Shiny and clean

I am not a particularly vain person, but I do love my hair. Most people who met me briefly probably wouldn't think much about it, because I usually just throw it back in a ponytail. But the thing about ponytails is that then the hair is there when you need it. You can do it up or let it down or curl it or straighten it or whatever you feel like doing. Sometimes, I do my hair nicely just to remember what it looks like, since mostly it's just wash and go.

I was happy to receive natural shampoo and conditioner samples in the mail because I am a total hair product junkie. The idea of a natural shampoo that is good for both my hair and the environment is very appealing. I have to admit that my first concern was, would it work? I mean, those pesky chemicals are there for a reason! To scrub out the other crappy chemicals like hairspray and gel and whatever else. Also, applesauce. (I'm a mom, what can I say?)

Thankfully, I had a rich lather instantly, and my hair came squeaky clean. But that was just half the test. For me, the real reason I've tried practically every single hair product out there is because I'm in an eternal search for conditioner that will weigh down my frizzies. Thankfully, the naked naturals conditioner did a great job of making my curls separate and look cute.

See?



(Of course, I never really look like this because my 2-year-old doesn't let me do my hair. So normally I'm either wearing a towel on my head, or I've got my hair shoved in a sloppy ponytail.)

The best part about the free samples is that they came with a $1 off coupon for the product. Oh, and the part where my hair smelled like lavendar. Mmmm. Nice :-)

teh cute

It is really too bad that the bottom half of this picture isn't useable because Ben looks so adorable dancing in my nylons and shoes. But at least you can see him for the ham that he truly is in this now completely SFW cropped photo.





That's my boy. One of these days, I'll have to put a video up of him dancing to "Penguin Movie" (Happy Feet) because he just goes crazy during the part where Mumble is dancing alone on the hilltop. He likes to say "be himself" outloud with the movie too. I swear, it's the cutest thing on the entire planet.

My cross-dressing kid

After coming home from "going to work together" last night, Ben decided that he needed to go to work too. In order to go to work, first we have to put on our "nylon socks" and then we need our shoes.

Time to go to work Mama!


(you can see the white socks he was previously wearing on the ground, as well as the animals who are both always around whenever pictures are being taken.)



Phew. Hey Mama, did you know that working is hard work?



The most amusing part about all of this is that he isn't wearing a diaper underneath that super-big T-shirt (when he goes pee-pee in his potty, he is rewarded with some diaper-free time which he is always thrilled about) and there's one picture where you can see. Sadly, it was the very best picture because he was dancing in the nylons and shoes and looked adorable. But I am not the kind of mom who would put photos of her naked baby on the internet. That's not a good idea for a phethora of reasons. :-)

Fantasy house for sale

The money we put into the house was mostly on repairs, but some of it went to things like the plants you see in the pictures. I can't believe how much they help it to look nice. You would live here right? It looks shiny and happy and pretty and artistic and romantic and dreamy.

The one thing I have to say though, after putting in probably more than 60 total hours of cleaning, I'm frustrated that a few things ended up the way they did. When Dan came to take the photos, he had us take the dog dishes up off the ground, and so I put them on the counter that was behind him while he took it, so they wouldn't be in the shot. Well, I guess he came back and shot it again from a different angle and didn't bother to either move them or ask me to move them. So you can clearly see two dog dishes on the counter looking weird and cluttery.

This is insanely annoying if you knew how much stuff was previously on our counter and how I killed myself to get it PERFECTLY CLEAN!!!! He also had us take the magnets and photos off the fridge, which I can't believe didn't occur to me. (It was probably the saddest thing I've done thus far. Having Stephen gone is hard enough without taking all of our family photos down. They are like lovies to Ben. We sit and look at the fridge and talk about all of our family members at least once a day ...) Anyway, now I don't even have photos of papa around that we can say goodnight to. :-(

Anyway, back to yesterday. I took them down, but didn't do the ones on the side of the fridge because he was standing in the main doorway and you couldn't see them in the shot. Well, guess what. Again, he must have come back later, shot another photo from a different angle and all the remaining clutter is clear as day. Le sigh. And if you ask me why we didn't just do it all before he came, I will seriously have to jump through the internet and strangle you.

