Putting an ad in the paper for Mary Poppins

My daughter fell off of her chair last night at dinner.

The whole thing took place in slow motion, and yet I'm still not sure how it happened. Her entire chair fell to its side, taking my daughter down and her dinner plate up in the air. As my luck would have it, we were having quinoa so the airborn plate created a quinoa rain shower over the dinner table. As the person nearest to her, I reached out my hand and clutched her leg just in time so that her fall was a little softer. Nevertheless she still ended up face down, belly down on the floor covered in quinoa and chicken. 

In this house, I would expect nothing less than for a tumble off a chair to create a mess the size of the tri-state area.

I only have 2 children, but everything in this house seems to be louder, messier, crazier than a house full of Dugans (they have what, like 19 kids?)

One day my aunt stopped by after an acupuncture appointment.  She could only stay for a few minutes. Now my aunt's house is so clean and quiet it's like visiting Jefferson's Monticello. I'm pretty sure she she attaches velvet ropes across all her rooms and only allows her family to occupy 3 rooms in the house. You can drop by without notice and it looks like no one but a curator and people dressed up in period wear pretending to stoke a fire live here.

So my aunt visits and probably spends about 15 minutes with me and the kids in which they run around, play with toys all over the floor, messily eat lunch, and probably have a tantrum over what color their plate was.  To which my aunt looked and me and says, "You need Mary Poppins."

"I thought the mom in Mary Poppins was a suffragette," I began, "not just plain suffering?"

My aunt also has 2 children and claims that they both took 3-hour naps until they were 7 and never played with dirt and never got food on the floor and ... Well, we all know that parents suffer from amnesia when it comes to their kids. So I'm enjoying my messy house, my messy dinners, and my messy kids knowing that one day I'll be telling them, "I don't know why your children are Gila Monsters? You guys were so quiet and played so nice and never made a mess or threw your food."

One day.

Organizing Photos into a Photo Album

I completed my first Photo Album as well as organized my entire photo collection ... from 2011.

Alright, I realize it's mid-2014 here but I made a dent in the 14,000 photos taking up precious space on my hard drive, so I feel like I should be wearing a tiara or that crown from Burger King. Tackling these photos was a monster -- iPhoto is just another basement where I throw stuff I don't want to deal with.

What inspired this project was a Pin on Organizing Photos. You can read her post (which is awesome and in great detail, but she talks about printing photos which I gave up on), or you can read my version (the lazy blogger version). Take your pick.

How to:

iPhoto sorted by Month/Year

1. Sort Photos: All of my photos were in iPhoto already sorted by month/year. If yours aren't, do that first. (Also don't forget to grab your husbands phone and get his photos into your library).

 2. Cull Photos: This is the hard part, and took me a long time. I basically went through each month 3-4 different times at different time periods and deleted photos. For instance: August 2011 started with 275 photos, after 4 different deleting sessions over a few weeks/months, I got it down to 128. Some months I got down to 50, but that's like March when nothing happens.

I kept my progress detailed in my spiral notebook of which months I did, where I left off, etc so I could pick up at any time.

If you have time ... you can also crop and fix all your photos. I meant to do this but time just escaped. I agree that any photo I did crop looked better. Oh well. I'm not Ansel Adams.

How long did this take? I started deleting photos in December 2013 and finished March 2014.

3. Start Photo Book: There's a few to choose from. I made mine through Shutterfly choosing the softcover, Year in Review model. Now if I thought deleting photos took a long time, making the book took even longer. It's online and ended up being 94 pages so it crashed a lot on me and was also slow to load. Then creating the pages themselves just took a lot of time, effort, and brain power -- which I was working mostly after 9PM and my brain officially shuts down at 5PM.



This I also kept detailed in the spiral notebook, listing which months were made vs which months were now finalized.

I started the book in March and finished June 1st. The book arrived today: June 11th.

Notice the 1st page where I left the stock wording ...


4. Back-up photos: Once the book was sent off to the publisher, I resized all the photos (some were like 3MB) and then put them all both on a DVD and on my external back-up drive. And they came off my computer.

Some notes on making a Photo Book:

1. Online the photos look smaller: Seeing the pages now, I wish I hadn't done some of the 2-photo pages or the larger photos. The small sized photos looked like postage stamps online but they ended up being perfect size to capture a series of photos from a vacation, or holiday.

Like did I really need this ginormous photo of my cat?


2. I like the pre-done pages: This party page was a pre-set idea page you can choose and I like how that turned out. It's hard to have the time to stylize 94 individual pages.


