Crafts, Naps and Paint

For some reason, life seems to have run away from me.  Harper is 16 months in a few days, Cooper's 3rd birthday is in less than a month, and I have no idea how that happened.  The kids and I have been working since the beginning of June to finally get the house "put together."  I have friends who will paint before they move into a place because they know exactly what they want:  where the furniture should be, where the pictures should be hung, and all those details.  I, on the other hand, have to live in a space for a while.  It drives Todd mad when he comes home to find every piece of furniture has been rearrange, replaced with something he didn't know we had, or out in the garage.  He does love how clean things get in that particular room after said event, but with our crew, the immaculate room never lasts that long.  This holiday season will mark 4 years here in South Africa for us, and almost 3 years in this flat.  I figured it was time to buck up and take the plunge.  So, right before we left, I had Todd put six nails in the wall.  Most of them were for wall hooks for backpacks and jackets for the kids, but I also hung a picture frame that I'm in love with (gotta love dumpster diving windows out of someone else's trash to hang on your wall!).  

When we got back from the States, I decided to take it one step further and PAINT.  I know, crazy, huh?  I painted Cooper's room, painted the girls' room, and painted the downstairs, well, one wall.  In order to paint, we needed to make a trip to the paint shop, where Cooper wanted a totally typical blue (yeah for easy!) and fought that Em was set on Pepto-pink.  I'm not into pink in general, and the thought of walking into a room that made me think of Bazooka Bubble Gum was just too much.  So we worked it out and got a lavender.  Not a huge fan of that either, but what can you do?  I didn't think it was a battle really worth fighting, so purple it was.  The curtains we brought back with us, which are supposedly "black out" are an aqua marine blue.  I thought they were that lovely blue that girls clothing has and is just a great, vibrant color.  Turns out, it's more marine than aqua and so we struggled to get things to match the now purple and aqua-marine color scheme. That was the point where I realized I'd need to start making things.  So I bought fabric and then realized I had no idea how to sew a blanket or quilt.  Lucky for me, a friend just had a baby and I made this one for him, and learned just about every quilting mistake possible along the way.  Now, I'm working on Harper's, hopefully with less drama the second time around.

Em loved helping me pick out the fabrics, and then arranging these into the baby quilt.  She dutifully sat by my sewing machine as long as I'd let her to put the pins in the pincushion.  It was during this time when she told me she wanted butterflies in her bedroom.  Great.  Another thing to work on.  Okay, butterflies will be there, somewhere.  Promise.  As soon as the quilt was done, I started work on other things for the girls' room.  It's taken nearly 3 years, but I finally amassed enough Crayola Crayons to do a project I've been itching to do for a very long time.  

With helpers in tow, we went to the shops to find the frames we needed, then the paint and the ribbon and all the rest.  I let both Em and Coop help paint (one for each girl) until I discovered blue on my dining room table.  Not a happy mom moment.  Then, they were relegated to just watching, but they got really excited every time I "cut" a crayon into pieces.  The hot glue gun was another first as I used to only bring it out while they were sleeping.  Coop loved to see the glue "change colors" as the wax melted with the glue. Amazing how easily amused he is.

All these projects would be picked up as nap-time started and would continue until disaster happened, like blue paint on the wood table.  For days on end, Em would rush down the stairs after waking up to see what we were going to do next.  It was rather fun as that's the closest thing this stay-at-home mom gets to a kid excited to see me.  

Then one day, as we were wrapping up all the projects and things were slowing down, I went to do some laundry and came back in to the house to find Em like this.  I guess she'd woken up from her nap too early because she wanted to do something with me, but the lure of the warm sunshine was too much for her.

I love this face, all sweet and innocent... and not asking 437 questions all at once!  The weather has been getting warmer and warmer and that always signals that it's time to head outside, into the garden and get some Vitamin D into us.  We're all excited to plant our garden, go out without seven layers of clothing and not be cooped up inside.  I hope things will settle into a pattern soon, but if the last 3 months are any indication, this hectic-busy schedule of chasing two pre-schoolers and one toddler might be our new 'normal' for a while... not sure I'm ready for so little picture taking and blogging and story telling, but I'm loving all the things I can do with the kids at this age, and every now and again, I'm reminded that even the incessant questioning isn't as bad as I think.