We're Seeing Other People. They're Our Children.

I remember when I was about twelve, my parents came up with this new system to try to encourage me to finally behave myself. It basically consisted of some sort of point system and the end goal was that, if I got ten points, I got to go to Chapters. This was major incentive because I was a big nerd and had my eye on the entire Nancy Drew section. The part of this that I probably would never have admitted to enjoying so much then, but fondly remember now, was getting to have hot chocolate with my Dad in the adjacent Starbucks. I don't remember what we talked about or what book I ended up buying but I do remember sitting there at the table, drinking sugary goodness, and soaking in the precious one-on-one time with my Dad, as only the oldest of seven could.

At some point during my recent exhausting pregnancy, I started to feel incredibly guilty for how many Netflix Naps I was taking. For those of you who are not familiar with this term, that's the time of the day when you tell your kids that they can watch a Paw Patrol or two and, once you've passed out on the couch with your mouth hanging open in a charming manner, they actually end up watching.....seven. You gotta do what you gotta do and all but I knew I wanted to start being more deliberate about the time we were spending with our kids. I also wanted to get into the habit of spending alone time with them, due to the imminent arrival of Clementine, because I knew how quickly baby life-takeovers happen, once those sweet dictators are on the scene. We decided to start dating our children, which is not as creepy as it sounds, I swear.



Now because we live the poor life (ok, in a first world problems kind of way), we had to find some really clever mostly-free ways to wine and dine our new love interests. Luckily for us, it turns out that kids are very cheap dates and easily impressed by things like M & M's and spending time together outside. In all honesty, we have put a cap on the snacks portion of the date lately because it was all a certain food-loving child of ours cared about and we were starting to get a little jealous. We felt all the "when do I get a treat? Is it treat time yet? Can I have five Kinder Eggs instead of one?" was sort of distracting him from the point, which was realizing how awesome and hip his parents are.

The hardest part about the dates has been that we have two children that go on them, which means that one is going and one is staying. There are usually some tears from the child who gets left behind. I hope that the more the outings become a regular thing, the more the left-out child will be able to relax and realize their turn will come. Either that or eventually Clementine will be old enough to also feel the pain and the two sad children can cry and commiserate together. Either way!

I try to make sure that I spend my time with them really trying to get to know them as an individual - their likes, dislikes, quirks, plans, view of the world, and whether or not they like to take long walks on a beach. I try to focus on those stories they tell that might still be going on when we are out shopping for old-age homes together. I try and think of the most thoughtful questions I can and really listen to their hilarious responses. I put my phone away. I try to let them take their time and not tell them to hurry up. The stuff other normal good mothers do but I sometimes forget in the chaos of a regular day. So far, Matt and I have taken them:

- to the park to play soccer

- to Starbucks, for hot chocolate and a necklace-making sesh

- to the animal shelter, just to look and not to come home with a kitty. Seriously. No.

- on a hike

All of these were enthusiastically received.

Some ideas we have for the future are:

- skating

- pottery painting

- going to a farmer's market

- picnic time

- sitting on a hill with some sketchbooks

- checking out the Lego store

- going to a hockey game (or let's be real, probably lacrosse because $$$$)

- taking them to an event happening in the city

- going to feed the ducks (in what feels like a million months from now. I can dream!)

- fro-yo (is that still a thing?)

- exploring a new park

- bike-rides

- Ikea ( you probably think I'm kidding but I'm not. Ikea is the most magical place on earth.)

- getting their expert help with a project, including a trip to a hardware or home store

- garage-saling

This weekend, I am taking Tallulah to see a version of The Nutcracker for kids and we are both looking forward to it. I expect to leave with a beaming daughter and me in tears because I will never be that graceful.

Do you date your kids? Do you have any great date ideas you'd like to share? I'd love to hear them! And, if you're wondering, no, my parents' point system didn't work. I am proud to say that to this very day I still don't behave myself.

A Paper Airplane Birthday Party

This year I tried really hard to keep things simple for Theo's birthday. The amount of people in our lives who have seen the real us and, yet for some reason, still want to be our friends has grown. Seeing as we have a tiny townhouse, I decided to do two separate parties for family and friends this year to try to keep all that party under control. With everything that's been going on and how exhausted I knew I was going to be, I decided to cut down on my birthday love a little bit.

