The new couch and living room! Yay!!!

Here it is, oh man sooo comfy! :D












We are going to hold off on getting the fabric to do the curtains. As our long term goal is to make this room a "movie" room, with a curtain over the tv like the old time theaters and eventually a popcorn machine. But we are really liking the look of the room at the moment, plus all extra funding was just spent for the couch, so it'll probably be another year before we do that stuff, though Mike is looking at going ahead and getting a new sound system with some e-awards he got through work. :)

Then we can use the other stuff we don't use anymore for the playroom so I can play use the dvd player as a cd player and play the records we have for the kids with speakers and actually be able to hear it.

The playroom mostly cleaned up. :)

Here's the pics of the playroom, the desk is still a pit, but getting there amongst the other 50 things going on at once too. LOL!








~ the kids don't know it yet, but the workbench behind the door is going out in the trash tomorrow! ;)


This is a yard of PUL that I'd bought and I really like how it looks on the kids table. :) Meaghan picked it out and I hemmed it up to keep it from ravelling. It's plastic laminated on the back, so water resistant. :) I wish I could find a cute but non glass vase and some fake flowers to put on it for that extra touch it needs! LOL!

Promised Pictures

Ok I promised various pictures so here they are:


Katie with her hair to mail off:



U4's practice (Meaghan in the yellow shirt/purple pants):










U10 practice (Katie in the black shorts/purple shirt)- Practicing goalies, since this is new this season/age group.







Alex being a booger. LOL!

Link to the first post, for those who want to read about the training

I've had a couple of mentions of putting up a link directly to the first post of training so people don't have to wade through all my posts, so let me do that now. :)

Here you go:

The Very Beginning: About Me

Training

We're Home!!!

In Home Training

It's also over on the right hand side in my links section. If you want to go to the next post, click "Newer Post" at the bottom of that post and it'll take you to the next one. :)

Ok, ok, I know It's been a week and a half since I posted, it's been BUSY!!!

Phew, what a busy weekend/day. We were super busy all weekend doing a bunch of stuff, re-arranging, and WOOT WOOT, we bought a new couch! I'm happy. Mike and Dad are picking it up after work tonight and someone is to be here in about an hour and a half to take the old one & chairs that I'd put up on freecyle. I really like how the living room is coming out.

Dad and Sue gave us two tall bookcases, so we were able to bring those in and they look so much nicer than how we had it before. I freecycled the behemouth of a bookcase that Mike had built for over the table the dog cage was on. So that was gone Friday. I tried cleaning the sectional we got off of freecycle, but 1. the smell just wouldn't go, and 2. we didnt have the middle/corner pc. so it wasn't working for us. So Mike took it to goodwill. Our new couch is a corner sectional, made of microsuede and is super soft and super comfy!!! It's big enough both Mike and I can lay full out on each half. YAY! The only thing I'm not sure about, is it's white but it was the only color they had in the price range we could afford and that we liked. We had the protection stuff put on it and the sales guy kept saying it was practically indestructable and good for kids and pets, as well as easy to clean. We'll see. We figured at worst, we slipcover it later on, which will be fairly easy to do, since it's pretty squarish.

Today I've been quite the busy bee, I've been seriously cleaning- putting stuff away and finding places for the stuff we've moved around, though thankfully it wasnt much displaced with moving the living room around. Mike painted the corner last night where the bookcase and dog cage table had been. so that's all done. The room is all set up and ready for them to bring it in tonight and push one bookcase in place and the coffee table too. I'll take some pics when all done.

Then I've also swept throughout the rest of the house, as in moving furniture out and sweeping behind/under real good. I also brought the small bookcase out of the living room, and put in the playroom and got all the kids books on the two bookcases, instead of on top of desk, on top of the cubby unit, etc. Plus, now the books are comfortably in them, not like you are struggling to pull out a book/put a book away anymore. This also cleared off almost the entire top of the hutch on my desk here and was trying to move the one printer over, but don't think my cables are long enough. Will have to come back to this one. Cleaned up the dining room and have a table to eat off of again! YAY! As well as have laundry going.

Need to get my shower and get dressed before the people show for the old couch and work on the kitchen. I have a couple of ideas for some stuff that's in there where I can put them now that I didn't have before. So all in all, really happy about getting some things out of the house, some things moved around to better, more functional places and the sun is shining outside! YAY! Although it is supposed to be a high of 20 on Thursday. Not cool there.

