I'm Back!!!

And it's only been two days! Wa-Hoo!!!

Saturday, the 4th, was a GREAT day. :-) We had some money in our local VLB fund, so I drove around and picked up all of our local VLBs and we went shopping for VLB vests and materials to make signs for the Youth March. First stop: Burlington Coat factory. We found vests for Kody, Dalton, and Michael. :-) Then we went to Hobby Lobby and bought some felt, Hancock Fabrics and almost bought some fringe for the banner but the line was too long, Michael's for some sticky-backed felt letters, Arby's for lunch, Joann's to finally come to the conclusion that it would cost considerably more to buy all of the materials necessary to make vests for the girls (that's what all of the craft/fabric store stops were all about) than it costs to just buy finish vests AND it would heap on lots of extra stress to try to find time to make them in the week and a half before we leave. Then we went back to Hancock to buy the fringe we didn't get the first time. We had a GREAT day and I had so much fun with all of them! And now they all call me "Mom." There's another half to that story but I will omit it to protect the shy and easily embarrassed. Ha! The highlight of the day was when we were standing in line to have the fringe measured--the first time, when we ended up leaving instead. The guys had wandered off, so when I decided to put the fringe back I took Laura and Katie F. and we snuck out of the store and out to the van. We then drove around the parking lot for several minutes, the girls giggling up a storm over having left the fellas in a fabric store. When they finally emerged and found us they just sort of threw their hands in the air and shook their heads in a you've-got-to-be-kidding-me sort of way. I told them that they seemed to be enjoying the fabric store so much I just didn't want to interrupt them and pull them away before they were ready. :-) I must say, the guys were really, really good sports going to all of those stores! They never griped or complained at all. Amazing. My sons would have been miserable. Ha!

I dropped all of the kids off, came home, and busted open the box with my sewing machine in it--first time I've seen that machine in two years. ~Aaaaahhhhh~ It felt so good!!! I hate sewing and always feel incredibly stressed and DIStressed (ha!) when I attempt it (no matter how badly I WANT to sew and be good at it!), but this was really a CRAFT project more than a SEWING project. So, amazingly enough, it all went smoothly and I just had so much fun making a VLB banner for Bessemer.

Sunday, the 5th, started with an early morning trip to Wal-Mart. Strangely, I really enjoy Sunday morning trips to Wal-Mart! I can be there in about 2 minutes and there are NO crowds. You get to park right up front, grab what you need, check out, and be back home--in no time!

As a side note: A week or two ago I was making dinner and suddenly realized that I had NO cheese with which to top the casserole I was about to put in the oven. I hopped in the van, zipped over to Aldi--right by Wal-Mart, walked in, grabbed my cheese, checked out, drove home, and walked in the door EIGHT MINUTES after I had originally left the house!!! As much as I've always declared that I am NOT a good city girl, there's no denying that I have quickly fallen in love with conveniences like that!!!

Anyway, I went to Wal-Mart that morning to pick up a few materials for our VLB signs. After service we came home and had left-over deer stew and taco soup for lunch ~YUM~ then I met the VLBs back at the church so we could work on their signs. I'm not allowed to tell you about them though because the kids think somebody will steal our idea and they're a wee bit prideful about having the coolest signs at the Assembly. Ha! I'm LOVING it that they are so excited! They're going to look GREAT in their brand new VLB uniforms and carrying their new signs, and with a nice, new banner to represent our church. And again, we had lots of fun on Sunday making signs and then just hanging out until church time. I love being with these kids and am feeling more of a connection with them all the time. Like they're "my" VLBs. I just love that. :-) Is it wrong to be possessive??? Of course, there are a couple of them I'd like to trade in... HA! Seriously, I just love, love, LOVE having the opportunity to work with these kids. It's KILLING Katie that she's not one of them. She is NOT handling her pre-VLBhood very gracefully at all and HATED being left out of the outing on Saturday. I did let her and Madison come help us make signs on Sunday--because we needed all the help we could get! Ha! Anyway, the signs turned out great and we had a ball.

