Daydreaming...

I'm taking a break from cleaning the house. I've done so much laundry today. Doing laundry is a great way to prevent yourself from ever wanting to buy more clothes. Yuck.

So, for my break, Pintrest and I did a little day dreaming. Of course, these days all my day dreaming involves the house. :)

Quick update...the inspection went well. There are a couple little things we are negotiating, but I don't see any of them becoming major set backs. Let's hope I'm right. Right now, we're trying to get the ball rolling with the financial stuff. If everything continues to go smoothly, we're looking at a closing date of March 15th. Which means we'll get the keys and be moving on St. Patty's Day. May the luck of the Irish be with us.

The house has dark brown wood for all the cabinets, and a light brownish-tan color on the walls with white baseboards. The carpet is brown. I love the colors, but I think when we decorate we need to add some splashes of color, just to liven things up a bit. I really like warm colors and earth tones. I'd like to do accent colors that matched that table runner (and all the other things) in the picture above. In my mind, those colors would give our home the feel of a bright, warm, happy place.

Of course, the decorating is going to have to come a little at a time, likely over a long stretch of time. But day dreaming is fun.

The yard will have to come first. I want to get my fruit trees in as soon as possible, so that they can start producing as soon as possible (in 2-4 years, depending on the tree). I did a little bit of research today, just to make sure I was happy with the types of fruit trees I'd selected. I think I am.

Black Tartarian Cherry

Attributes:
Excellent for the home orchard, the Black Tartarian cherry tree produces fruit with a sweet, rich, full bodied flavor. Begins bearing fruit 3-4 years after planting and will bear long into old age. The best pollinator for dark sweet cherries.
Fruit Description:
Heart shaped about 1" in diameter and usually purplish black, but occasionally red depending upon the site. Flesh is dark red, thick, tender, juicy and sweet with a smooth stone that separates easily.

Bing Cherry

Attributes:
Sweet Bing is America's favorite cherry tree. Its large, sweet fruit is produced abundantly and generally ripens uniformly on the tree in mid-June to mid-summer depending upon location. The delightfully fragrant white flowers bring spring beauty to the landscape.
Fruit Description:
Very large, about 1" in diameter, heart-shaped, skin is bright red when immature becoming dark red or deep maroon. The flesh is purple-red, sweet, juicy, and firm with a stone that is easily removed.

Belle of Georgia Peach

Attributes:
Combines good yields, hardiness and disease resistance. Sets rosy freestone peaches with super-sweet, juicy white flesh. Ripens in Aug. Self-pollinating.







Methley Plum

Attributes:
A handsome, vigorous plum tree that does well in most soils. Sweetly fragrant, delicate white flowers bloom in profusion in early spring. The juicy reddish purple fruit has a sweet distinctive flavor good for eating fresh or in preserves.
Fruit Description:
Medium to large, round to conical drupe, purple red skin, juicy red flesh with a sweet, mild flavor, clingstone.

2-1 Double Delicious Apple

 Attributes:
Through the miracle of grafting, this revolutionary tree produces two different, yet equally delicious, apple varieties. Medium- to large-size Liberty apples ripen for harvest in early October, and delicious porcelain-skinned Sundance ripens slightly later near the middle to end of October. Perfect for fresh eating, baking, drying, juice and sauce, these varieties pollinate each other and are disease resistant.



Honeysweet Pear

Attributes:
Super-sweet “sugar-type” pear with a rich, spicy flavor and exceptional quality. One of the few that is self-pollinating—does not need another variety for good fruiting. Keeps well in storage; ripens late August.



Also on my day dream list, are nut trees and asparagus. I don't think I have room in my yard for a nut tree. They just take up so much room, but I'd love to have one. And, asparagus, we will plant that, and soon, because it takes it 2 or 3 years before you can harvest it. But I think we are going to give asparagus it's own personal garden bed, somewhere in the back yard. I just have to figure out where.

Well, this day dream must come to and end. I can hear all three children up and raring to be let out of their rooms. *sigh* nap time is never long enough, is it?

Catch Up

I'm really behind on the blog. I know. First things first, happy 26 to me! Yay. To celebrate Aaron and the kids cleaned up the house, decorated, and made me chocolate chip pancakes for breakfast. I hadn't come downstairs yet, and I could hear Aaron say to Lincoln, "Go upstairs and tell Mom that breakfast is ready, and don't say anything else, and then come back downstairs." So Linc comes running up the stairs...."Mom, breakfast is ready!.......And I think you're going to be really surprised, because we helped Dad clean up the toys and blow up balloons." I had to giggle. I love 4 year olds.

