Jake in his cast and a few other random pictures...

We were excited to head to the doctor 3 weeks after Jake fractured his elbow.  We knew he was definitely going to get the cast off for an x-ray but the question was would it stay off or would he need another one?  We took a few pictures in case it was the last of the cast just for documentation purposes....

Jake was thrilled to have it off while waiting for his x-ray.  He itched it and there was dead shin everywhere!

This one is out of order...Getting the cast off!  Jake said it tickled.

And the verdict was:  Splint instead of cast!!! He was in the splint for 2 weeks and now he is just doing physical therapy and getting back into the habit of letting his arm hang instead of what has come to be called his C3PO arm. (holding it up and bent all the time...it is a hard habit to break)

Now for some random pictures I just feel like posting right now.....

As soon as Jake's cast came off...Sadie's cone went on.  We had to bring her to the vet because of her eye issues (I talked about it a few posts back...). She was having some major eye allergies and she was rubbing them too much so she got the cone of shame.  She was so pitiful with it on...

Random picture of some beloved yard sale finds we got several weeks ago:
Typewriter for $1.  I love it.  Jake and the girls love to play office with it...And it reminds me of one of my favorite movies You've Got Mail....

And my ugly chair.  It is so comfy and a great deal at only $13.  I am going to recover it, with the help of  my mom, and it will be comfy and adorable for a steal!  I will show the after.  It will be a while since my parents are getting ready to head north for the summer.  Did I mention it swivels?  I love it

Jake has been working hard at physical therapy and doing the exercises at home.  This is as far as he could pull it in when he first started.  I will take pictures in a couple of week to see the progress.

Jake painted and distressed a very cool shelf we found at a yard sale and gave it to me for my birthday.  He did a great job and I love it!

See the hairstyle change from the above pictures to these?  "Summer do" in full effect!

More of my new creations...

Thanks to 2 of my sister-in-laws I can post these pictures today!  All my stuff is packed so I don't have cute things to set up my newly painted pieces with or for that matter a place to set them up (the last pictures I posted were set up at my mom's house. Thanks Mom!).  Ranee let me use here house as the backdrop for these next 2 pieces and her cute stuff to make it look even better.

Erin told me that I don't have to have a cord for my camera anymore because laptops have a place for you to insert the SD card.  I really wish my dear husband would have told me that all this time I have been complaining about not being able to put my pictures on my computer!!!  When I asked him why he didn't tell me he said because I should have known it....To this I said I have never had a laptop and hardly ever used one for that matter so I had no idea it had a place for an SD card.  So, I asked him again why he didn't tell me since he knows I am computer illiterate and his response was because I didn't ask...Really?!?!  I am so glad you told me "the girl Erin"!!!

Okay, back to the real reason for this post!  Here are 2 more pieces  I have painted recently and am ready to sell:

I LOVE THIS COLOR!  It is my favorite!  I am going to paint our table this color and distress it when I have a house to put it in!  I have used this color over light and dark pieces and love how it looks distressed in both cases.  This little table was white underneath and it looks so pretty and beachy.  I will have to dig the other one that I painted in this color, (that started out black) out of storage to post because I love it too...

I love this one too!  I think I may need to stop buying pieces I like so much myself to paint otherwise I will never want to part with any of them.  This piece was stained dark and the light gray looks so great over it.  Distressing this little shelf was so fun....

What do you think? Do you think I could sell any of the pieces I have posted so far?...Input please! :)

Photos into gifts...Baby Jaxson

I mentioned a while ago that I am lucky enough to have a sweet new nephew and that I took some pictures of him...Well I gave up on trying to find where I packed the camera cord and got the pictures put on a CD.   I had a gift in mind that I wanted to make for Matt and Erin and I think it came out pretty amazing if I do say so myself. :)

First we had our little photo shoot.  These are shots I love but, they are just runner ups....

I just love those little skinny arms!! 

I know you are ohhing and ahhhing at this sweet little guy...

Baby toes are the best....