On Monday, after searching NUMEROUS websites for several days and making some phone calls to boot, I place an order for two red ladies' vests. Just an hour or two later I received an e-mail saying they'd been shipped. WOW! They came from Brooklyn, New York, (which makes them so much cooler) and arrived at my house first thing Wednesday morning. GREAT service. And the vests are really, really nice. I was worried about them being junk--really cheaply made or with flimbsy costume fabric of something--but they are so, so nice. They are a shorter than what I prefer, but Mom says that women's vests are SUPPOSED to come just to your waist, so I'm guessing that makes them perfect. Anyway, if anybody is in need of red vests for the Assembly you still have time! Check sixstaruniforms.com. We paid $18 per vest, then $9 shipping, bringing the total to $21 per vest--plus tax, of course. We would have paid more than that to buy the materials and they wouldn't have been as nice. Just some handy info for ya'. :-)

Where was I? Ah, yes--Monday. I found and ironed all of the curtains for my bedroom and the guest bedroom and got them hung, and also ironed the bed skirt for the guest room and put it on the bed in there. (It had some tears in it, so I had FIXED IT--wow!!!--when I had my sewing machine out on Saturday. Amazing!)

That night we went to the Cox's house for dinner. The Hopkins joined us there, too. We were pretty rude and showed up about 30 minutes before we were supposed to. HA! Chalk that up to my short attention span or really bad memory--one of 'em was the culprit! We were there for several hours just visiting and enjoying some really great food. They made "hobos" and they were excellent. I'm guessing it's a southern thing, because I'd never heard of it before. (I could just be ill informed, of course.) They put a burger in foil, covered with green peppers and onions and carrots and potatoes and Greek seasoning and what-not, then wrap it up tight (one for each person) and throw it on the grill for about an hour. Yum. I'm wanting to try it with all sorts of things now! If only we had a grill... The season is just about over, so maybe grills will go on sale real cheap and we'll pick one up. :-) Anyway, it was Madison's birthday, so we also enjoyed some really fantastic cake and Blue Bell ice cream. It was all so nice.

I spent a great deal of my time on Tuesday cleaning out the work room. It's where we've been keeping all of our paint and tools and trash and plumbing supplies and hardware and extra WHATEVER while we've been working on the other rooms upstairs. So it was no easy task to clean it up! We had the kids haul lots of stuff out to the shed and we gathered up lots of trash, carried paint and brushes to the basement, collected tools and hardware in a giant tub to be sorted out later, and finally got it all DONE sometime in the late afternoon. Then I spent the evening sorting through that bin of tools AND our way-too-big junk drawer in the kitchen, figuring out what needed to go to the garage and what needed to stay. I even made a late-night trip to the store to get some "junk drawer organizers" (plastic bins with different compartments) because things like that just make me so happy. ~aaaahhhh~ It feels sooooooo good to have those jobs taken care of and have a PLACE for everything! I hate rummaging through piles of tools or WHATEVER trying to locate something.

Wednesday I painted the inside of the door in the workroom, but decided I hated that color in there. So I mixed three colors together (the brown, cream, and white that I had on hand) and created a really dark cream or really light tan (I can't decide) that works PERFECT in there. I got the first coat on the door, the two closet doors, the window sills and trim, and all of the baseboard and chair rail that day.

Thursday I put the second coat of paint on all of that stuff, then painted two coats of dark green on the panelling down below. The top half of the walls has some sort of grasscloth on it. It makes me think of bamboo. With the dark green on the bottom of the walls I keep picturing a palm tree in there or a hammock or something! Ha! It's our Gilligan's Island room. :-) Of course, it will have nothing of that nature at all. It will be full of vinyl cutters and other machinery and sewing supplies and painting stuff. But still, it's going to look great. I'm so excited about having a room where we can just keep all of that stuff out and have easy access to it whenever we want it (will I actually sew more???), but I'm so surprised that I actually LIKE the room itself so well--the paint and trim just worked wonders in there and it looks fantastic! It makes me really, really like the grasscloth where before it was just so-so.

Today we laid the floor in that room. Well, almost all of it. We ran into some difficulty toward the end and called it a day. We hope to finish up tomorrow. It went fairly quickly, I thought. James made all of the cuts for me and I whacked the planks together. I like that job. Joe helped out quite a bit, too. He likes my job, too. :-) This is laminate flooring that was actually in the chapel room when we bought this house. We hated it there, so we pulled it up and have now reused it in this room--and it looks soooooo good! It goes with the walls just perfect.

The other really exciting event of the day is that my Papa Jerry called me this morning. :-) He called to tell me happy anniversary. It's been 21 years since our plane crash in Colorado Springs. AMAZING. Thank the Lord for sparing ALL of our lives. I was so happy to hear from him--it's been a long, long time and it was just so good to hear his voice.

So THAT gets me all caught up. Wa-Hooooo!!! Next week I'll race off to IYC, the General Assembly, and a family vacation, thus putting me way behind again. But for now I'll know that I'm all caught up. :-)