Master Bed & Bath Remodeling Ideas

The past few days I've been contemplating the colors, style, bedding, and decor for our master bedroom and bathroom when we remodel this summer.

I'm thinking of going with chocolate brown and light blue bedding with brown dominating, painting the walls light blue, and decorating with some pics taken by yours truly turned into sepia tones. The I'd like long white sheers on the windows hanging from a decorative brown iron rod with brown iron "tiebacks" on the wall with blinds or shades on the windows, too. I'd love a hardwood floor, but Josh wants carpet because he thinks the hardwood floors will be too cold. We'll need to get new carpet anyway with the remodeling.

The only thing is that our bedroom furniture is a medium oak. I don't really care for the style anymore. I/we picked out when we first got married, and I know much better what I like now. I'm not sure if the medium oak color will look ok with the chocolate brown. Josh says we're not going to paint it though. And we're not getting new bedroom furniture.

I'm thinking of painting the master bathroom the same blue as the bedroom. The cabinetry, sink, toilet, and shower will be white. I'd love to have large brown slate-look tile on the floor and put a few colored pics of Josh and me at the mountains and beach in WA on the walls in brown frames (wood or metal). I think the blues from the mountains and water will go well with the blue walls. I'm thinking maybe putting a few brown metal hooks or decorative accents on the walls, too.

If anyone has any thoughts, comments, or suggestions, I'd welcome them!

For My Valentine

I looked and looked for a valentine card for Josh and just couldn't find one I really liked this year. I usually get him some dark chocolate which he likes, too, but this year I got a little bit more creative.

I bought a bag with a bunch of Ghiradelli dark chocolate squares in it. This is the 16th Valentine's Day Josh and I have been together, so I typed up 16 slips of paper that have a sentence or a phrase on them relating something about us or our lives to the numbers 1-16. Then I took out 16 of the chocolates and taped one slip to each of the 16 chocolate wrappers and hid them around the house where Josh will find them ... in his socks, by his alarm clock, in his shoes, by his razor, etc. Then gave him a letter that told him what I'd done and how he didn't have to look for the chocolates right away but rather I hoped he would find them unexpectedly and they would put a smile on his face the same way thinking about him puts a smile on mine.

I Won!

A few days ago, my friend Jenni had all of her readers salivating with a post about some divine chocolate caramels her husband had given her.

(That's Jenni's picture.)

Then she said that if you left a comment on that post about which kind of the chocolate caramels you'd like, you'd be entered into a random drawing to win a box with your choice inside.

So I left a comment and was entered. I don't win these types of things, but you never win if you don't enter, right? Well, guess what?!

Out of 97 entries ... I WON!!!

Whoo hoo!!!

In Which I Earn the Bad Mom Award

E had basketball games at her school last night. It was also our night for our "compulsory volunteerism" in which we had to supervise at the games for 2 hrs (make sure there are no problems with fans or students from our school or the other team's and help as needed).

E's team lost, and when her game was done, I handed over the blaze orange supervisor's vest to Josh to wear while I went and finished proofing and printing the bulletins for Sunday since they weren't ready for me yet while I was working there earlier.

After putting the kids to bed, Josh and I watched The Soloist. I wouldn't recommend it. It wasn't horrible or anything, but it was R.E.A.L.L.Y. slow. I think it could have been a good movie, but it just seemed so drawn out when it didn't need to be. I watched the whole thing, but Josh fell asleep during it.

J had a basketball game this morning at P, H. Josh took J and S to the game while I took E, G, and F grocery shopping with me. E and G wanted to come with me and pick out presents for their friends whose birthday parties they will be attending soon, and F wanted to spend the remainder of her $10 money from Christmas. E was scheduled to have a 3 hr cheerleading practice this afternoon (or so I thought), so we had to get the errands run in the morning which meant we couldn't all go to J's game.

J's team won his game.

After lunch I took E to school for her practice. We were about 5 minutes early. Pastor's car was the only one there, but that didn't really faze me since the other cheerleaders usually get dropped off, and the coach gets there right when practice is supposed to start. I watched E open the door and go into the building.

On the way home, I had to stop at Piggly Wiggly to pick up a couple of things that they had really good deals on.

When I pulled into the garage, Josh came out with the phone in his hand and said that E was waiting at school and didn't have practice. Oh, no!

I drove back and picked her up, but I went into the office and checked on my computer there. Practice was scheduled for 1:00-4:00 NEXT Saturday afternoon!

I felt so incredibly horrible! Bad mom award for the day? Yep, that would be mine. :(

At home once again I spent over 2 hrs cleaning the house and folding laundry. Not fun, but productive, and now the house looks much better.

With our permission, J has started reading the Harry Potter books. Someone at school is reading the first one. Because it wasn't in the school library, J started with book 2. When we were at the community library this morning, I checked for book 1, but all the copies there were checked out there, too. Guess I'll have to put it on hold for him.

J just started reading the Harry Potter book this past Wednesday and is already almost done. Pretty good for a boy who mainly enjoys non-fiction!

