video vednesday: obviously we didn't have a bar at the reception...

...so we had more communion.

stinky feet equals dollars dollars dollars!

i was on the craigslist job page the other day, just looking around for other options for todd.  and i couldn't believe our luck! i found the perfect 'plan A' and 'plan B' for him!

wow, i don't know what i hope for more:  that he would end up being a model, or that he would step in to a smells-are-remunerated customer service position.  probably the second, just because i simply cannot imagine a job in which a customer service position is open specifically to stinky-footed individuals.  what kind of customers would he be serving?  and what kind of service do said customers require??

um, now that i think about it, i definitely hope he becomes a tv/film/video/radio model.  specifically, a radio model.  he'd probably get to spend a lot of time at home.

I'M NOT DEAD, YOU GUYS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

i was such a crappy blogger last week.  and in thinking it through, i realize that it's entirely possible that you thought i was dead.  so, sorry about that if you did think i was dead.

i lost my phone one day last week, and todd tried calling me like eight times, and when i didn't answer, he was positive i had died and atticus had somehow locked himself out of the house while trying to find help and was now just wandering the neighborhood, all alone and freshly motherless.  obviously, that didn't actually happen, but i guess what i'm trying to say is that it doesn't take much to assume someone has kicked the bucket.

so i'm back on this monday to tell you that i am still breathing, still talking, still an all-around living human, generally speaking.  i'm hoping this is good, reassuring news for you to start the week out with.  

so, see you tomorrow! unless i actually die in the meantime, obviously.

short and sweet.

life has gotten circus-crazy around here lately, with home projects and swim lessons and a new workout routine and yard work and whatnot.  so i only have a quick moment, but i thought i'd use it to brag about the fact that i finally finished compiling our family yearbook! ...from 2012!

it's taken a while, obviously, but it is done.  finito.  whew, that's a sigh of relief.  anyone want to send me a prize of some kind for finally doing this?  perhaps some kind of trophy?  or, if the postage on that is pretty outrageous, a ribbon would be fine.  or a copy of a simple letter you sent to your local congressman about how on top of my life i am.  some kind of memoir.  you know.  something.

i suppose just receiving the finished product should be reward in and of itself, right?  but that was a lot of photos...

thinking about starting at square one on 2013's book almost makes me wish my kids weren't so darn cute and photogenic.  almost.

unless you have a toddler of your own as well, and this is therefore normal for you...

...please do not read while eating, or within 15 minutes of planning to eat.  disclaimed.

the other day, finneas was playing with this toy trash truck we have: the kind with a little door-thing on the back that opens and closes, up and down.  so, he closes it.  then, he opens it.  then, he takes something out of it and hands it to me.  and that something that he hands me is a moderately-sized turd.

where he found said turd, i cannot say.  he was not, himself, poopy,  so it didn't come from his diaper, which only means it was just...laying around somewhere.  for some reason.

my best guess is that it was a leftover from an incident that happened two days prior, before church.  i was getting laurelai into the bathtub, penelope was trying to help.  when i looked down, i realized that there must have been poop in laurelai's diaper (whoops, forgot to check.  now it's time for new bath water), and that penelope must have stepped in it.  which is how poop got all over the floor, and why a turd was stuck between penelope's toes.  so then, i made her drape her foot over the side of the tub as i tried to one-handedly scrub the poop off (with my other hand, i was trying to keep laurelai from drowning.  you know, like a good and attentive mother, instead of one who takes her child's diaper off without looking at it and then sets it, open-faced, on the floor.)  then off we trekked to church, like a normal family, and not like one whose children walk around with turd toes.

so, i'm thinking this incident somehow resulted in the rogue turd-turned-toy.  but that means that it was days old and that i had somehow...not...noticed it.  a piece of poop.  just laying around my house somewhere.  