Getting our house to look this good nearly killed all of us, especially Ben, who kept inventing new levels of trouble to get into in order to get some attention. It was murder on Saturday. By the time it was crunch time, (like after 7 p.m. on Saturday and we still had to drive all the way to Kent so Stephen could get up and go to work first thing in the morning) we were all about to lose it. There were definitely some tears shed trying to get a few last minute things done and keep everyone from melting down. There was literally no time left to do any "one last thing." We didn't even take the time to eat a family dinner. Ben snacked on weird things and then started refusing to eat anything because his blood sugar was low and he was tired and cranky. We ended up going through the drive-thru on our way out of town and letting Ben eat some chicken nuggets in the car. He was a lot happier after that.

But luckily, when Ben and I got back to Aberdeen yesterday at around 2 p.m. (he napped in the car like a champ, yay!) the weather was nice (what? no, say it again) so we were able to spend some time doing some last minute weeding. About 20 minutes of yardwork made a tremendous difference and Ben was as good as gold for all of it. He used a screwdriver to dig in the dirt and helped me put the pulled weeds in plastic bags. What a sweetheart :-)


Our house:





From the front



Stained glass window, close up



From the back, with the hot tub sort of showing. I would have liked to have washed the cement a little, but it's January and we ran out of time. Oh well.



Upon entering. This is one of my favorite shots. Man it looks good in there.



This one came out pretty good too. See how the fireplace looks just fine without the glass panels?



Kitchen. YAY! This is what sold the house to me.



Kitchen. Too bad you can see a few dishes in the sink. I offered to take care of them really fast, but he said that he'd shoot it over them so they wouldn't show. Hmm.



Dining room and part of the kitchen. This is the one that shows the less clean part of the kitchen, which is frustrating because it WAS clean until I had to move things around for other shots that he didn't even end up using.



When we bought the house, this floor wasn't even there. Surely someone will fall in love with it in all its splendor and offer us a gazillion dollars, right?



The downstairs bedroom, which is technically the master, but we use it as our guestroom. (I can hear all of our previous guest complaining that it didn't look like that when they stayed with us. Sorry you guys! :-)



Our room. The shelving was $600 and Stephen screwed it into the wall, so its staying. It was a great idea since we lacked closet space, except that we never used it because I got dressed downstairs as to not disturb Ben and Stephen while they were sleeping. Oh well. Sometimes you just can't forsee these things.

(Oh, and if you look really closely, you can see Trick-or-Treat Bunny sitting on the shelf in the corner. Why he didn't move her out of the way before taking the picture? The world may never know ...)



This is Ben's room, which is really a lot cuter than is shown here. The things on the wall above his bed are glow-in-the-dark stars, and we also have wooden letters that say "BEN" but those aren't in the picture, for obvious reasons. :-)



Want to buy our house? Know someone else who might? It would make a great family home or a rental, whichever.

Here's the official listing ... fair warning. I did not see the text before it was posted, otherwise I would have copy-editted the hell out of it.

"Has a functional Hot tub, Nice back patio and deck area for BBQ or hanging out and entertaining."

Oh dear. Well, hopefully, people who are looking to buy homes aren't picky about things like appropriate capitalization and such.

It's also up on craigslist, which he swears is effective, even if there's no Aberdeen listings and it has to be lumped in with Seattle, which is two hours away ...

Oh, and of course there are two classified ads set to run in the paper tomorrow. I got them both for free :-)

Worth 1,000 words

One of the coolest things about posting the video of me and Ben cooking the other day was that it reminded me of the fact that our camera takes videos as well as pictures. I ignored it for quite some time because I didn’t have any way of getting the photos and videos off of the camera, so I figured, “Why bother taking them?” (How dumb is that?)

We are lucky that we got our camera as a gift, but if we didn’t already have one, I’d check out these Nikon D3s. One of my blogging friends was telling me the other day that if she wanted to share old pictures, she’d have to pull them out of albums and scan them. I wish she would — cause I’d really like to see them — but understand that it’s pretty inconvenient to have to do that. I’m so glad almost all of our important memories are in digital form.

Say cheese!

For my 21st birthday, I'd asked for a camera. My husband bought me a digital one and I was disappointed. I thought I'd never learn to work the thing and that it was a passing fad anyway. I mean, how was I going to make pretty photo albums if my pictures were stuck in digital form? I was seriously upset with him about this for several months. A side note: He used the camera that he'd just purchased for me to take this shot (my avatar) of me while we were walking to the bar in downtown Bellingham. Once he taught me how to upload it to the computer, I decided to make a user-pic from it.