 If you know me than you know I took a ton of pictures and it was tough narrowing them down since Jaxson is so dang ADORABLE!!!..But I choose my 4 favorites and after distressing a stained board and using a little Mod Podge the gift was complete!  I am actually on my way to deliver it right after I post this. 

I had to take pictures of my favorites after I did it because I thought I had deleted them from my camera on accident before I made the CD.  Turns out they were on there but since I took a close up I can't resist posting them. :)

Bedside Table: Before, during, and after...

Here is the piece I did yesterday that I LOVE!

                                                                     Before..

During....

And after....I am in love with this color!  I thought I might have to spray the knobs but after it was painted they didn't look ugly anymore.  I am going to a couple of consignment stores tomorrow.  If I come back with this one I may not be able to part with it!  I am trying to start up a little business to support my new habit but don't really know where to start.  Pieces this size would cost too much to ship I am sure....

Jake and I even come up with a name for our business already: S.O.O.N =Something Out Of Nothing.  That one may not stick but we are having fun dreaming of going to Disney World with the money we will make! :)

If you have any ideas on where I should start let me know-this is all new to me!  Or if you happen to know someone in South Carolina that you think just couldn't live with out this tell them to email me! :)

Brain declutter: Killing time

*We are still waiting on "our" house.  Short sales are no fun.  I will cry like a baby if it doesn't go through because I really love "my" house.  Looking at other houses made me want to just move into them but then when we went back to our house it just felt like home...home that needs to be fumigated, cleaned, and painted, but still like home.

*We (I can say we because I ran the idea by Aaron he said yes because he loves me) are going to paint the doors in our house.  No plan white doors. I am thinking different fun shades.  If some one is visiting and needs to use the bathroom I can say "it is down the hall with the teal door" instead of the door on the right...Not any easier to say but much more fun.

*My addiction to Pinterest comes and goes.  I went 2 weeks with out looking at it once.  Lately I am a full fledged addict again...If it cost money to go to it I would be broke...That isn't true I never would have gone there in the first place if it cost money, but you get my point.

*I think I will probably always regret never having lived in a cute, little, loft apartment on the top floor of an old brick building in a little cities downtown.  Above a bookstore, a little cafe, or even an attorney's office.  It will never happen now of course and I am all right with it. It is more of a single person thing to do and I am glad I am not that.  Regret may be to strong of a word for it...

*I am tired but I don't want to go to sleep.  My parents went to the Temple today and we are spending a 2nd night in a row with them.  The reason why those 2 things are even related is because while my parents were gone today I painted and distressed a bedside table that I got at Goodwill for $4.99 and it looks so amazing I can't go to sleep until my mom see's it!  I will post a picture of it asap.  I am trying to start selling things I have distressed....I am hooked on it and can't keep everything I distress so maybe I can sell it. :)

*We went to the library and signed Jake up for the summer reading program and if he wins a drawing for his age group he could win a...whatever the video game system is that has Kinects (sp).  It seems like a strange prize for a library to give away to me.  Won't the kid who wins it spend more time playing video games then reading?  Needless to say I am hoping we don't win it but don't tell Jake that.

*I love to try to find books that I think Jake will like when we go to the library because I am so good at it!  :)  They have a "new books" section and I found a book called "Storybound" by Marissa Burt and I started reading it and I am LOVING it. (Yes I said for Jake but I like to preview books I haven't heard of before he reads them just in case.)   I haven't finished it yet so don't run out and get it in case there is a horrible twist and the author goes from perfect tween reading to bad language or something else that makes me absolutely hate it (which I don't foresee happening...), but so far it is awesome.  I will do a little book review from my perspective and Jake's after I read it and pass it on to him.  If the rest of it is as good as the part I have read so far then you should definitely run out and get it!

*I am so lazy right now that instead of getting up and going across the room to where "Storybound" is laying on a chair, I looked it up on Amazon to remember what the authors name is.  Seriously...I can see the book from here...What can I say I am lounging on the chaise lounge my parents got at Ikea and I really don't want to get up.  Nana got me a laptop lap desk for my birthday (that I am LOVING!)  and I am comfortable enough that I could sit here all night and search for painted doors and ceilings on Pinterest all night long.  Did I mention we are going to paint the ceilings in our house too?  They have flat ceilings not that popcorn stuff. 

