oona's been busy

Yep, it definitely seems to be different with girls. Oona blessed us with this creative display a couple of weeks ago. She also hit the dining room and living room walls. Mind you she did all this handiwork while I spent five, ten minutes tops, packing my bag for the gym and gathering snacks for the kids while they're at the gym. Imagine my surprise when I came upon all the scribblings.
On the plus side, these are rooms that we're planning on repainting anyway. In the spring Oona's moving out of her tiny room to Owen's room and Owen's moving up to the guest bedroom (we don't get many visitors) and Oona's room will become my craft room/office for nursing school.

I like how the scribbles sort of look like speech bubbles, but don't let Oona know that I said that. Her room looks horrible right now - no pictures (she swings them against the wall), no curtains (pulled at), broken windowshade (guess who broke it), dresser taken out of room when she tried to climb it and it almost fell on top of her. Her room is a bit like a cell but she's three and pretty destructive. There are a bunch of stuffed animals though.

I hope that everyone has a wonderful Thanksgiving!

refinishing job #2

This is a buffet I got back in September for $60 from the Goodwill. Sort of had a late 60s early 70s tacky vibe to it - I hated the carving detail in the legs that was stained a darker color but I was hoping I could refinish this to work with my decor. My decor being hodgepodge on a budget, which I would define as simple country, coziness and family friendly atmosphere a must. I'm terrible at documenting 'before' pictures as I'm usually so eager to start a project I jump right in, thus the drawers were already stripped in this photo. Of course I jump right in like an energizer bunny and then hit a wall very quickly, like when I realize my vision will take longer than an afternoon to do. And the project drags out for weeks or months. But this one is finally through, thank God and I'm on to the next project in masochism.





And after. Overall I'm happy with the way it turned out, although the 'rusty red' iron pulls and knobs don't match (the knobs are rustier). I'm not a huge fan of 'rusty red' for a hardware finish but the boring size for the pulls is 4 1/2" which makes your pull pickings very slim. Now I can't wait to fill this puppy up with all the crap cluttering the bookshelves in our living room. My goal for the new year is to streamline/declutter the living room and dining room (as much as I can having two kids). Let me know what you think and if you have any idea how I can tone down the rustiness on the knobs.

cold snap

The cold weather has come too early to Pittsburgh. Here in the house of Amelia Plum that means... Oona's is experiencing the static induced bad hair days a month or two sooner than usual. Fortunately she's cute enough that she seems to be able to pull off the look. I've tried lightly coating my hands in lotion and then patting down her hair. But, honestly, nothing seems to work. It's so fine and she's adamant about having no barrettes or other type of hair accessories in said hair (I'm lucky to get a hat on her).

And Owen's back to hogging all the hot air coming out of the living room register. No wonder it's always so darn cold in the living room. I understand why Owen does it though, at times I think I should start a blog Feed Owen where I just put a picture up of him in all his skinny glory and see how much money we could collect in food donations. But I wouldn't do that because it's fraud and he does eat a lot it just doesn't seem to stick on him. Don't we wish we all had that problem?!

bruise dementia

Two posts in one day, can you handle it? In other mundane news I have had this bruise for over a week now ( I just took this totally unflattering picture) and I have absolutely no idea how this bruise got there. I notice this happening more and more as I approach 40 (less than one month away, yikes) that I get bruises on my legs, usually on the thighs and I have no idea how they got there or what I bumped into. So last week I'm changing into my pj's and notice this huge oval and I'm completely baffled, did I inadvertently use the hose attachment on the vacuum on my leg? In other news my vacuum died a spectacular death last week. I'm cleaning when all of a sudden I jumped because it sounded like gunfire but it was only the belt breaking on the vacuum. I would have brought it for repair until I noticed that a piece of plastic and a screw blew right off the vacuum's body (I found it under the sofa a nasty jagged triangle of death) and was thankful that my kids weren't in the living room when I was cleaning, imagine getting impaled by a vacuum remnant. Toby was playing X-box at the time but he also escaped injury. Does anyone know if those Dyson's are worth the obscene amount of money they charge for them?

hello goodbye halloween and october

Okay, so I'm obviously terribly behind in posting to my blog. The country's so different, halloween has passed, we have the hope of our new president-elect - thank you Florida, Ohio, and all you other awesome states that turned blue this election! My Grandma is on hospice and no longer can get around on her own, she's declined cognitively a bunch but don't count her out yet - she's back to eating, well nibbling on her favorite frosted cookies, and she's gotten back that fiesty spark in her eyes. Well, back to Halloween, I totally dropped the ball and didn't take pictures when the kids went trick or treating but fortunately my neighbor got one pic of our kids from that night. Owen would be the one wearing the somewhat scary Anakin Skywalker (from The Clone Wars he'd have you know!) mask.

Oona's titled her costume 'Bad Princess Kitty' a girl who at three is already in touch with the virgin whore dichotomy. She loved twirling around and playing with her artfully shredded skirt but wasn't so keen on wearing the mask or the elbow length velvet gloves. Miraculously Pittsburgh experienced its second straight year of beautifully mild Halloween weather (I always feel so bad for the kids when it's a nasty night of freezing rain and they have to cover up their costumes with coats) so it was a great day out.

Oona's school had a halloween parade (like how I 'framed' the picture with the two spidermen in her class) and here she is hugging one of her buddies. Her teachers had come to our house for a parent teacher conference a few weeks ago and they mentioned that a few of the girls in the class have already formed cliques where they'll exclude other girls (it's baffling and horrible that this crap starts at 3 and 4) which, obviously, upsets the girls that are excluded. But they said Oona doesn't care at all. She'll play with whomever, boys, girls, popular or not. Thank God! Owen's the same way at his school, he'll play with anyone as long as they aren't bullies or bossy, which makes me happy as a clam that they're kind.