Floor Score

Hey!  I’m just popping in to let you know we did NOT fall off the face of the Earth but our living room floor did…well, kinda.  You see, we had some water issues (you might remember me blabbing about the chimney leak and a water influx on the patio-now-screened-in-patio) that are now solved but that left some of the planks of our laminate wood floors in the living room warped.  Well, since we’re about to sell our house we reckoned yesterday was good time to replace those.  Unfortunately, the previous owner didn’t leave us any extra planks BUT something crazy happened, while waltzing through our local ReStore last year, we spotted a box of the exact same flooring and swiped it up quicker than quick.  Fast forward to yesterday morning, when we pulled that box out of the closet to finally repair the flooring and guess what?  The new planks are ever-so-slightly different than the existing.  They’re from the same company and look exactly the same to the naked eye but the tongue and groove were about a millimeter different.  WOMP, WOMP.  So, this was the scene in our living room yesterday evening:

(old floor on the left; new on the right)

One Year With Gianna

Also known as “The Year Parenthood Kicked Our Butts”.  Right after Gianna was born I thought, “Hey, this isn’t so bad, this having-four-kids thing.”  And now, looking back I realize I was naively basking in the sleepy newborn stage, soaking in life with the big kids getting more independent, only having one in diapers, and spending hours of “free time” nursing on the couch…  But now?  Now we have a one-year old and for this particular one-year old, that means being on your toes and on top of your game allllllthetime.  I don’t remember the twins or Sebastian being as busy as this girl is and, for the twins sake at least, that’s saying A LOT.  Girlfriend seems to have been born with a seek-and-destroy/eliminate/rough house/erradicate/obliterate motto and also a lemme-taste-test-every-tiny-thing-I-find-on-the-floor mentality.  Her favorite things?  The slightly open dishwasher, toilets, drawers, cupboards, toilet paper and any paper which she loves to pick to shreds (and then eat, of course)…nothing is safe.  In short, we get nothing done when she’s awake unless, and this is a big UNLESS, we turn on Moana.  She will sit and watch that movie and let the world crash down around her. 

Technically she’s now 13 months old but we’re going to go back a month and celebrate this girl who, for all her crazy business, brings all the smiles and laughs to the other five faces in this little fam bam over here.  Gosh, we love her something fierce.

Let’s skip down memory blevard, shall we?

First, you might feel like skimming the story of her birth or back even farther to when we found out she existed.

To Market, To Market

To buy a new house!  But first to list this one within the next couple of months!

Yep, we really, really, really want to move closer to where Anthony works for a good many reasons and so we’re taking the leap this summer and shooting for it.  Cue the tears though because we’ve brought home all four of our babies to this house. 

The Grass Is Greener

…in the backyard.  Whereas before, it was a mix of dirt and weeds that left me feeling blue and the kids, well, brown.  I know, kids and dirt.  They go together like peas in a pea pod and I’m a farm girl, I should know that.  Right.  But I also know that trying to keep the dirt from infiltrating the home by capturing said kids before they traipse inside all while juggling a sweet little angel but very needy babe is not my idea of a good time.

So that’s one reason we laid grass in our back yard last weekend – so that we could let the kids roam free, graze, skip, jump, and holler without hollering ourselves to “please stop digging in the dirt!”  The other reason is one I’ll dive into in another post but for now, some befores.

I took these pictures back in February, I think, when spring was around the corner but not quite here.

Seven favorites

Hey!  I hope you had a great Memorial Day!  We spent the weekend and holiday at home doing tons of work in our backyard.  I can’t wait to show you guys the progress!  We’re putting in an outdoor patio right off the screened-in patio and I’d say it’s about 75% done and so far, it’s only cost us maybe $100.