*Laptops are the bomb.

*Aaron only has 3 more days of teaching in NC and then he gets to stop commuting and live in SC with us all week long. :)

*Watching and encouraging Jake to be in pain while doing his physical therapy for his elbow is so hard to do...I have to tell him to push harder even when he is already in tears...It is hard but I am being strong.  He is such a trooper.  I have to admit I bought him a toy at Walmart today because I feel guilty.  I know that it stupid and he has to do the physical therapy but it makes me feel better and that is really the most important thing right? :)

*I watch Jake sometimes and have to laugh because his imagination never shuts off.  He will be sitting in the car fully acting out what ever scene that is running through his mind...Love it..I will have to save a funny story about just that type of thing for another time because I am going to stop rambling and go smile while looking at the bedside table I mentioned earlier.  It is so pretty I just can't help myself.

Tuesday is"Ketchup Day": Jake's fractured elbow

Did you know that I LOVE Heinz (yes it has to be Heinz...I realize a liberal owns the company but I cannot help myself....) ketchup?  I do...On anything. Fries or chips. Hot dogs or mac and cheese.  Burgers or scrambled eggs.  But that is really besides the point.   When I say Tuesday is ketchup day I really mean "catch up".  But since I am a big dork I am going to call it ketchup day. :)  That is the great thing about blogging you can do what ever you want!

Jake joined the broken bone club 5 weeks ago last Thursday (this picture is him after coming home from the ER.  He is smiling because the good hospital drugs are still in effect.  The next couple of days were no fun for my little bug...)...it is funny how time flies but at the same time it seems so much longer ago then that...We were helping my mom and dad pack their truck (we moved a couple weeks before that...I am so done with packing trucks...until we get our house of course!) when Jake fell (really hard) on the concrete/brick path in the backyard while carrying a box.  I knew it was broken immediately because I was carrying a box a few feet in front of him and heard his first "ahhh!" as he was tripping and witnesses the elbow smack and weird arm twist.  What did I do? What any mother would do.  I screamed out "He broke his arm!!" and turned and ran.  That is right people I ran away.  Don't judge me-I am not proud of this act but I know myself.  I could not be a nurse and seeing Jake hurt is something I can't take.  I only ran because I knew Aaron was right behind him and if I went over to them my hysteria would only make it worse. Scrapped knees and bruises I can do.  Lots of blood (requiring stitches-this has happened twice. One time I ran because Aaron was there.  The other time I didn't because he was not which meant I was in charge...) and broken bones not so much.  I only ran far enough away to regain my composure and then I turned back around and helped.   Aaron wasn't sure it was broken.  What part of my screeching didn't he understand?  Long story shorter...I took Jake to the ER (it was 4:50 pm and his doc said to head there not to them) and we waited.  He sat in pain while I tried to console him and explain my coward act of running.  Luckily he gets it. :)  He was sent to have 2 x-rays and I knew it was fractured when I saw it and I am not even a doctor.  Then the x-ray tech said: "okay...we are going to have to get a couple more...".  Sitting and waiting (for hours) was the hard part.  The doctor came in and told us we were in luck because the pediatric ortho doc was there because another child REALLY broke their arm (think twisted the wrong way and everything...) so we got lucky and didn't have to be sent to the hospital in Charlotte.  Fear creeps in a little when the local hospital tells you that you may have to go to the big city hospital near by because it may require surgery...Luckily it didn't!  The ortho doc had to push it back in place. One word for that: HORRIBLE.  But then it was over and the rest is history.  Jake had a full arm cast for 3 weeks and a splint for 2 more.  Poor Jake had bruises all around the part of his arm not in a cast that we could see.  I can only imagine how it looked under it those first few days.  Jake spent the morning after the "incident" sitting in the car for 3 hours (because there was nothing to sit on in the house since it was all packed in the truck) watching a movie while we finished up with the last of the boxes.  He has been such a trooper, but he always is.  He was upset at himself for crying so much.  I told him I would have cried way more so I call it a victory.   It is feeling so much better that he kicked my butt at Just Dance 3 a couple weeks after even with a cast on...not sure how because I was told by several black friends of mine way back in middle school that I have rhythm-which is the ultimate complement in my opinion.  I am thinking about practicing it every night after he goes to bed so I can kick his butt because it is really frustrating!  But that is a whole other post for another day...I will let you know how that turns out.