Of course, I couldn't let it go completely but this year involved a couple of really easy DIY decorations that even Matt admitted were much more casual than in previous years. He's still trying to turn me into a "normal" wife but he was as happy as he gets in these situations. All that he had to do this year was make a few paper airplanes and pass me some tape. Ok, there was some cleaning and some hollering but that's how I roll.

Theo is in love with making paper airplanes, decorating them perfectly, being dissatisfied, and then starting all over again. I decided it was the perfect theme for his party. Paper airplanes that is, not perfectionism. I didn't get the most amazing pictures and the cake was lopsided but I tried! Everyone seemed to have a good time and at the end of the day, that's really all you can ask for. And cake leftovers. Lots of cake leftovers.













There you have it! Make some paper airplanes, stick them on the wall in a way that makes a pretty statement, and yell, "Nobody breathe!" because it will probably be temperamental. Coordinate your trendy straws and dollar store plates into colors that maybe have something to do with planes but you aren't sure why. There were also some matching simple streamers (not pictured) and a paper airplane garland. Brown paper everything because brown paper is amazing. Stick some tiny airplanes on skewers for the cake. Then stick some more on brown lunch bags and break out that rusty high-school cursive and you're golden! Now all you have to do is figure out how your son has managed to turn six and what you're going to do with his last year as a little boy.

A Baby Nook

I've been trying to listen to everyone who keeps telling me to relax about baby prep (actually, that's a lie. I've just gotten really good at smiling and saying mmhmmm while still going over my to-do list in my head). I knew though how fast this due date was going to sneak up on me and here we are, just over five weeks out. It's not that I'm one of those wishful delusional people that thinks I'm going to have the baby early or whatever. It's just that I don't want to be spending my last few uncomfortable weeks organizing blankets or waddling and sweating around the mall looking for the ever allusive perfect first outfit. Even running errands has gotten ridiculously frustrating because all I want to do is accomplish something but the amount of time it takes me to do anything is laughable. Can you tell I'm getting grumpy?

Anyway, this weekend I managed to actually complete a project I have been working on for way way too long now - the baby nook. After many a roadblock with the making of the mobile (damn it, overly-expensive Michaels! How can you not have double-sided gold paper?), among other things, I put the finishing touches on with the aid of my best friend that I always sucker into helping me.

As usual, when I started this project, I got too excited to remember to take any before pictures. Basically it was a closet with mirrored doors in a boring vanilla work-in-progress master bedroom. That's all.

We are reusing our old change table and to make that more interesting, I did a small knob upgrade which made a huge difference. We took the bulky top off eventually as well.

This before photo is of half the dresser because I had already replaced the knobs on the other drawer before I took the photo. I wasn't about to put those cheesy little animals back on, so this is what you get!

We are lucky to have a large master bedroom which was easily divided by one of my favorite and most versatile pieces of furniture - the Ikea expedit. We didn't know where we were going to put this when we turned the playroom into a bedroom but I was really excited about using it as a room divider and baby storage. I never know what to do with all the tiny socks and washcloths and such so the bin system works really well for me.











There you have it! Simple, calm, and pretty. I was really happy with how it came together. Matt was looking at it the other night and saying, "You know, we've never had a room to decorate for a baby." He was right! Every time we have had a newborn, there was some sort of weird circumstance that meant our baby got the ugly sad end of the stick (ie. a bassinet at the end of our bed. Oh the tragedy!) The baby won't have their own room for a while, on account of their siblings needing to be kept apart in their own rooms so that we can at least pretend to get sleep over here. It was a great feeling this time to prepare a space while we wait for this little one to arrive and undoubtedly have a poop explosion all over that nice white crib sheet.

The Little Things: Door Updates

Since we bought our place two years ago, we have been slowly but surely bringing it into the modern world. We know that this isn't our forever home and also that my part-time job of hoping a rich stranger will feel sorry for me and hand us wads of cash has not been particularly lucrative. So we have had to work with what we have. You would not believe how quickly things that, in a spoiled way, you had previously thought were sort of a given, such as baseboards and light-switches, add up. So instead of buying replacements, we have done some DIY upgrades that we've been really pleased with.

