Hanging out in Owen’s room.
Category Archives: Katie
Katie’s keeping my makeup safe!
During one of our endless trips to empty all the small leftover bits out of the rental, I handed Katie part of my makeup organizers to put in the car. This is what she did with it.
Soooo much junk left.
Just two of Katie’s walls after her room was emptied. Unbelievable.
A breakfast note for Maggie.
When bedding gets packed…
The kids’ PTO calendar submissions
I finally got the kids to make pictures for the annual calendar contest…I loved both of them but unfortunately they didn’t get selected.
I found Katie’s wishlist.
More Adventures in Moving, Dinner Edition
More Adventures in Moving, Dinner Edition:
So today we moved the refrigerators around. Our fridge from the house went to the new house garage. The rental fridge came back in from the garage. So this necessitated a bunch of coolers and rearranging of food and trying to decide what to keep here and what to take over to the new house. I have done this MANY times, but today…well.
So it comes time for dinner and I had found a package of what I thought was taco meat. I mean, I even tasted it and my tired brain thought it was taco meat. It was Italian sausage. So then I dug through the freezer and found enchilada mix–perfect for nachos! Except it turned out to be potato soup (I didn’t take off the last label).
Not to be deterred I went back to the freezer and found ANOTHER package of meat that looked like ground beef – but it wasn’t my writing but I couldn’t really make it out… Yeah, more Italian sausage.
I GIVE UP. So we were gonna have Italian sausage nachos.
Except guess what? I had NONE of my other ingredients! No green onions (missing), no mexican cheese (missing), no guacamole (missing), no salsa (missing). WHAAAAAAT?????? I knew I had all that stuff which is why I picked nachos to start with! But by this time we were all starving so it was just meat and cheddar cheese nachos.
And guess what? Miss Picky Eater herself said they were the best ever! WHAAAAAT?!
And then while we were eating…we were discussing all the missing foods and how I swear I didn’t unpack them at the other house…and we discovered there was one cooler that got pushed aside in the other room. So now we have a full fridge.
What shall tomorrow bring?
No big party this year…
Just a neighborhood friend (and her cousin) over for some slip and slide fun. Plus ice cream.
And then a Bundt cake with our friends later.
Work doesn’t stop on a birthday!
Daddy and Owen were painting the garage while Katie was having her waterslide party. Yes, it’s purple. We only use Home Depot or Menards “oops” paint colors ($30 vs $120 for five gallons) for garages so it was bright peach or this. We figured the purple was meant to be.
Also, Tom’s sprayer died about 3/4 of the way through…so we ended up buying a new one. We hated to spend the money but he will definitely use it for future projects.
Once we showed up to check on them, of course Katie wanted to paint, too…so we let Katie do her name.
Cartwheels in the kitchen!
Give this girl some empty space and this happens. Constantly. Needless to say she loves the new house.
Just three more of the birthday girl!
Complete with birthday shirt, unicorn tail headband, and the shoes (heels!) she thought were appropriate to wear to work at the new house. Also, pose 2 was ALL her.
Happy wet 8th birthday, Katie!
When you wake up at 5am with an idea to hopefully make Katie’s pool noodle birthday candles a bit better (adding the letters) …and you’re hoping the rain stops so the whole thing doesn’t get ruined (because you were cheap and used the cardboard school folders instead of going to Target or Walmart to find the plastic ones) …but who expected it to storm this week (it’s never rained once on her birthday) …so you were taping candle flames to the sticks in the rain in your PJs (hoping the neighbors weren’t watching because the PJs were too short for public). Oh, and Tom put the letters facing the house instead of facing the street, so that required a last-minute complete rearrangement (because the letters were already pinned on—because we already moved the glue gun/craft bin to the new house). Phew.
But she LOVED it so that’s all that matters, right?
Katie’s now-annual haircut!
Katie’s hair still doesn’t really seem to grow much—even after almost a full year—but I figured a cut was a good birthday treat!
Masks on!
She didn’t believe me that you could tell if someone was smiling (or not) under the mask…
This was last year. Okay maybe it grew an inch or so? And it looks like the curl changed a little? Still not as much as I’d expect after a year.
We are officially homeowners again!!
After some last-minute drama (with getting the funds wired the morning of)…it’s a done deal. We are now the proud owners of a 30-year mortgage! But it’s seriously our dream house and we couldn’t be happier. Tom and I just keep saying What did we do?! Oh yeah, we bought a house THAT WE LOVE.
I mean, we have purchased two houses in the past and they were both great for us at the time but we never loved them. We. LOVE this. house. (Is it perfect? Of course not. But does it check all of our boxes? Minus a lazy river and a four car garage… Yes.)
And then Anna brought the kids over…and was our family photographer!!
