The Randomess that is my Monday

Odd things have been happening all morning. Maybe its the lunar cycle, maybe it strange weather patterns caused by hurricane Sandy on the east coast, maybe its my imagination...I don't know but this morning was too weird not to write about.

1. My son decided to NOT take a morning nap and instead chose to roll around on my bed yelling, hollering, and chattering away to anyone/thing that would listen. Including, but not limited to: me, the T.V, the remote control, the dog, the pillow, the light fixture, and his pacifier. Now this doesn't sound too unusual being that Lil' E is 8 months old now but it is for him. He's normally a pretty quiet baby...except when he's hungry...or needs a diaper changed...or sleepy. Point is that he cries when he wants something and has, up until today (and some last night) not had any interest in the baby talk and jibber jabber. At lunch today he was talking away to the lady behind the counter. I don't know what he was saying but it seemed pretty important because he had a look of all seriousness on his little face.

2. The Asian people at our local Samurai Sam's are happy, friendly, loud, and weird. One look at Lil' E and most older people try to touch him and talk to him. Some have even asked to hold him. I don't know what happens when people age that makes them oogle over a strangers baby (or touch a pregnant woman's belly). Lil' E hasn't learned the term "stranger danger" yet so naturally today he was trying to touch the lady and man behind the counter and coo'd at them. The man informed me that Lil' E looks just like me and that it was good luck for the son to look like the mother. My best guess is its good luck because if the baby loks like mom and doesn't look like the father, paternity wont be disputed. Then there came the exchange with the lady as she brought me my delicious plate of Yaki Soba Noodles.
Lady (HEAVY Asian accent): ooohhhh he sit so good! How old?
Me: he's 8 months
Lady: Ohhhh he little like Asian baby!
Me: yes he's small for his age
Lady: Little is good, you no worry
Me: OK....
Then she walked away. As we were leaving she yells to us from behind the counter across the restaurant (mind you we are NOT the only ones in the dining area).
Lady: 'member I said small is good! Strong brain better then strong arm!
Me: uhhh...thanks?

Really...how do you respond to that?

3. Adventures at craft warehouse. I think I've said this before but I LOVE craft warehouse. It's my happy place. Long story short, Grandma gave me some ceramic tile and I made some coasters out of them so I needed waterproofing sealant and cork or foam or felt dots for the bottom. Craft warehouse doesn't have these (GASP!). I ended up just buying a sheet of foam paper and I'll cut circles out myself. Problem solved. As I'm wondering the aisles searching high and low for said dots a little old lady (70's or 80's) stops me to play with Lil' E (here we go again!). Lil' E being the chatterbox he is today with no stranger danger fears just starts blabbering away at her and trying to grab her necklace (yes she was that close to my child!). I can't just tell this lady to GTF away from my baby without causing a commotion (and yelling at old people is rude) so I just patiently wait and watch for an opening to run away. Then she says to him "oh just look at you! aren't you an adorable little thing. yes you are! You must look just like your daddy!"
Gee, thanks lady! Because he's adorable he must take after his dad...not me. Slap. In. The. Face. She must have smelled me starting to go into defense mode because she high tailed it out of there.

4. Our neighbor across the street is raking her leaves in 30mph wind. Counterproductive.

5. My garage door wont open from the outside. I had to park, go inside, and push the button from the inside of the garage for it to open. Stupid P.O.S!

6. Lil' E is SUPPOSED to be napping right now. But no. He's yelling...at his bear. It's not the bears fault he's stuck in the cage, cut the stuffed animal some slack!

So that was my morning. Yeah...gotta be the tides or the positioning of the stars or something.

DIY Upcycled old toy rack

This is my first DIY project of the season. It was a beautiful 80 degrees outside today and I was not about to waste this gorgeous day by staying indoors all day listening to 90's on 9 (Srius XM Raido yo!). I've been wanting to do something special for the front porch for a while now and after scouring the garage for stuff we never use anymore that I could re purpose into a porch planter for flowers I found this:

This is a toy rack I bought for Miss Priss when she was 3yrs old. She doesn't use it anymore because shes 9 now and "Princesses are for babies."
This is what it is SUPPOSED to look like ~~~~~~~~~~~~>>
But naturally over the course of the past 6 years and moving multiple times most of the little buckets were lost and the rack itself has suffered more then a little wear and tear to the paint job.

Ok so first things first, the supply list.
*a drop cloth (if I get paint all over the garage floor or the driveway the fiance might kill me)
*Some sort of Primer paint. I used Grey Gesso. I was going to use white but 1) I didn't have enough on hand and 2) I wasn't confident it would cover up the existing picture without using 50 coats of paint. Now I suppose this part isn't ENTIRELY necessary if you're going to use a dark spray paint.
*Paint brush for primer
*Spray paint of your choice. I had Green, black, and Pink on hand
*Stencil (optional)

goodbye Disney

Ok so here we go....

Lil E was supervising the project

Paint over the picture with primer. It doesn't have to be perfect just try to get as much covered as possible. Let it dry.









Next I drug the whole thing out to the driveway because if I got spray paint on the car I'd never hear the end of it from the Fiance. Then I spray painted the crap outta it :) I hung a stencil on the sides to give  it a design. This step isn't necessary but I thought I needed to jazz it up a bit.

