Mostly I love the blue ceiling and want to do it in my house… hmm. Which room to pick?

img from: apartment therapy

(yes, we’re slightly crazy)

So the day before Mother’s day and just two short weeks after James’ happy arrival, we packed up the moving truck and away we went. Our families both pitched in  and we had so many wonderful helpers!  Thank you so much to everyone for coming and helping.  We appreciate all your help so much.

During the move I was running around like a crazy person.  I wanted to take some pictures of everything going on, but never did. Oh well. My soon-to-be-sister-in-law Aubrey did get some pictures of our front door and James during all the excitement. She posted them on her blog, you can check it out: Musings of Mo. (the first two pictures are of our new front door, then James and then pictures of our cute niece, Maddy).

After we got everything out of the truck and into the house, my mom, aunt Deanna and cousins Emily and Jared helped out a ton by unpacking and organizing our kitchen for me.  It was such a wonderful blessing! The kitchen is one of those rooms that overwhelms me and having that finished before the day was done was wonderful. So you can have a peak at that room (it’s not an awesome picture, it was just taken with the camera on my computer. As a side note, although we do have an office that my computer can live in, I decided to put it on the desk in the kitchen and am totally LOVING having it right in the middle of everything.  I can work on my computer but still be in the heart of the home.)

The Kitchen

There are so many things that I am loving about our new house.  Here’s a list:

• I love that I can do the dishes without having to have Bryan close the dishwasher for me
• I love that none of the walls are shared. (The Cardons were wonderful wall-sharers in our townhome, I almost never heard them at all, but I always felt like I was too loud and they could hear me and I felt bad. Now, I can turn the music up as loud as I want and never have to worry.)
• I love that everything is on one level. I don’t have to hike up the stairs. Laundry gets put away right away because I don’t have to fold it in the family room, then carry it all up the stairs. It’s just seamless.
• I love that Teddy likes the house and can still see out the windows.
• I love that we have been here for just over a week and it already feels like home. It’s like we’ve always lived here.

We’ve put away and organized all the rooms except the office and the baby’s room (he’s sleeping in our room right now). So as soon as those two rooms are finished, I’ll take some more pictures and let you see the rest of the house. For now, you’ll just have to enjoy this little taste.

Now, don’t think everything is perfect. (Although it’s pretty close) The back porch of our house doesn’t have steps going down and there’s no yard… so taking Teddy potty is kind of a pain.  We have to hook him up to his leash, out the garage and then out the side yard and stand there with him while he does his business. It’s a good thing that I have diaper changing to bargain with though. I say to Bryan, “I’ll change James’ diaper if you take Teddy out…” and it almost always works.

I do kind of miss our townhome though.  Mostly though, the people. That was the hardest thing for me about moving, realizing that I was going to have to leave a ward that I have grown to love so much. You are some of the greatest people I have ever met.  The first time Bryan and I set foot in that ward building and became members of the Vineyard 2nd ward, we were instantly greeted with warmth and friendliness. Attending a new ward for the first time has always been kind of a super stressful for me (traumatic experience when I was younger, I’ll share the story sometime), but because of how wonderful the people were in the Vineyard 2nd ward it wasn’t so hard (it was harder for me to tell them that we were leaving).

To all of you wonderful people in the Vineyard 2nd ward: thank you so much for your friendship and for the things that you have taught me over the last two years. I will never forget the wonderful friends and examples you have been to me. I will miss you so much.

Let’s still be blogging friends, okay?

As much as I love skirts and own many of them though, I do not love hanging them up.  I’ve tried many different options for hanging skirts: skirt hangers, folding them over regular hangers, just folding them… I didn’t like any of them.  Really, it just all boiled down to the fact that I wanted a way to hang my skirts, keep them mostly wrinkle free and still be a lazy as possible (sad, I know).  Then one day I came up with a fantastic idea:

Small, light-weight hooks, made by 3M with the little removable sticky thing on the back.  I had an empty wall next to the door of my closet, stuck a bunch of these little hooks on the wall in rows and dun, dun, dun daaa-SKIRT WALL.

I kind of love it.

I put up the top row, then about a foot below that, staggered the other rows below it.  Using the tags inside the skirts they hang up very nicely and surprisingly stay pretty wrinkle-free. The best part is, after a long day of meetings and church, I can come home and slip the skirt off and hang it up. My skirts have no longer become a decoration for my floor.

I’m thinking of making a similar one for my purses, I just have to find the right wall.

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.)

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)