Near Silhouette

This week's weekly photo challenge:

• A self-portrait featuring a physical attribute that you find endearing or beautiful about yourself - something that you feel makes you uniquely "you".


• Submit one photo.


• This photo can be color or black and white.


• Go ahead and "tweak" it if you feel like it!

How ironic after I'd already posted 2 self-portraits already this week due to my new haircut!

Anyway, here's my entry for the photo challenge:

I purposely backlit my profile against the window, then lightened the pic, bumped the contrast way up, and converted it to black and white to bring out the contrast even more.

I debated about what feature to highlight as I think my best feature and the one that makes me uniquely me are two different things, but I think they both come out in the photo.

• My best feature? my hair (dark in the pic, but you can still see how thick it is and how much I have)


• The feature that makes me uniquely me (or that I'm "known for")? my big, high cheekbones aka chipmunk cheeks

Click HERE to see the other entries.

New 'Do, Take 2

At the risk of appearing narcissistic, I took another pic of myself with my haircut today. It looks better today since I did it rather than just taking a pic after getting it cut. (My hair never looks the way I would do it after coming from the salon.)

I can't believe how curly it's gotten! All of the waves/curls in the above pic are natural and are from letting my hair air dry this morning after washing it. (By the way, the "M" pendant was one of my Christmas presents from Josh this year. More on that in another post.)

My hair has always had a bit of wave to it, but I think it was when I was pregnant with S or Grace, it started to really curl. It seemed to be getting more curl in it recently because I was starting to even get ringlets when it was long, but I was afraid that they'd disappear once I got it cut shorter. (I had curls as a toddler til my hair was cut, and the same happened to E and F.) I'm glad to see the curls and big waves are still there.

Yesterday I said I'd gotten about 5" cut off. After comparing the above pic to this one E took of Josh and me on Christmas Eve, I think it may have been even more.

6"? 7"? I'm not sure, but it looks like a lot.

New Year, New Look

Josh and I took separate vehicles to church today so that I could stay after and get a few more hours of work in for the week. I worked til about 1:00 and then went and got a haircut.

My hair was getting too long, so I got about 5" cut off. It's now to about the middle of my shoulders in back and is cut in medium and long layers. I also got it thinned, of course, so that it doesn't stick out like a bush.

Here's my new 'do.



J had basketball practice this afternoon.

Josh finished arranging the basement so that the home weatherization people can get where they need to in it, and the kids had fun playing some kind of Batman game they made up down there and going around and around the newly made aisles in the basement.

I spent the latter part of the afternoon transforming 11 overripe bananas into 4 loaves of banana bread and 1 banana cream pie, completely homemade.

Hosting Christmas

As I mentioned yesterday, today we hosted a Christmas celebration at our house with my brother and his family, my parents, and my sister.

All 5 of the grandsons received remote control cars from Grammy and Grandpa (my parents).

My dad putting batteries into one of the cars

Once the batteries were in the cars, our family room became the open road ... or maybe the demo derby arena!

Since the 4 older boys' cars were all the same except for the color, the controllers would make more than one car move. At one point, there was a car up in the living room that someone had forgotten to turn off, and it was driving around because someone was in the family room driving another car.

Brother J and nephew E putting together E's Lego gift

The whole clan (except for me) just before eating

Grandpa and Grammy with all 9 grandchildren

A pic of the whole crew (including me since we used my camera's timer)

Father and son

Sis R, E, and SIL L playing Bananagrams. E got the game from my parents as a gift.

(It appears I got off on my numbering for Project 365 somewhere along the line since this should be Day 363, but I've only got it as Day 361 in my sequence. However, since I've got plenty of pictures in this post, I'm going to count this as Days 361-363 to get back on track.)

Christmas Eve 2009

(My 3rd entry in the Christmas Journal photo challenge -- I try not to use the flash so much indoors because I don't like the shadows it casts, but then my pics tend to turn out yellow and grainy in the low light. Any helpful ideas?)

We went to DS's Christmas Eve service where Josh did the A/V for them once again. It had just started to rain when we left home, and when we returned, the rain was coming down pretty hard. Temps were about 35 degrees, but the roads weren't too bad.

Once we got home I took our traditional pic of the kids next to the tree on Christmas Eve. It turned out really well (on the 3rd try)!

As our family has grown, it's gotten harder to take a good picture with everyone looking and no one having a goofy look on his/her face. However, I've learned that the trick is to bribe the kids by saying that if I can get a good picture of them, I will take a picture of them in which they can act as crazy as they want.

Here's the bribery pic of the kids hamming it up.

E took a picture of Josh and me.

After we changed clothes, we set out our supper of sausage, crackers and cheese spread, apple slices, and Christmas cookies, milk and wine, which we ate and drank as we opened gifts.

E was very excited about her new digital camcorder.

Buy Josh tools, and he's a happy man! Actually, he asked for this heavy duty ice chopper.

J has decided he doesn't like getting his picture taken anymore, but I got this one of him with his Lego Millenium Falcon.

G really, really wanted Anakin's Y-wing fighter. He got it!