  We went to the doctor on my b-day and he got the go ahead to only use that splint if he is running around outside.  It is healed but now the not so fun physical therapy starts.  Luckily Ranee (my sister-in-law) is a PTA and can help us out with that.   I have been waiting to post this (still no camera plug.  I wrote this a couple of weeks ago and saved it to add pictures...so I changed a couple of things added this paragraph, and am going to post it) so I could put more pictures of Jake with his cast, with the splint, and doing his exercises but I am sick off waiting...I will post an all cast pic's post later.

I am starting to wonder if I will ever ketchup catch up...Tuesday is my designated ketchup day.  The rest of the week I will work on the here and now so I don't get even further behind!

...One more thing on a totally different topic: I lost 4 pounds last week!!! :)

The past 2 months...

****Warning: This is going to be a long post of me just rambling on about all we have been doing over the past few weeks that I have neglected to post about.  This will be very random and will not-I REPEAT-WILL NOT be edited so it will probably not make any sense at all.  But if these memoies are not added to this blog ASAP they never will be.  Read at your own risk.  This is a post for me to remember.  Don't say I didn't warn you!***

Where do I even begin?   I have been missing my little plug to hock my camera up to my computer

so much!  I have even had to delete pictures (some I thought I had on a CD but turns out I didn't...) off my camera to make more room and the pictures and memories are just getting all jumbled up and will be forgotten if I don't hurry up and document them...So here are a few pictures of what we have been doing along with  rambling list of the things I can remember we have done...The memories and pictures will not be in any kind of order....We have been enjoying time with the local cousins as you can see from the brain freeze picture.  We picked the girls

(from here on out if I ever say "girls" on my blog just know I am talking about Riannon, Della, and Addie Kate...) from school one day and went to QT for a 49 cent icee.  Jake has loved having them just down the road to get together to play all the time.  Their favorite things to do are: swim in the pool, play office with the typewriter (we got for $1 at a yard sale), Jake's Laptop, and Nana's computer, play outside in the woods, watch movies, jump on the trampoline, and just plan be goofballs.  We have really enjoyed being able to go to Riannon and Della's chorus

concerts and Della's band concert.  We have also had fun spending a couple nights here and there at Nee and Papa's new, adorable townhouse.  It fits them so perfectly and I do have some pictures of it but they are on my camera...so there they shall stay until I can run to Walmart and put them on a CD or until I can stumble upon the cord that is packed who knows where!  Jake was excited to be the first person to put up Papa's American flag at their new house.  I can't wait to take pictures of how cute it is inside too!  They really had to downsize and have made several trips up to Charlotte for more

bookshelves and stuff to organize in a smaller space.  It is so cute!  I will take more pictures and post on that later.  We have been waiting as patiently as we can to here about "our" house.  We still have an offer in on it (it is in short sale and although we will get it at a great price we have no idea when) and have spent some time looking at other houses.  One I feel in love with, but Aaron not so much...Another we just looked at today that was awesome but needed lots of work and was a huge 2700 square feet.  Much more than a family of 3 needs.  We decided to look back at our house and we "re"-fell in love

love with it.  I am not going to lie I was staring to get a little impatient and wanted to just find a house to move into and call it good!  But seeing "our" house again made me remember why we love it so much.  It feels like home and we are praying that it will be.  With short sales you just never know....Keep us in your prayers because I have the whole house decorated in my mind already. :)  I had to put a picture up of my beloved lap top that my parents surprised me with.  It is a Gateway and I am kind of in love.  Isn't it so pretty?  Jake was thrilled to have gotten Papa's old laptop when he got a new one