As for the last week and a half, we've had second soccer practices, games were cancelled on Saturday because it's just rained and was COLD. It's Indiana, what can you say... But it turned out for the good for us, because Mike and I got a LOT done around the house, such as wiring, laundry, and going through things and re-arranging things to better locations. Before we started the day though, we made a trip to the dr, since I hadn't shaken this nasty cough I've had since the cold, and turns out I have bronchitus. So I'm on AB's 3 x's a day now for a while. I'm already starting to feel better. :)

Then we went to church Saturday evening and Honey was excited to go. She's itching to get outside, I can just tell. She's bored around here and I'm ready to get out too. Ready for it to warm up a bit and be nice!

Anywho, we had a wierd day it seemed at church. She pulled me to someone wanting petted, so corrected her for that, and then we went on to the sanctuary and for some reason she took me around the community group kiosk and to the windows, that looked out over the courtyard. Not sure what was up with that, unless she was wanting to go outside, which she has been a lot lately. So we go to the service and Dad and Sue were there and as soon as she saw them she practically drug me to them. Which I wasn't super thrilled about. I'm thinking we need to do some obedience work and get out and walking more as she's seeming to get lazy about some things. Not bad, just lazy. But then after the service, I go and pick up the two little ones downstairs and we head over to the library. I command her to go right and she refused. Since she'd drug me to the person earlier and as a golden, she can sometimes be hard headed about which way we are going- especially if it's not the way we normally go. So I command her again, RIGHT!. She again refused and now was practically at a 90 degree angle from me, pointing straight away from where I was trying to get her to go, so I take one step forward and BAM! The wet floor sign hits the floor. OOPS. Dog was right, human wasn't listening. I tell her I'm sorry and everyone around me is looking at us, as the sign made quite a ring through the whole hallway as it hit the tile foor. I say ok, You were right, I wasn't listening! Sorry! Everyone was chuckling at me talking to her. LOL! Someone grabs the sign, we head on around it, me thanking the person that picked it up, and head into the library and Mike then gives me a hard time for not listening to her. :P

So all in all we are doing pretty good now. The kids are well finally, I'm starting to get over my thing and things are good. :)

Well I gotta run, will try to post pictures later. :)

First Soccer Practices:

Tonight was also the first practice for both of Mike's teams. We spent the evening, from 5-7 at the park, as both teams had thier practices- the U4's first, then the U10's. Alex had a lot of fun with his new friends, who were all within a few months of his age too!

Unfortunately, I had used ALL of the camera battery by the end of Meaghan's practice. ;) So next week, I'll be bringing BOTH camera batteries!

















Ok I'm off to hang with Mike for a bit, until we got to bed!

Night all!

Yay! We are on the mend! :)

We are all feeling a LOT better now. :) Though there's still some residual coughs and sinus issues, but everyone is in much better spirits and not just feeling cruddy. Meaghan went back to school this morning and Katie got up to my surprise, a completely different kid from yesterday. She was at her worst yesterday, and today you wouldn't hardly have known she was sick. She was moving around, helpful and wanting to do things.

Sooooo, since Katie made us sooooo proud of her last August, right around her birthday, by saying that she wanted to grow her hair out to donate to this organization:

http://www.childrenwithhairloss.us/index.php

It is an organization that will fit a child up to the age of 21 with a free wig, once a year. We had looked at Locks for Love, which is what everyone knows of when you mention hair donation, but LFL charges it's recipients for the wigs. Granted it is on a sliding scale, but they do still charge for thier services. This organization does not and I found out about this when I went up to MI this past year and a good friend and SHIM treasurer (see my links for DB orgs down to the right), Jill, she told me about doing this and donating her hair. So I came home from that weekend and I kid you not, it wasn't a few days later that Katie stood up in the tub during a bath and announced she was going to grow her hair out to give to a child who didn't have hair.

I was proud and shocked at the same time, as we hadn't discussed this or anything, so I asked her where she heard about this and what gave her the idea for it. Apparently one of the videos we'd checkt out from the church library had a small segment on hair donation as it was a video about treating others kind, even if they are different. So we told her we loved her and was very proud of her for this. So then the growing started. She let her hair grow and grow and grow and for the last few months, Katie has be REALLY tired of having long hair. We just had a little bit more to go, as we had to have at least 8 inches for donation, and you have to really have 9 inches to pull it up in ponytails and band it then cut it off.

Well that day has finally come! YAY!!!! So we walked to the hair dresser today and cut off her hair! She has a short bob now, which is really cute on her! :) She is just estactic and elated that it's short. We also got Alex's hair cut since it was well overdue for a cut as well. LOL!

Here are a couple of pics from before:








And the after:











Then the kids with Honey: