The best kind of help

If anyone locally wants the name of an honest hardworking and fantastically patient and kind handyman/contractor/painter/construction expert... let me know.  I would love to pass this name along. He's building Jamie an office currently and doing a marvelous job. He's built me custom shelves for storage which you can see in the pictures above. He enjoys Mark's endless questions "Mr. J, what are you doing now?"  and asks the boys if they'd like to help. He had Matthew holding tape measures and Mark painting and drilling and counting wood and so much!  I can not wait for our project to be completed, but in the mean time, it's been fun to have such a friendly guy on the scene.

Dinning Room

I find myself not having near as much to post about without a constant weight loss challenge or consistently bragging on Matthew...

However I'm excited about our "new" dinning room so I thought I'd share. I'd gotten the table and chairs as a gift from a friend over a year ago. We didn't have space for it at the time so we stored it. Then Jamie's sister moved into an unfurnished appartment and we loaned the set to her while she was there. In the meantime, we moved last fall and do have space for it! So when Kimby's lease was up this weekend, we got our dining set for the first time in our actual possession! I love it!!! It meant squashing our huge playroom, but that hasn't seemed to stop or squash Matthew's playing at all. Here's a pic for you. Oh, and yes, Moses thinks he is now king Tut and the table is a throne just for him. (Sorry it's a dark pic)

Yellow Paint

A friend of mine recently painted some of her new house-the kitchen specifically a yellow color. I thought how neat it looked in the pictures, and my little project bug was bitten. I'd painted our smallest room-- the laundry room a bright golden color to brighten it up and help it seem larger. I wondered what the yellow would look like in the hallway (Thanks Liz!) So this weekend I tackled painting our hallway a bright yellow-golden color using the same color from the laundry room. Jamie was out of town from Friday until today (Tuesday) and I was hoping I could get it all done in time for him to get home to it "fixed." Here's a little bit of what happens when you try to tape up the trim with a toddler "helping" you out. Mmm-hmm. Isn't that nice? One I should have taken a picture of was all the little pieces made their way over the whole socket cover. He saw I taped up the sides and then he helped me cover it completely with blue. In fact I had to peel some of that off before I started trimming so that I knew WHERE the socket was. LOL! Also (yes I'm Dori--the delay fish) I *thought* I had enough to do the whole hallway and I ran out. SO, when we went to home depot Saturday to get more of the same color, um, they don't have that color with that finish any more. Bah! So I got a new gallon and a new finish and repainted what I'd already painted so that no one can tell now. It took Friday night, Sat nap time and night, nothing Sunday, a little last night, and today's nap time to finish. No way you can paint for real with a munchkin running around, I just painted whenever he was down. Anyway here are the pictures of the process. I LOVE the new color. It is now bright and happy in there instead of just a dingy off white boring hallway.


In other Matthew news: he said "loove oo" tonight for the first time with a new twist. "loove oo, momma" !! I could have melted right there!