My Little Phelpers

Last Tuesday, Bryan and I celebrated our 3 year anniversary.  Even though we didn’t do anything super exciting, I must post about it. We just went out to eat, and then to Target to buy a fan for our bedroom (and we found an awesome fan that has a remote, sadly though the remote didn’t work).

But, I am so happy that Bryan and I are married.  I often think about how much I like being married to him.  He is wonderful. I think I’ll keep him for a little bit.

I do not love to clean.  Who does though?  But I do love the feeling after everything is cleaned.  So I guess it’s worth it in the end, right?  Let’s hope.

Tonight when my handsome, handsome husband and I came home from work, we decided it was probably time to do the dishes (sadly, we don’t do the dishes as often as we should, because there is only two of us, and we don’t make that many dirty dishes so we wait until we have more to do.  By time that happen though, we have a huge pile.).  So we went in the kitchen and got to work.  Then, I guess we got in the mood and our kitchen cleaning turned into entire main level cleaning, which then turned to master bedroom cleaning and ironing.  It was a very productive evening.

While I was cleaning tonight though, I was thinking a lot about the cleaning as I did as a child.

I am very thankful that as a kid, my mom made sure we always had jobs to do and she taught me how to clean.

Tonight, I was vacuuming the living room and I remember as a kid when we had to vacuum the living room, my mom insisted that we move the piano bench out of the way and vacuum everything.  So now, when I vacuum the living room, I make sure and move our ottoman so I can vacuum everything and not just around things (I don’t move our love sac out of the way often enough though, it’s a pain to move).

Then, when I was dusting, I moved everything off the end table and bookshelf and dusted the surfaces while they were empty.  Then as I put the items back in their places, I ran my dust rag over then to make sure they were also dustless like the shelves they sat on.  This practice was also something we were instructed to do when dusting the piano when we were little.

Another thing my mom taught us to do when we cleaned that I still do is after loading the dishwasher, you rinse out the sink and faucet.  Then dry the inside of the sink and buff faucet so there are no water spots.

While I know these type of things are standard things that people do when they clean and I complained about when I was little, looking back now, I’m so thankful that my mom taught me these things and got me in the habit.  I know sometimes when I am being lazy in my cleaning and don’t move the things when I dust or something like that, it’s never really the same.

One thing that my mom did though and taught us, that I DO NOT follow her lead is ironing.  (Her method is better than mine, but I hate it so much, that I just can’t do it).

My mom irons like this: when she does laundry, if there is something that needs ironing, she puts it in “the ironing basket.”  This included all kinds of things, like my dad’s dress shirts, polos, her shirts, our shirts, pants, pillowcases, table cloths and sometimes even sheets.  Often, one of our jobs for the week was to iron 5 things — not a lot, but considering how much I hate it, it was torture.  We would sift through the basket to find the pillowcases and table cloths.  If you were one of the first to do your 5 things, you could normally get away with only having to iron the easy things.  After the pillowcases and the table cloths the next easiest would be shirts not belonging to my dad (so mom’s t shirts or one of the kids shirts).  Then if you had to, you’d move on to dad’s polos.  Then if you were really unlucky, you’d end up with dad’s dress shirts.  Which were just such a pain because they were hard to iron and if we did a bad job, dad wouldn’t look nice and he was a CIO and needed to look nice. After we did our 5 things, mom would finish the rest.  Now, this system was a great system for my family.  It helped us learn how to iron (even though we didn’t want to) and we had lots of really nicely pressed things in our house (pillows do look nicer on beds after they have been ironed. Try it if you’ve never done it).  Don’t get me wrong, our system had some flaws, but we won’t go into that.

So if I don’t follow my mom’s system, what’s my super awesome ironing system, you may ask?  I don’t have one.  I hate the chore so much that I would rather wear wrinkled clothes than have to iron.  This isn’t a problem for me, because I’ve come to terms with it.  It is a little bit of a problem for Bryan though, because his Sunday clothes really do need to be ironed.  The system is probably something I should try to adopt from my mom, but it’s just so hard. For a good portion of our marriage so far we didn’t even have an ironing board. My cousin Brandon and his family came to stay with us once and he was amazed that I didn’t have an ironing board.

So here’s my question to you.  How do you iron? How do you make sure everything that needs to be ironed gets ironed? And it gets done in a timely manner?