as you can see.  For some reason that jogs my memory that I had an amazing dream last night that gave me perfect characters and the beginning of a plot for a book...but I can not for the life of me remember what it was about!!!  I always remember my dreams and I woke up and thought all about my dream and how perfect a book it would be...Now not even 12 hours later my mind is blank....I need to write things down...Back to what we have been doing the past 2 months.  We have enjoyed a new little guy named Jaxson Matthew Harmon. :)  Matt and Erin had their first baby a few weeks ago

and he is so adorable.  I went over to their house one day and we did a little photo session...Those unfortunately are a few of the pictures I deleted from my camera but luckily I printed them.  I forgot that when I printed them I didn't make a CD because no one at Target knew how to load the CD's into the Kodak picture machine.  I will post his adorable pictures after I take some more because he has changed so much already.  Newborns tend to do that...The picture below is not that best (the light is no good and he was starting to make a funny face) but it is the only one I have of him on CD so you will just  ohh

and ahh over this picture until I can get the others on here.  Isn't he totally adorable?  He is such a little peanut!  He was something like 6lbs, 7 oz and 18 inches  when we was born and he wasn't even early!  For the 2 families that his parents came from that is a shocker since both sides have a history of big babies!  He is a sweet little guy and we all fight over who is going to hold him first at Sunday dinners.  On my birthday I called dibs for first to hold him tomorrow.  :)  I forgot about that picture above of Jake, Papa G, and Nee.  It is a picture of us eating the first meal as guests at their new house.  Aaron has been commuting and it is coming to an end with only 1 more week of school in NC and him starting a new job down here in SC a week from this coming Monday.  He spent the weekdays staying with friends from church up in NC and driving 1 hour and 45 minutes to SC on the weekends.  He gets up at 5:15 am on Mondays and get back home around 6:15 pm on Friday nights.  He is what I would call an AMAZING guy. Not only because of how much he does for our family...but because he found my iPod charger too. :)  We are glad to have him home for good next week.  Nana and Papa are still kind enough to let us invade their home while we wait for ours.  We have enjoyed having a 2nd dog in their sweet golden retriever named Penny.  Sadie is a skinny little thing now from all the running she does in the woods all day.  She is in doggie heaven even though we found out she has allergies.  We had to take her to the vet because her eyes were all swollen and yucky.  Turns out she just isn't used to all the allergens here in SC yet.  She went from being a full time in door dog to a full time outdoor dog over night! Here eyes were so irritated that her eyelids were rolling in (common for dogs I am told) and her eyelashes were causing even more irritation.  Did you know dogs have a protective 3 eye lid on the inside?  I didn't until we woke up one morning and went out to the garage to let her out and feed her and her 3 eyelid was half way across her eye.  It was pretty gross and that is the day we took her to the vet.  She takes allergy medicine now and is back to trampsing through the woods.  She and Penny have totally creeped us out the past 2 days by bringing home little tiny deer legs-one each day....Dogs are gross.  No they did not catch a deer.  I have no idea where they found it...Next subject because that is making me sick just thinking about it.  Another random thing to post about but I will: Jake had one of those 24 hour stomach bugs a couple of weeks ago.  He woke up in the night and instead of going to the bathroom when he thought he was going to puke he came into my room to tell me he was going to and on the way to the bathroom puked all over the carpeted hallway.  Awesome...Spent pretty much the whole night up cleaning and comforting a still puking kiddo.  Amazingly enough I did not get it!  I have been distressing furniture and taking up already limited space at my parents with my creations.  Jake and I found a few shops that want to see some of it to consign.  I can't wait to have the space to do our bed, dresser, table...etc!  I got called as a co-CTR 4 teacher and it is going well so far.  They children are adorable and Primary (Sunday school for the children) really is the best place to be at church!  We have to be to church early tomorrow so I am sure Aaron is getting ready to get a calling.  I am starting to draw a blank on what else has been going on...If more comes to me I will be back with another post.  I will be back with more pictures as soon as I find my cord....