Here's another one -- vacation.


3. It's expensive: Look for coupons and deals. If you don't need it right away, sit on your finsihed book until a deal comes. Mine was ready around Father's Day so there was free shipping and discounts. Even then, the 94 pages came to over $60. But I figures, printing each photo and buying books would be around the same thing.

4. I wish the spine wasn't blank: This will end up on my bookshelf so I wish the spine had the title from the front.

Final Verdict: I like the book a lot but I like trying other things so for 2012, I'm trying MyPublisher. So far it's not as "cutesy" as the Year in Review pages and doesn't have pre-done pages with their "bling" but I'm okay with that. I can compare them when I get this done ... next year.

The Money Pit strikes again

This winter we celebrated 9 years of living in The Money Pit. My husband and I can't believe we've lasted this long: this house is one big headache. But something called "excellent schools" and "terrible resale value" is making us stay put and the house is very happy eating away at our savings account one check at a time.

This week I wrote out a check for a new, professionally installed window well cover.

This window well used to hide under a splintering, decrepit wood porch that we finally took down 2 years ago to make way for a patio and now it's exposed for our kids to jump on. So we put a cover on it. Done.

before

Two years and many rain storms, heat waves, and -20 degree days later, we finally had a nice day with the kids playing in the backyard. Nice, until Caligula my daughter took one look at it and decided to pretend it was a bounce house ... and fell right through --- 3-1/2 feet down into the well!

With Cerberus, her Trio of Bears on guard

Luckily the bottom was soft-- or at least that's what my husband said from inside. He saw the whole thing happen and dove in to rescue her -- right after throwing his glass of beer up in the air.  We were so lucky the cracked piece didn't cut her ... I'm still in shock over the whole thing.

Anyway, after kindly refusing my dad's offer of covering it with a sheet of plywood which he would gladly bring over from his collection of "bits & fragments of the last 50 years" stashed in his garage, we were on the phone with a window well company and had it promptly installed.  Voila.

After

 The warranty says "lifetime" and the weight max is 250lb.  We'll see.

Kids for Hire

What I've learned from watching Disney's Cinderella is that washing your floors on your hand & knees is the best method. Singing while washing, however, does not make it more enjoyable -- nor does it summon birds and mice to my aid.

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Today I was on my hands and knees wiping the bathroom floor because, according to the Cleaning Schedule of my role as Household Sanitation Director (AKA the unpaid maid), this should have happened on Tuesday.

My son walks in, "Can I help?" (Queue the theme song from Chariots of Fire)

Never one to turn down cleaning help and a firm believer that misery deserves company, I hand him a rag, point to the bathroom sink full of soapy water, and put him to work.

I expected -- well what I expected was for him to act like how I did as a kid which was to pretend I didn't see my mom cleaning and walk the other way. But no, he helped me clean the whole floor (which is quite small but nonetheless) and then asked if he could clean the cabinets too ("of course!"). From there we moved to the bedroom floor because I had a captive audience and I was not against exploiting the moment. Plus, they were really dusty.

Capturing this once in a lifetime moment.

 My daughter stayed away for the most part. When she did pop her head in, my son told her, "I have so much work to do!" Believing this to be a party she wasn't invited to, and being a known party crasher even at her tender age of 23 months, she grabbed the nearest thing (a bath towel) and got down on her knees and started to clean too.

Looking at my two pride & joys, I felt just a wee twinge of guilt -- and a lot like Cinderellas Evil step-mother -- but what the hell, my floors are clean and I didn't have to pay bribe anyone to do it.

Kiawah Island

The 2nd leg of our journey took us to Kiawah Island.

I didn't have high hopes after my son shielded his eyes exiting the airport screaming,"There's too much sun!" We've been holed up like hermits in Chicago this Fall, Winter, and let's just add Spring to the list too... Sun is new to these kids.

I agonized over this part of the vacation. There's only about 4,000 rental options to choose from and we had never been before so you're trusting your gut. Good thing mine is full of probiotics.

A few things to know about Kiawah:

1. It's a private island. You need to be staying on the island, or know someone who is, to get on (same for neighboring Seabrook). And even when you're on, there are places you can't go (Vanderhorst Plantation).

If you want to do a beach day on Kiawah and you're not staying on the island, Beach walker Park is open to the public.