Well, that was almost exactly five years ago! I'd had my lj for just one month at that point, and no one really knew it existed. I was using it more as a personal diary than a way to communicate with friends and family. Now, I'd be lost without my digital camera! (We got a new one for the holidays last year.) How else would I share cute photos of my son with everyone I've ever met? Photo albums do still have their place, but in today's online world, I'm glad I finally let my husband teach me to work the camera. Sure I'm not an expert, and I occasionally still take pictures of my feet while trying to figure out if it's on the right setting, but my favorite thing about digital pictures is being able to immediately erase the bad ones. I can't even believe how many pictures in my childhood photo albums feature me with my eyes shut!

If you are one of the few people left on this planet who doesn't own a digital camera yet, you should check out these Nikon cameras. You can get a slender one like ours for about $120. I'm considering suggesting it to my aunt, who never knows what to get for her pre-teen daughter. Marissa will be 13 this November and is very interested in photography. I know it's a present she'd love.

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Ben's room!!!

So while I was at my in-laws this weekend, I uploaded a ton of photos. But rather than bombblast them all up at once in a day-in-the-life kind of post (not that I didn't think it was a cool idea, just that the ones I took don't really tell one long coherant story) I'm going to put them up in smaller groups over a longer amount of time. Since I've spent a lot of time on this blog writing about Ben's room, I figured those ones should go here.

Oh, and Ben slept through the night on Friday night while I was working. All the way from 8:30 p.m. until 6 a.m. Wow! Of course, we couldn't get him back to bed at 6, but that's OK. Saturday night, he slept until 6 a.m. again, even at my MIL's house while sharing the bed with us. We weren't quiet either. We came in, we moved him, we got up again, we talked, and he slept through it all. AND he went back to sleep after he nursed at 6 a.m.

Yesterday night he only slept until 3:30, but still, I never thought I'd be saying he only slept until 3:30, you know? I mean, prior to moving him to his own room, I pretty much expected him to wake up before midnight (usually before 11 p.m.!) every single night. For months. Possibly even for the last YEAR. And now, he is sleeping so well! Yay. The only thing is he's still having trouble making it all the way to our room. He's suceeded at this only once, the first time he slept til 6 a.m. All the other days, he cries at the gate. And strangly, he usually cries for Papa. Once he gets in the room he wants to nurse and says "Mama otherside peeeese" but out in the hall it's "PAPA!!!" Weird.


Pictures, yay!!!!

Here is Ben asleep on Friday afternoon during his nap.


Here is what Ben looked like when he heard me enter the room and take his picture. He was not thrilled to be woken up. (Don't worry, it was time for him to get up anyway.)


Here is what Ben looked like after he settled down to some Mama otherside, which always improves his mood greatly. Notice the firehose leg in the air. This is clearly because the milk comes out so fast that it shoots all the way down to his toes and makes them fly around all crazy-like.


Here is how cute and happy we are after he is done having his otherside. Yum yum yummers. Note how ugly the wooden dresser now looks next to the painkasaurus brown walls. We tried shopping around for something to replace it with, but everything either wouldnt' work or was way too expensive. So even though its nice wood and hearing this would probably give my mom (who is a big fan of nice wood) a heart attack, we're probably just going to paint it white. It's quite old anyway, and has several stains on it. So I'm not too sad about it.




Here are a few more shots of the rest of the room. The walls used to be white and the doors used to be wood-colored.

memories of my little baby

we watched videos of ben's first birthday this morning because he wanted to watch tv. "TV!!!!!" he said, banging on the TV cabinet. fine.

first, OMG I can't believe I was crying then that he wasn't a baby anymore. he is such a little baby in that video! i cried as soon we turned it on. and also, i uh, hate to say this, because it makes me sound way more egotistical than i am, but i think i looked really pretty. i remember choosing my clothes and doing my hair for that day, keeping in mind that we'd likely be seeing the video a lot for years to come. i know i've seen it since we made it (at least once right away to make sure it came out OK) but i don't remember thinking i looked especially nice then ... maybe its because i look worse now, LOL!

anyway, ben watched for awhile, and then got bored and tryed to push a lot of buttons and turn the TV off.

oh well. he is only 20 months. he shouldn't be watching TV anyway.


This is what Ben's first birthday was like, FYI:


OMG itz mah birthday!




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