So I had to wear Katie’s mask…
I dropped my mask getting out of the car at the closing offfice and OF COURSE IT’S RAINING TODAY and it immediately got soaked so I had to use whatever mask was in the car so Katie’s it was! (normally I have a bunch in the car for back up but I had washed all of them the night before.)
Our last family photo in front of my birch tree!
On our way to buy a house!
The kids masks from Old Navy are good.
Plus they’re cute. And I guess she’s cute, too.
July 4th fireworks with neighbors!
The kids started by catching fireflies. They were actually pretty good at it. Katie set these on the table and they stayed there long enough for me to get a photo—half on and half off!
Soon the fireworks came out. We started small.
The kids were at a respectable distance.
But the second one we did—a Panda—got a little crazy. It started small but then the second phase got insane and sparks were reaching the kids. Needless to say everyone immediately moved back!
Then they did some individual ones—each kid got to hold one and I managed to snap this awesome pic of Owen.
The dads got involved, too.
The kids wanted to see the house!
We have a garage door opener to store some stuff before we move in…so of course the kids wanted to see the house again.
Nude porch swimming!
Virtual Lego Challenge
Our library was having a virtual Lego challenge—you had to built a Lego scene with real life objects in it. Owen built a baseball field complete with baseball posters in the outfield! Katie added a fan eating a sucker!
Surprise! The kids saw their new back yard!
We went on yet another walk in our new neighborhood today and the homeowner was outside in the garage and we quickly debated introducing ourselves or not…and I said WHAT THE HELL and long story short she’s super awesome—she was excited to meet all of us, reiterated that she’s thrilled the house is going to a nice family, and she let us show the kids the back yard.
She also told us she was leaving two additional TVs (one in the wet bar and one in the gazebo), that we were welcome to start bringing stuff over to leave in the third garage bay, plus, after we exchanged numbers, invited us over for a house tour and a drink on the deck!
Both kids are super excited about the gazebo.
We also got to scout out the back yard again to see where we could put a small shed so that was good.
Still loving our local fruit and veggie basket!
The kids took us to the river!
A neighbor took the kids on a bike ride to the river the other day and that’s ALL they can talk about. They went back a time or two by themselves and really wanted to show us (mostly so we’d let them go by themselves once we saw how they could get there without traveling on the main road)…so we finally agreed.
First you ride through the church parking lot. At the far back corner there’s a strip of grass that you ride across which connects to a dead end neighborhood cul-de-sac. Then you ride up to the front and hop a curb and ride on some grass untill you reach the sidewalk then take that until you reach the next street and then you ride all the way to the end in another cul-de-sac where there’s a…creek. River is exaggerating a bit.
It is pretty back there… Can you see the kids? They are on their favorite rocks. Owen calls one of them his thinking rock.
Underneath is more fun… traipsing through the water in their rain boots.
This is exactly the kind of place I’d have loved to explore and play at as a kid so I get the fascination. I just wish they’d found it before we were ready to move. They’ll just have to explore the new neighborhood…
We might be walking in our new neighborhood again…
Today taking a trip around the park to spin some Pokestops. We close in 24 days! 😱
She wanted to start the fire!
So she got this all ready herself!
This does not make a happy mama.
So….this is how Katie left the front porch (and driveway, too!) today while she’s off gallivanting around the neighborhood. After, you know, we’ve told them 2,638 times to PUT SHIT AWAY. So not only has their shit exploded inside the house these days (as we’re trying to organize and clean to move next month), but shit has now exploded onto my front porch.
They skip steps all the time. Never finish anything without prompting. Because they’re kids. But it’s just sooo frustrating because it seems like it’s all I’m ever saying! I wanted to throw all of this away but Tom intervened and sent Owen to bring her home. She apologized (but it won’t change anything) and then she “cleaned” it up by stacking it all up under the bench. Sigh,
And this is what the sink looks like after I told both kids to load the dishwasher. TWICE. After I’ve told them every single time when they load the dishwasher that they need to check the sink. But heaven forbid I didn’t follow behind them and watch them so they didn’t do it.
Oh oh oh! And this is what the living room always looks like because they pull all the pillows and blankets off. AND LEAVE THEM ON THE FLOOR.
Saying goodbye to second grade!
I emailed Katie’s teacher to see if she would be willing to take an end-of-year photo and she was! (She actually lives about a minute from us so we went to her house!)
And the comparison between start and end of year.
I let her wear MY lipstick today.
She bugs me to wear lipstick all the time and I usually hesitate because I know she won’t want to deal with taking it off. But today I let her as a special treat because we were going to be seeing her teacher.
The application is all hers—I didn’t help one bit (color me impressed!!) but she did whine a little when I told her she needed to do three layers AND put on gloss. (And later in the day she was positive it was coming off and I assured her it was not.)