2. There are alligators. There are lagoons and signs that say "Danger! Don't feed or bother the alligators." As if! We stayed on the lagoon and saw them a few times. There are also a lot of bugs ... they are the kind you don't seems to see and then you looks down and have 20 bug bites on your legs.

Our alligator swimming in the lagoon

3. The pools are for resort privileges only. This means that if you rent a condo, make sure it has these privileges to enjoy the pools. And I recommend it if your kids are little - the pools are 0-depth and are mini splash parks.

West Side Beach pool

 The beaches however are beautiful! Wide open with boardwalks over dunes to preserve the natural terrain. The sand is very fine and will stick to everything!

4. Bikes. Rent them! You won't regret it! We rented ours for our 3 full days there and it took us everywhere we wanted to go. The bike paths are paved nice and pretty easy to follow (we got lost a little - well not lost but more like our paths always went straight to the beach!) You can also bike on the beach if your thighs need a workout.

5. Not too many restaurants.  The resort restaurants were expensive but lovely. We ate at Jasmin's Porch for dinner and Mother's Day brunch. But we also ate poolside one afternoon and the food was good and reasonable. There are a few good restaurants nearby, so we had dinner on John's Island at Fat Hen -- I sucked the LowCounty Lemonade down. Freshfields is right at the island entrance and has a few restaurants and grocery store too.

Mothers Day Brunch on the Terrace

I need one of these right now.

Where did we decide to stay?  Condo on the ocean? 10-bedrom villa in Vanderhorst Plantation? In the end we chose a 2-story townhouse across the street from the beach that had resort pool priviledges which we rented through VRBO.com. The actual Kiawah island resort managed the property (even though it was owned privately) which made check in/out a breeze and we weren't worried about being scammed.  Next time we go, we feel that we can stay further from the beach and bike there (if it saves money).

On the balcony for Mothers Day

Home Away from Home

 This was a great place to come visit and we know we'll be back and as the kids get older there will be different and exciting stuff to do -- like fishing for crabs and maybe an alligator tour?

Charleston, South Carolina

This was our first real family vacation since having the kids (who will be 4 & 2 over the summer) and since we were forced to bring our kids along on this "family" vacation, we thought a lot about how to do it right, pleasing both the adults -- who would prefer walking the streets of Charleston and drinking coffee all day at cafe bars -- and the kids. This was the vacation in which we wouldn't have other family members constantly vying for the kids attention or watching them so we can drive 20 miles for that place with the awesome donuts. We thought about it so much, in fact, I thought it might be a good blog post for anyone else thinking about this trip. 

When to go? 
We decided that 6 nights of forcing our little ones to sleep in strange places would be plenty and we would divide the time between Charleston, SC and Kiawah Island -- 2 nights & 4 nights respectively. We left on a Wednesday so that our nights in Charleston would not be over a weekend and the hotel rate was cheaper too.

What to bring? 
This was our first vacation that didn't involve dragging along the grandparents which meant that my husband was alone carrying 2 car seats and our enormous rolling suitcase on & off the airport shuttle. It wasn't pretty but it beats renting them from the car company.

As for the luggage, we're still a 1-suitcase family which is gonna end fast because I can't do another vacation where I only get 1/4th space for all my stuff. I'm almost 40, I need more space for age-defying clothes & make up. On the other hand, kids summer clothes take almost no space. We also bring along a small rolling suitcase for the extra things that won't fit -- like toiletries and diapers. Like I said, I need a lot of age-defying product.

Charleston

Most people do Charleston as day trips from Kiawah Island, but we wanted to experience the city. Selfish on our part? No. This was our vacation too and it's possible to make adults and tots happy in this walking, stroller unfriendly-city and this is how we did it:

1. 2 nights ... that was our maximum stay in a hotel and eating out. 

2. French quarter Inn ... I can't speak highly enough about this hotel. It exceeded all our expectations and I am grateful to my husband for finding it and booking it (I was responsible for Kiawah). The hotel had the most amazing complimentary breakfast that we ate in the courtyard, as well as wine & cheese (which we missed because of our heinous early dinner reservations), and 8:30 p.m. cookies, milk, & port (which we did NOT miss). The rooms are lovely and luxurious and they even have a DVD player for late night Frozen watching. Oh and a pillow concierge. Oh and complimentary coffee, water, lemonade, tea out all day to enjoy. Oh and turn down service with free bottled water and chocolates. Amazing place!