So anyway, we don’t have any finished projects to share right now though we do have a HUGE project in the works that I’ll type of soon BUT I do have a list of about 30 (possibly more) things I keep on my phone of things I want to share – stuff we’ve bought that we love, recipes I’ve found that have been awesome, excellent reads, companies we’ve had great experiences with, you know, mumbo jumbo that you just might find interesting and that we think is worth passing along.  I meant to share five today, thereby making this the old Five Favorites but then I got a little carried away with seeing Memorial Day sales and so we’ve got Seven.  Lucky, I suppose.  ;)

Ahem…

You might’ve heard or read my words about our Berkey water filter.  Well, we’re still super happy with it and are so glad that we snagged one last Christmas.  Why am I telling you this again?  Because, Berkey is having a Memorial Day sale that ends Friday!  You can grab one for 15% off with code ‘BERKEY15’!  The filters don’t need to be replaced very often but even with the price of those and replacement, you’re looking at spending about $17 PER YEAR to get good, clean water.  And then of course there’s no plastic being transfered out into the world, which is huge for us.  Anyway, the biggest reason we settled on a Berkey was because it filters pharmaceuticals like acetaminophen and pesticides out of your tap water like a boss.  I know.  Those things are found in tap water.  Scary, right?  You can see everything else they filter out here.  So anyway, the Berkey.  We highly recommend.  We have the Big Berkey and it’s the perfect size for our fam.  We fill it before we go to bed every night and it usually lasts us all day.  The link above is our affiliate link as is the graphic in our sidebar.  You can also grab one on here on Amazon.

Last year our lawn mower broke right in the midst of summer and it was a $60 fee just to get it looked at to figure out what was wrong, not including repair costs.  Boo.  Anthony wanted to see if he could fix it himself before we shelled out cash but didn’t have time at the moment.  In the meantime, our grass wasn’t growing any shorter so we bought this reel mower off a Facebook resale site and have been very happy with it!  So much so that we’re thinking about just fixing and selling our old power motor.  I love that I can mow the lawn while the kids play around me and we don’t have to worry about buying gas, me throwing my shoulder out trying to start the dang thing, or changing/checking/draining the oil.  I also love that the kids can mow the lawn with a little heaving and hoing.  As you can see, Sebastian is patiently waiting his turn.  :)We also have a friend who owns and loves this one.  As for me?  I think I’m a reel mower fan for life.
 

A lot of homes built in the 70’s and before were built complete with the craziest of tile choices in the bathrooms.  You know what I’m talking about, right?  Those bathrooms with the pink or blue or green or yellow or shmellow tile that adorns the floors and walls and whose color spills over onto the toilet, tub, and sink?

Well, I was so amazed at how beautiful Rebecca made her green-tiled bathroom look by just swapping out the vintage mirror and light fixture for something circa 2017, adding new cabinet hardware, and adding some neutral decor.

There’s budget-friendly hope for the rest of ‘em!

I posted once or twice about the fiddle leaves my sister gave us that I propagated (successfully!!!) and then you never heard about them again and you probably don’t care but either way, I’m happy to report that I planted them in one big pot they’ll share for the rest of their days (or at least until they grow out of it which probably will take years and years?  I don’t know…) and they’re doing great! There hasn’t been any new growth in the form of more leaves (yet) but their stems are growing taller so I’m hoping we’ll have some trees, or at least a bush, in the next year or so.  Go find yourself a friend who is pruning their fiddle leaf and offer to take a few of those clippings off their hands!

A good friend gifted us a Baby Brezza at a baby shower for the twins and we used it for them and every kid since.  Ours steams and then purees the food so all we had to do was cut up the big stuff and toss it in.  I didn’t keep track of how much money we saved making our own baby food for the tots but I know the number was somewhere in the hundreds at least.  If any of that sounds fun to you, you should run quick and grab yourself a Brezza while they’re 25% off with code ‘25food’!  The sale ends tomorrow!

I’m a greek salad junkie and Anthony loves them too though we’ve never been able to find a really good, bottled Greek dressing (that’s fits in our grocery budget at least).  So you can imagine how delighted I was when this recipe popped up in my Pinterest feed one day and, after quickly tossing it together, makes my taste buds sing.  There are measurements for a smaller batch in the comments too since the original recipe makes a boat load. 

Last, take 15% off any pillow cover order of $24 or more in my shop with code ‘MAYIPLEASE’!  The code is only good until the end of May, so tomorrow!  (Where the heck did May go??!!)

Ciao!

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*affiliate links included in post