I know part of my problem with it is my attitude, but still, there has to be a way to do it that makes it less horrible, or maybe not less horrible, but so that my husband can look nice (because really, even with a good system, I’ll still only do my hubby’s clothes so he looks nice and I don’t feel like a horrible wife). He’s pretty awesome and deserves a nicely pressed shirt.

( ha ha! That turned out to be a really long article about cleaning. Wow.)

Last weekend for Mother’s Day, I decided that I wanted to finish decorating my living room.  The last couple of weeks, I have been putting up some pictures from our wedding and a BEAUTIFUL picture of Christ that Bryan bought me for my birthday.  The only thing left was a focal point above the couch. (the Cardon’s next door have this great picture above their couch that I’m totally jealous of, so I needed to find something that would look almost as cute) So, a few weeks earlier, we went to IKEA and found this really cool mirror, and after looking around at a couple of other places, it was the best deal and would look the best — so we went and bought it.  After we bought it, we brought it home and my handsome handsome husband and Jordan moved the couch out of the way and went all “handy men” on Kinsale and I and put it up on the wall. They found the stud, drilled a hole, and measured where the other hole needed to be (only one inch away from the other stud) and put the screws in (surprisingly, it’s really sturdy too).  I was really impressed and I think it really ended up looking great.  What do you think?

Another exciting thing:

The last couple of days at work, I have been creating a special VIP invitation to an event we are putting on for the President of our company and a couple of other important people.  I was talking about the invitation with some of the other designers and we came up with the idea to do a pop up card to invite them.  So with Andrea’s help we came up with some options. We had some big plans for out of control mountains popping up out of the card, but we took a little different route. So today, I finished it and I think it turned out really cool. We only need to make five.  We cut out all the parts today and will put the cards together tomorrow. I’m pretty impressed and was very pleased with the final results. (the pictures aren’t the best… sorry)

Some stories:

Earlier at work, my friends and I were all sitting around talking.  I was showing a friend of mine something on the internet.  I was explaining to him that it was php or javascript based and you just needed to go in and edit the HTML code.  And he looked up at me and said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about. All I heard was WAH WAH WAH.” Then another of my friends turned around and said, “She has to be able to talk like that to communicate with her husband.”  Then we laughed. Oh web people are such dorks.

Another time, during lunch we were sitting in the lunch room eating and some people from the Support Team came in and started talking about the things they were working on. This didn’t work here, and this person was talking about their database and the location of their files.  My friends and I at work just looked at each other amazed.  Support people are such dorks.

Today at lunch, we sat around the table and talked for 20 minutes about this really nice font I found at Veer.com.  “It’s a San Serif font with really straight edges.  It’s kind of like ITC Kabel,” I explained to Ryan and Ian. “But I like it better than Kabel because the S has really small space between it’s lines.”  “You know,” Ryan said, “They should have a pronunciation guide for font names.” I said, “Why because I say Kabel differently than you.” He said, “Yeah, but also…” and then we talked about all the fonts that we weren’t sure how to pronounce.  This conversation went on for quite a few minutes. We finished lunch and went upstairs.

Later as I was sitting, thinking…I realized: we’re all dorks.  It doesn’t matter what we are dorks about. All groups of people have the things that they are dorks about.  It doesn’t matter what it is or who you are, there is something that you think is important and interesting that someone else things is so lame.

Isn’t it great?

For a long time men and women have argued about if the toilet seat should be up or should be down. Men leave the bottom seat up and women fall in. Women leave the seat down and men have to lift it up before they use the restroom and then put it back down to  ward off the wrath of the woman with the wet behind.  For me, I’ve found that this is a particularly hot topic, not because Bryan doesn’t  put the toilet seat down when he is finished, but because other people when they visit my house don’t put it back down the way it was when they found it. You see, Bryan and I have come to an agreement, that if he has to put the toilet seat down, then I have to put the toilet seat down as well (and besides that, who really needs to walk into a bathroom and see the inside of your toilet). So anytime you come into our house, you will find all of the lids on all of the toilets in our house in the down position. Not until just recently did I discover that it bothered me when people don’t put it back down, but it does (remember that next time you come to our house ).

Anyway. The moral of the story is, if everyone puts all the seats of the toilet down then the great debate will be ended and there will be more peace in the world.

And by the way: I thought this picture of the toilet was so funny. You can find more here. People are so creative sometimes.