I had plenty of excuses to take 4 showers while I was here

The beautiful breakfast

My daughter having her breakfast on the courtyard

3. Kid-friendly but still adult engaging activities ... with only 1 full day and 2 half days in the city, we were short on time and with a toddler who naps, we were even shorter. We made the best of it by choosing:

--- South Carolina Aquarium

Touching a starfish

Up close with a stingray

This huge tank of fish is amazing

--- Trolley Rides

Riding the Free Trolley

--- Waterfront park splash fountains

The highlight of the Charleston trip

4. Eating out at the right place at the right time ... we had 2 dinners to endure with the kids and we chose Fleet Landing which is on the water and very kid friendly for our first night (we had just gotten off the plan not 2 hours earlier). The second night had to satisfy the foodie parents -- who can't wait to book a trip to Charleston without the kids if only to eat until they pass out -- so we chose Poogan's Porch. Early dinner reservations helped too - 5:15 p.m.

First night - Fleet Landing - outside overlooking the water

2nd night Poogan's Porch - fried pimento cheese anyone?

5. Spontaneity ... For lunch on our full day we lucked out because we jumped off the trolley to pick up cupcakes at Cupcake: down south and found a great place for wraps across the street that we picked up, jumped back on the trolley, and ate at the hotel before the kids passed out. Spontaneity is definitely helpful with kids, as is an amazing husband who doesn't bitch about it. I mean c'mon, you have to stop for cupcakes.

Making a stop for cupcakes: vacation priority

How we got around in this walking city:

To get the kids around we brought an umbrella stroller and the Ergo carrier. Most times our daughter was in the stroller but if my son was tired we'd let him ride and I'd throw my daughter on my back.

Sidewalks not that wide - double stroller? Nope.

She looks comfy. So what that it's 85 degrees!

Or sometimes it even went like this!

We're not above child labor, if she wants to push him, go ahead.

Traveling with kids is rough, I'm not gonna say this was all wine & roses. 

1. Plane ride ... Our toddler (still a lap baby) was not happy on the plane. I had to apologize in advance to the guy in front of us for all the kicks he was going to get -- to which my husband added, "And we apologize for her incessant screaming and the big crap in her pants."  Thirty minutes into the ride she said, "All done plane." and tried to make a run for it.

2. Naps ... getting the kids to nap was an Olympic Sport and when we did we couldn't wake them. Our second night we had to pry 2 screaming children out of the hotel to get to our restaurant on time. We left apologies to our hotel neighbors too.

Acting irreverent at the French Huguenot Church

3. Tired legs ... The battle over the stroller was a sight to be seen. Never has a piece of mesh held together by some metal seen so much love. 

First night being carried ... never again!

4. Sleepless nights ... Our daughter is not the co-sleeper our son was so sleeping in bed with her is really rough. She wouldn't fall asleep or stay asleep. Good thing the bed was heavenly.

5. Messy dinner companions ... we got a constant reminder to why we don't dine out with the kids that often. They are a pain. They are a mess. And they don't seem to understand the concept of lingering over food and enjoying the company. They were perfect to other people (we got lots of compliments on our kids) but that's because my husband and I know the way to a happy meal is that we are totally engaged with our kids (and not each other). We also eat blazingly fast.

So that's the recipe to a great Charleston 2-days with tiny tots. Accept the good, the bad, and the messy.

Next blog post -- Kiawah Island: I still have sand in my ass!

Mars & Venus packing on vacation

We're leaving for vacation and packing for any vacation is always a nice reminder that the inequities between man and "wo"-man (as my sexist 7th grade social studies teacher always liked to phrase it) still live on.

I pack clothes for me & 2 kids. I go through all their summer clothes and force them to try it all on to see what fits. Then I make a checklist of what I'll bring for them and check it off the list as it goes in the suitcase taking approx. 3/4 of it.

My husband picks out his own clothes and puts them in the 1/4 space left for him the night before. Voila.

Everyone only gets 1/4 space for their stuff. Use it wisely.

I have what goes in the carry-on out and ready to go, along with mine and the kids clothes to wear on the plane so the morning of we can get ready and go.

My husband probably thinks I overthink everything and why can't I be that crazy hippie chick he met 13 years ago?

My infamous checklist.

I tear apart the bathroom packing up make up, bug spray, sunscreen for us & the kids, setting out everything so we can use what we need the next morning and then pack that up.

My husband is asleep.

If I dare complain, my mom & grandmother would more than likely say "we used to pack for our husbands too! At least you don't have to do that!"

Of course my point being in that 50 years man is now capable of packing for himself but it hasn't gone any further than that.

Evolution is still working on that prototype.