that I want to help her make more progress. They’re also great because they can be adapted to the level Ben is at, recognizing letters. Most of them also only require some paper or notecards and some markers.

Here they are if you’re interested.

1. Climb to the top – kids roll a dice (made with a cube block and some sticky labels) with sight words or letters on each face and see which one of the six sides gets to the top of the chart first.

2. Same or different – a card is divided down the center with a line and then on each side of the line two letter or number combinations are written. The child then has to decide if they’re the same or different. This helps them to train themselves to visually differentiate between common words that are close to one another.

3. Showdown – you make two sets of cards with the same letters, numbers or words on them, varying in quantity and complexity based on the age of the child. You pick a card from your deck and read it. The child then has a few moments to shuffle through their pile and find the corresponding word/letter/number. Once he’s found it you say “1-2-3 SHOWDOWN!” and you both turn over your cards. If they match … YAY and if not, the child can go through their pile to find the matching one.

I also found this cute math game for addition. We regularly practice addition in the car with Tabby so I think she can handle it. Wonder if I have enough dice.

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Change? We fear change.

We have some huge changes coming up here pretty soon at Casa de Nichols. I am referring of course to the retirement of our long-term (5.5 yrs!!) sitter and the kids moving into official full-day schools. As a type-A control freak, I am not very big on change. But over the years I’ve both developed coping mechanisms for dealing with change, namely planning! I get to make lists and time tables and label things and suddenly even though I can’t control what else the change is going to do to us, I feel better because backpacks are labeled and the calendar is updated and I have a chart for making sack lunches.

So I am slowly but determinedly getting everything ready for the big shift. I have a countdown sort of going in my mind, not like 52 days, 51 days, 50 days … but practically every time I look at the calendar, I do a gut check of “Wow. Just a month until our sitter’s last day,” or “Wow, just 3 weeks until we do Kindergarten registration.” I’ve ordered Ben a nap mat – it arrived yesterday and let’s just say he hasn’t been this excited for naps in a loooong time – and some personalized stickers to label clothes and lunch containers. In all seriousness, I do have a file of links to lunch ideas. I’ve also been filling out mounds of paperwork and making sure all the things we need to do before school starts (immunizations, dentist appointments, shopping trips) are handled. And I am planning a small “thank you” dinner for our sitter.

Winston Churchill said, “There is nothing wrong with change as long as it is in the right direction.” I’m sure he was right. But I also like my change well orchestrated.

 

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Did you miss me??

So … did ya miss me? I took an unexpected but pretty necessary blogging hiatus for a while there. And it was awesome. See we got a chance to extend our weekend away by a couple of days and we jumped at it. JUMPED. So we headed for the hills and we proceeded to do a lot of nothing. Continue reading “Did you miss me??”

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Where were we?

We had a nice weekend. It felt longer than normal somehow and the office feels somewhat foreign to me like I haven’t been here in a while although it’s only been three days, like usual.

Friday the kids and I had a quiet day. We pulled out the water colors. We did laundry. We watched TV. We chilled. I handled some of the little things that I’ve been too busy for the past few weeks, including ordering Ben a nap-mat from Etsy that he will be using for the next two years at preschool.

Our friends needed us to watch their boys Friday night so they came over after dinner and stayed with us all night. Everyone did pretty well except for a smallish incident Saturday morning when Tabby’s decorative “special things” shelf got pulled down (now that she has bunkbeds, it is way too easily accessible) and her piggybank was broken.

We ended up taking them to see Madagascar 3. The kids had waaay too much popcorn and lemonade, but a really good time. They behaved really well. To my surprise, Matt and I enjoyed the movie too – the penguins were hilarious and so was the cross-dressing lemur.

After we dropped the boys off, we headed to my mom’s house where we played in the backyard and had dinner. The kids stayed with her Saturday night so Matt and I could accomplish a few things. We purged the kids rooms of excess junk (I contend there is still more that should go!) and rearranged Tabby’s room. Her shelf still needs to be fixed, but the room is flowing much better now and looks really cute. We also did some rearranging in Ben’s room and made some decisions about where his two decorative shelves will go. I think it’s finally starting to look truly put together.

Sunday we slept in and then we went to the kids’ consignment shop to pick up a check for the kids’ old dresser and see if they want to sell Tabby’s toddler bed (they did) and picked up some new jeans for Tabby. Then we met Mom and the kids for lunch and kiddo exchange and went home (via Target) to have naps and a quiet finish to our weekend.

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My Baby

This morning as I was leaving for work (a little bit late … ahem). I heard a little voice calling out to me. He wandered down the stairs in his jim-jams, an adorably mismatched combo of old PJ bottoms that are too small for him and a Toy Story t’shirt still much too big for him, hair sweetly rumpled, dragging his blanky Linus-style.

It was a rare moment when he still looked a bit like the baby I brought home from the hospital over three years ago. The moments are rarer and rarer.

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Phone Babble

So in the midst of all the craziness at work, I up and got a new phone. My old EVO was actually still working great, but Matt’s isn’t and since I had upgrade credits and he didn’t, we upgraded my phone and he will take my old one. The new phone I chose is the EVO LTE 4G. The funny part is that the network protocol it functions optimally on (4G LTE) isn’t even available in Denver until (maybe) late this year. But no matter, the phone itself is such a huge upgrade that I was able to see after a week of use that speeds I got on it were about the same (possibly a little better) than my old EVO 4G.

A couple more weeks in now and I am a huge fan – it’s a big upgrade in every way. The OS is now Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) and the processor is a super-fast dual core. The Android 4.0 OS is very slick and allows you to shove away apps and emails and notifications that you’re done with and sharing is pretty darn simple.

But my favorite feature is a pretty basic but crucial one – the camera. It is quick to load, quick to shoot and takes awesome photos. It is the first phone camera that I truly feel is a replacement for a point-and-shoot. It can’t hold a candle to my DSLR but for the little moments when the DSLR isn’t at hand, it works wonders. My favorite feature in the camera is the multi-shot mode. You just hold down the shutter button (on the side of the camera) and it clicks away. It isn’t precise like a DSLR (exactly 3 frames/sec) or anything, but you get a fair few shots and then you can select the “best shot” from the bunch and delete the rest – or keep them all. It makes shooting cute photos of the kids much easier. My Instagram account runneth over.

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50 Years

Back in 1962, my grandparents held a family meeting to discuss the start of a construction company, what would become Pinkard Construction. 50 years later, the business is now owned by my mom, her brother and a few others who bought out my grandpa in the 1980s. It is where I have worked since moving back to CO in 2004. Continue reading “50 Years”