One of these upgrades was our doors. We had the standard brown builder doors that you find in most homes built in the 80's. They were so blah that I wanted to fall asleep looking at them and they were really bringing down the style that I was trying to achieve in our home. What we ended up doing was gluing trim on them to make them look more current and then we gave them a fresh new coat of white paint. I (very badly...I was excited and have no patience) spray painted the door knobs black for some extra drama. What a difference! Our house instantly looked less dated.



One of my next biggest "ews" were our mirrored closet doors in the master. Nobody wants to have to see full-body views of themselves eating Ben and Jerry's that often, ok? Besides that, in the picture I had in my mind of my future bedroom, the mirrored doors stuck out like a granny in Forever 21. Sadly, new doors were not in the budget and frankly did not seem worth it in the big scheme of all I hope to eventually do to this house. I realized that the biggest problem was the really bad finish on the doors and that I could deal with the actual mirror part.



So I recruited my husband and brother to carry them down to the garage. They are much heavier than you'd think and those two practically gave me a heart attack with their lack of concern for my helpful "WATCH IT! BE CAREFUL! YOU KNOW THERE'S A WALL THERE, RIGHT?!" comments. Once they were in the garage, Matt put the doors up on a sawhorse and we got to work on the most essential part of the process - taping and covering the mirrors. This must be done well or your project is a bust.



Next, we spray-painted them with a primer and then a few coats of white paint. Ok, actually Matt did that. I'm realizing that his resistance to these projects is because he's probably catching on to the fact that he's really doing most of the work. I'm pregnant, ok! At any rate, we bribed my brother with beer to come back over and help move the doors back up. Ta-da! Instant update!

Now to get rid of that horrid carpet....I can already hear Matt sighing and saying, "No, Tara" in my mind but don't worry. I'm distracted by another project for the time being. This is the project where I purge our master of two out of four mirror closet doors that did not get painted, leaving a wide open space to create a baby nook AND creating the opportunity to re-do our entire bedroom. Updates to come!

Quick Entryway Update On the Cheap

I have had the itch to DIY something for a while because it's been way too long since my husband has had a call from me, saying I'm at Rona and asking him if he knows where the paintbrush is. He didn't. That didn't keep me down though! I grabbed a brush and asked the half-awake guy at the counter if it was smallest brush they had. He also didn't know. No matter. I found one. Next I went to Benjamin Moore, where I got eggshell and flat paint confused. The people who work there were the nicest in the world and acted like I wasn't a clueless moron, even when I told them that the big grand project I was doing was spots. Spots on the wall! They kept straight faces the entire time I tell you and sent me home with the black paint pot sample (eggshell!) that I was asking for.

So now you know just how much thought and careful planning went into the house project I'm about to reveal to you. Really precise stuff. I wanted dalmatian spots on my front entrance wall and I wanted them now, dammit! Wallpaper? Who has money for that! Stencils? What are those! I can freehand! I used to frequently accidentally watch ten seconds of those shows with artists painting, so I'm practically an expert. All I knew was that this boring situation had the be dealt with.

So, tiny hobby brush in hand, I went to work. Two minutes in, I was thinking how much longer this was going to take in reality than in my mind. In the end, it wasn't so bad! It took probably under an hour. Around the length of a Veggie Tales because that is not precisely what my kids were watching while I was doing this.

The final result? At first I wasn't sure because when you look at spots up-close for a while, your eyes kind of start to cross. However, when I stood back, I was really pleased. It looks pretty legit! And boy does it add a pop of interesting to the entrance.

Yes, you are getting the Instagram photo because I don't own a real camera and the actual photo was taken in the dark. Filters, yo.

So there you have it! Basically, a child could DIY if they really wanted to. Not that they should, which is exactly what I tried to explain to my kids when I saw their excitement at watching their mother break all the rules and paint on the wall. I'm sure I'll quickly regret not waiting until their bedtime.

I also wanted to say that the cost of this project was under $20! The impact was more than worth it. Even Matt was impressed, you guys. So go and paint spots on something! You (probably) won't regret it.