GREEN!

Pretty leaves

Don't do what I did and spray too close.
Spray paint drips :(

While that is Drying I worked on the few boxes that didn't get lost in the move(s)

finding 4 out of 9 isn't  too bad

First I peeled off as much of the stickers as possible then I spray painted them. I had black and pink on hand. The black turned out really well but I had to do 3 coats of the pink to get it to cover correctly. I should've primed them first.

The Finished product



Now I just need to add flowers

When I was finished (so proud of myself) I quickly showed the Fiance and he grimaced at the pink. *sigh* Details, Details. To make him happy I will probably go back and paint them white so they look better against the house and the white railing on the porch. Also I may have Mr. handy man drill a hole in the bottom of my new "flower pots" to give them proper drainage.
And that's it folks!


*UPDATE*

I did indeed re paint the pink buckets to make them white. Here is the end result:

Hands

You can see part of my bandaid

 Its quiet. Very quiet. The only noise in the house is gently sucking, breathing, and cooing of the feeding newborn. It's the middle of the night and I'm doing what I do most nights at this time, answering to Lil E's feeding needs. As I sit in the nursery rocking back and forth in the glider holding my beautiful baby boy I tend to do a lot of thinking. There is no noise to drown out the thinking at this time of the night. Tonight I was thinking about my hands. Yes, Hands.
Today I decided it would be a good idea to try to open packaging with a knife instead of scissors. I'm clumsy so I should've known better. As I'm opening the packaging my wet hand (yes, yes, I know. I don’t need a lecture) slips and I stab the oh so sensitive spot between my thumb and pointer finger. I didn’t cut it...I stabbed it. It was such a beautifully clean stab that it took the pain a few seconds to reach my brain. But when it did, Oh GODS did it hurt! The throbbing in my hand has yet to cease. I didn’t realize how very useful certain parts of me were until I could no longer use them. Tonight it was my palm and my thumb on my left hand that I had no use of. Making a bottle and changing a dirty diaper in the middle of the night is extremely difficult with only 1 ½ hands...especially when the half I'm missing is the thumb.

*sigh*

As I'm thinking about the nagging, throbbing ache that is my left hand my mind turns to the history of my hands and all that they have done for me over the past twenty-something years.

Tiny baby hands

In the beginning my hands were carefree. They were for holding hands bigger then my own. They were for swinging on trees, making mud pies, throwing random objects at my sister, and squishing spaghetti between my little fingers. They were for dipping in finger paint, holding crayons, markers, chalk, and writing on walls.

Writing on walls soon turned into writing on paper. My hands became nimble and agile enough to write numbers, letters, words, sentences, and then paragraphs. They wrote math problems and stories. They painted pictures and made gluing art projects together a breeze.

Lil E's hands are so small

In more recent years my hands seem to have forgotten their carefree life. These are important hands with important jobs now. These hands of mine have a more noble duty. They are now used to hold bottles, binkies, burp rags, and babies. They chop, slice, dice, scoop, and stir countless family dinners. They fold laundry, do dishes, and scrub bathrooms. They pick up children when they fall down, brush off dirty little knees, and wipe away tears. My hands give loving caresses, pats of encouragement, and high fives for a job well done.

My hands have been bloodied and bruised, slammed and mangled, broken, misused and abused. Most of all my hands have been under-appreciated. But yesterday the amazing man in my life showed my hands they were appreciated and loved. Yesterday he recognized all the things these hands do for our family and in honor of that slipped a ring on this injured hand of mine.

It's so shiny!

Introductions

So I guess introductions are in order.

Hi, I'm Melly.

Now that that’s out of the way, onto the important stuff.

Things you should know:

I love to paint but I do not consider myself creative.

I like the color pink, glitter, shiny objects, rainbows, and thunder storms.

I'm addicted to Oreos and karaoke.

I hate small talk. The awkward silence drives me nuts.

I like to cook but I'm not very good at it. I am a very Sandra Lee Semi-Homemade sort of cook. If its complicated or takes longer then 45 min, I probably wont cook it...unless it's in my crockpot (I love my crockpot).
I am a big giant nerd. I like epic fantasy novels, I used to play D&D, I have dressed up for a nerd convention...twice, and I studied ancient norse relgious pracices and various pagan mythologies for 5 years.

I am smart but I only know a lot about a few select subjects.

I have 2 wonderful (most of the time) kids. Miss Priss is a stubborn tweenybopper who thinks shes smarter then me and knows everything. Then there's Lil E. He doesn’t do much (yet) besides eat and sleep and poop

and cry

a lot

at 3am.

In fact as I'm typing this, he's crying. Its 3am. I'm holding him, trying to get him back to sleep and typing one handed. I'm talented like that

and sleep deprived.

I am new to this whole stay at home mom thing. I have always held at least 1 full time job sense I was 16 so this is uncharted territory. I thought I'd have a lot more time on my hands then I actually do (did I mention Lil E cries a lot?). I'm also new to this whole blogging thing. I'm not very good at talking about things...and stuff... and I'm mostly a boring person so I'm just testing the waters with this.

I suppose that's it...for now.