He was pretty happy about his new Lego Star Wars shirt, too!

E's godmother sent her the cloak for her Elizabeth American Girl doll.

S was super excited to find that he'd gotten some Star Wars Galactic Heroes.

(Are you catching this year's pervasive Star Wars theme?)

But almost nothing can beat stomping on and popping bubble wrap!

F wins the prize for the best expression captured on camera!

She's been saying for weeks and weeks that she wanted an iPod (something to play music). We got her an MP3 player, and she was beyond thrilled! F spent much of the night walking around with the earbuds in, dancing and singing. (I'd asked her the other day what some of her favorite songs were, and last night Josh downloaded a bunch from online to her MP3 player.)

After all the gifts were opened

I love this one of the girls together. E is showing F her camcorder.

Hard at work already

(Day 356 of 365)

It's Done!

Today I finished the quilt I've been making for our bed! Whoo hoo! I started it back in April, and it's finally done!

I asked Josh to take a pic of me holding it. My arms aren't nearly long enough to hold the whole quilt out straight.

The finished quilt on our bed

(Day 293 of 365)

What a Night!

Last night when I went in to kiss the boys goodnight, J asked me to fix the fitted sheet on his bed since it had come off part of the mattress.

Of course, J's bed is the top bunk, and the corner the sheet came off was the one way back in the far corner that I couldn't reach from the floor, so I climbed up on his bed like I've done who-knows-how-many times before when I've changed the sheets. Just after I got onto the mattress, the mattress and the board it was on fell through the bedrails! G was lying on his bed, the bottom bunk, when things fell through. I yelled for Josh right away because I was trying to climb out of things and was worried about G, who was screaming, being crushed or trapped.

Thankfully, due to the clip-on lamp G has attached to his headboard, the mattress and board didn't fall flat through but at an angle with the foot end completely down on the bottom bunk. The head end of the top bunk got caught on the lamp, preventing that end from falling down flat on top of G. G wasn't hurt, except for one of his toes, but he was understandably VERY scared by the whole episode and did NOT want to lie back down in his bed and go to sleep.

In the midst of everything, all the noise had scared F who was crying from her room.

After Josh and I got everyone calmed down, Josh examined the bed. Some of the paint on the wall got scraped in the process, but nothing on the bed was broken. It appears that somehow, in the midst of J jumping off his bed while I got on, the bedrails got pushed apart just enough for the mattress and board it rests on to fall through. The board only sits on a small wooden lip of the bedrails anyway, so it didn't take much for it to slip through.

Josh put the bed back together but had plans to fix it today.

In the meantime, G climbed into bed with S (who slept through all the commotion), and J got a sleeping bag which he put on the floor and slept in for the night.

Then at 5:00 this morning, S came into our room to climb into our bed like he sometimes does. When I picked him up to help him into our bed, he was wet, so I took him to the bathroom and changed him, hoping that his bed was still dry. No such luck!

As anyone who knows me can tell you, I am not a morning person. My foggy brain couldn't figure out what to do with G who was still in S's bed, so I woke Josh and told him what had happened. He took G out of the bed and put him on the floor next to J to sleep while I then stripped the bed and put the sheets into the washer.

Atleast I was able to climb back into my own bed and fall asleep again til 6:30.

Josh fixed the boys' bunkbeds today. He screwed the bedrails and board together with about six screws on the two long sides of the rails. That board and mattress are NOT going to fall through again!

Another Birthday

The 4 older kids have been attending VBS in the afternoons at church this week. I've been going in to work in the morning, coming home for lunch, and taking them back to church with me while Josh takes S to work with him in the afternoon.

Today at VBS the fire alarmwent off so everyone exited the building. We thought one of the preschoolers pulled the alarm, but then a few people thought they smelled smoke, so we called the fire dept, and they came out to make sure everything was okay. It was, except that the latch on the alarm that was pulled was broken off, so that has to get fixed. Nothing like a bit of excitement!

At the end of today's VBS session, the kids all sang some songs for the parents, and then there was a supper of subs, chips, carrots, and desserts for everyone. No cooking today for me! Josh and S came to see the kids sing and have supper, too.

Yesterday I baked 2 pecan pies (my fav kind of pie) for my birthday dessert. We had it a little while after getting home from church tonight.

The kids insist that even the adults have to have the correct number of candles on their cakes. Pecan pies don't lend themselves well to having candles stuck in, so Josh used his drill press to punch 34 holes into a piece of cardboard to hold birthday candles and then set it on top of one of the pies.

Josh had WAY too much fun taking this picture after I blew out the candles!

(Day 209 of 365)

The kids made me a number of homemade cards and projects. Josh did, too! He used the laser engraver at his work to make me a wooden wall plaque with our last name, the end of the Joshua 24:15 passage, and all of our first names on it. The plaque is similar in style to one my family had when I was little and one my brother made out of wood for his family. I love it!

As a side note, S has been doing really well with potty training. He's been able to go an hour now and keep his undies dry and has had 2 or fewer accidents per day the past few days.