and i wonder...how did my life get like this?  like, where another person puts a piece of poop in my hand, and my first thought is to CSI it:  where did this come from?  how old is it?  who did it belong to at one point?  why was my first thought NOT: why is there a PIECE OF POOP in my HAND?!

these are deep questions, folks, and ones i'm not prepared to answer.  all i know is that this stuff happens here.

but you can rest assured that the trash truck was immediately put into the dishwasher, right next to the plastic animals that got exploded-diaper-urine-granules all over them.  because the van voorsts have a million kids, and therefore, that is how the van voorsts do.

weekly whut update.

on saturday, we visited the farmers market for the first time this season.  it was kind of a bust in a way, considering hardly anything but lettuce is in season right now, and we already have some growing in our garden.  (i'll get to that in a bit!)  but i did buy some sweet potato slips and a basil plant, and the kids got some cookies.

we walked there from home (about fifteen blocks one way), so we rested a bit before starting back.  while taking a break, atticus climbed a tree...and subsequently jumped out of it.

i've been super busy on the house lately.  i don't know if it's the sunshine, or the fact that we're coming up on a whole year of living here (!), but i've been antsy to get some projects checked off the list.  in addition to painting the kitchen floor, i also overhauled our closet (and quadrupled the hanging space, thank goodness!), which meant (and still means, since i'm not totally done) that our room was DISASTER-FIED.  

todd also helped me start hauling rocks out of our front beds, so that i can widen the beds, move the peonies to a different spot, and plant some hydrangeas.  ooh, lawdy, do i love me a good hydrangea.  however, this project might just be my end.  did you guys know rocks are heavy?  like, really heavy?

but, speaking of peonies, our vintage-to-the-house, planted-in-the-thirties peonies are currently in bloom and GRACIOUS.  if there's one thing i love that's not a hydrangea, it's a peony.  (penelope thinks they're called 'panties.')

these peonies line our garden, which is currently taking my breath away.  it's so...green.  and growing.  and...vegetating.  like a garden ought to do, and which one might take for granted had one not experienced the Death Valley Garden of Story City, Iowa in which nothing, including weeds, would grow.

(would you guys mind if i told you more about what's up in the garden, perhaps next week?  because i'm just so proud of this thing.  it's like my fifth child, only it needs fewer baths and if it dies because of neglect, i won't go to jail, so there's less riding on it.)


and i've got this little herb garden going to town next to the garage.  yes, that is lavender back there in the red pot, and yes, i do go out multiple times a day just to smell it.  heavenly.

and this girl is growing like a weed (or, like a Wando Snap Pea, if you're referring to the van voorst garden and its most prolific grower).  she's large.  she's in charge.  she's chewing on an apple through a mesh bag while sitting at the table like a full-fledged adult, if adults chewed on stuff through mesh bags and had to be strapped to their chairs to remain upright.

man, i love my life.

get your porch paint on the floor tonight, make my day.

i finished painting the kitchen floor.  and it almost killed me.  and i'm still not 100% sold that i love it.  how's that for an opener for this blog post?

ultimately, i would love some penny or hex tile in there.  big ol' squares of tile just aren't really my jam, and i don't really want to carry the hardwoods in there, as i'm wanting to put in butcher block counters and i think that might just be a little too...woodsy.  but while penny tile is not in the budget right now, the c. 1991 linoleum was still kind of getting to me.  especially since we painted the cabinets white and everything in there was just...blah.

this was how the house looked when it was listed.  now imagine that white-and-gray/blue linoleum next to white cabinets and gray/blue counters and white benches and white appliances and white trim... it was a whole lotta 'meh.'

so i figured, why not do something in the meantime that doesn't cost much but changes things up a bit?  so painting it seemed like the best option.

it took FORRRR-EHHH-VERRRRR.  first, i had to sand the floor.  then i had to prep the floor for priming with a TSP substitute.  

then i painted the benches so they'd match the gray squares.  since the floor paint has a 24-hour dry time, i had to wait until the next night to recoat it.

so, the next night, i did a second coat on the benches.

the next night, i taped off and primed the floor and let it dry overnight.

don't mind the crazy nasty paint mess on the walls; i'll be painting (and maybe tiling?) those soon.

the next night, i painted the whole floor white.

the next night, i taped off the squares i wanted to paint (which took a whopping two-and-a-half hours.  it was brutal) and painted the gray squares.

(this is where i really started to panic because the floor looked like a toe-up hot mess.)

the next night, i did a second coat of gray.

the next night, i pulled up the tape and bemoaned all the bleed-under that occurred along the edges.  so then i touched up the edges of the gray.

the next day, i touched up the toe kicks and shoe moulding of all the cabinets, where the paint hadn't stayed in the lines.

(yep, there are definitely crumbs all over my floor already. also, i will be painting that table at some point, but i just haven't figured out exactly how i want it yet.)

and then i stepped back and i looked at it, and i was like, it looks like clown pants.

i'm not one that hates on clowns, but it wasn't really the look i was going for.  i should have made the squares bigger.  it looks like a french country kitchen had a baby with P.T. Barnum.  but maybe it works.  maybe it's like when two weird-looking people have a really good looking baby and you're like, well, that was unexpected, but i'm not complaining about it.

actually, my mood is currently swinging to, HECK YES, IT WORKS.  especially once i get some patterned cushions sewn for the benches, and the walls painted, and my lurbly subway tile back splash and butcher block counters installed...  dream with me here, people.  oh yeah, i think it works.

but ask me tomorrow and i might be singing a different tune.  i'm fickle like that, i guess.

video vednesday: if silence were loudness...

...they would be the loudest flying  bird.



(thanks for the video, kristy!)

laurelai is nine months old...

...but still hasn't been out of me as long as she was in me.  she was twelve days overdue, if you remember, so she's still got a few days to go before she's seen as much of the world out here as she saw of my innards.

the most notable thing lately?  her tongue.  she takes it with her wherever she goes.

girlfriend also has one tooth, and can sit up.  she loves going on walks and playing with the big kids.  she still isn't all that interested in food (she pushes the spoon away if i try to get her to sample whatever i'm eating), unless she finds it on the floor, in which case she's all over it.  todd found an entire pretzel in her mouth the other day.  she also ate two saltines on her own.  i think she just feels patronized by pureed foods.

her legs are still super muscular, and i may or may not be genuinely jealous of a tiny infant girl-baby.

bottle feeding is going well, albeit very messy, and she's growing!  she's also finally sleeping through the night, which is a huge blessing.

stuff is starting to feel normal and predictable, which i'm grateful for after the year we've had.  we love our baby girl, and can't believe she's getting so big!

mes'morial day breakdown.

i told you last week about our memorial day tradition.  this was the first year finneas participated.  (last year he was really sick, even though he was big enough to participate.)  here's how he felt about it:

if you're wondering, the feelings you're seeing conveyed are 'confusion,' 'extreme anger,' and 'hurt feelings.'  why his feelings are hurt, i can't say.  maybe he was mad at us for presenting him with something so sticky as though it was food.  how could we?!!

in time, he came around, though.

atticus, on the other hand?  well, let's just say the s'mores had him at 'hello.'

penelope is usually hit-or-miss with stuff like this.  she doesn't have much of a sweet tooth, so the novelty of the whole thing sustains her for a little bit.  but then inevitably she gets bored and/or upset.  

then she started crying.  then finn started crying (again).  it probably didn't help that we did this at like 8 p.m., half an hour past their bedtime.  (ALL HAIL SUMMER, IN WHICH THESE PHOTOS WERE TAKEN AT 8 P.M.!)

so we brought finn and penelope inside for baths.  meanwhile, atticus polished off his s'more (the only one of the kids to do so), and finished off the evening by scraping bits of marshmallow and chocolate off the tablecloth.

so... rip roaring success it was not, but it was still pretty fun!