For my birthday I got exactly what I wanted...money to buy trees! I think we can get all the trees we have planned out on our yard diagram. I'm pretty excited. I can't wait for spring. Provided that things go through with the house, of course.

Thursday night the other ladies in the Primary Presidency took me out to dinner for my bday. We went to Old Spaghetti Factory. I love these ladies. I wish I would have taken a picture of us. It's been so fun working with them the last year. On Friday night, my Mom and Kerry and Tanner came down, and Tanner watched our kids, while Mom and Kerry took us out to dinner again. Two nights in a row for me, I know, I'm spoiled. We went to my all-time favorite restaurant...Texas Road House! Mmmmmm. Heaven on a dinner plate, that's what it is. Aaron also made me a Sweet German Chocolate Cake from scratch. He's pretty much amazing. And the cake was fabulous. Mmmmmmm.

Here are some other random things I've been meaning to post. Starting with my shoe-obsessive daughter. I guess there's a little bit of Granny Jan in all of us. ;) The last two are of her wearing Ivan's sun glasses and Grandpa Swan's shoes. She was such a crack up walking all over the living room in them.

The other day it was warm enough to ride bikes outside. Lincoln chose to play in the back yard with his friend instead, so it was just Adelia and Ivan and I in front riding bikes. Adelia wanted to ride Ivan's little trike, so I put Ivan on Lincoln's bike to see if he could do it. He did great. He can peddle and everything, which makes me really excited for his birthday coming up, because he's getting a bike of his own. Adelia will be able to inherit the trike, and life will be grand. On a side note, Adelia loves my St. Louis beanie. That's the one she chooses to wear every time we go outside, and sometimes she'll even put it on to wear around the house. Silly girl, at least she's sticking with the National League. :)

And lastly, Aaron made us Italian Sodas for date night the other night. So we drank Italian Sodas and watched Failure to Launch. I thought the movie was incredibly stupid, but the sodas were great.

Oh ya, I should probably give a house update. Aaron's dad is here with us this weekend to do the inspection on it. They looked at the outside on Saturday and it looked good. They'll do the inside tomorrow. And we'll go from there.

Study Up!

Fantasy Landscaping...and Birthday Present Ideas

We have an accepted offer on house #4, which by no means means that it's final. However, in the event that it does go through, Aaron and I decided to spend date night Friday evening daydreaming about how to landscape the yard. (Since all there is right now is dirt.) This is what we came up with, and I'm pretty excited about it.

I'm really in to fragrant, flowering trees, so that explains the line of Lindens along the front. And the Lilacs, Orange Flowering Fragrant Teas Olive, and Banded Laurel, but those are more like bushes than trees. I'm also really in to fruit trees. I kind of feel like, if you're going to plant a bunch of trees in your yard, they might as well be useful and provide food. (I'm also really in to canning in the fall.) All the fruit trees are self-pollinating, except the two cherry trees, which will pollinate each other.

Now, onto the birthday ideas. :) So, I had it in my head that trees were expensive, like $50 a pop or more. But I was looking around online, and found arborday.org, and they have some pretty inexpensive trees for sale. I was thrilled.

Black Tartarian Cherry - $13.96
Dwarf Bing Cherry - $13.98
Dwarf Belle of Georgia Peach - $12.98
Dwarf Methley Plum - $12.98
Silver Linden - $6.98

Those are the member prices, but it's only $10 to become a member, and if you become a member they will send you 10 FREE trees. I so want to become a member! They pick the kind of trees, but you can pick a group. For example, you can pick to receive 10 Flowering Trees, or 10 Autumn Splendor Trees, or 10 Pine Trees, or whatever, there are about 10 different kinds of groups you can pick from. Cool! Even if I didn't plant the 10 free trees in my own yard, it would be fun to give them to friends and family, or donate them to the city, or whatever.

After finding those first few, I still had 2 spots for fruit trees planned in the yard, but I had to go to a different site to find some more self-pollinating trees. I found gurneys.com and on their site they have my last two trees.

Semi-Dwarf Honeysweet Pear - $24.99
2-in-1 Double Delicious Apple - $34.99

Anyways, this year for my birthday, I want trees. I'm so excited about it, I can hardly sit still!

Snow Day

I sent the boys out to play in the snow a few days ago. I think they enjoyed themselves. They stayed out there happily for about an hour.

House Updates

Meet house #4. Built in 2011, it's 2340 sqft with 5 beds 3 baths (2 full, 1 half), formal living room, family room, dining room, kitchen, and upstairs laundry room. Lot size .23, I'm ready to move in already. :)

The house faces north. To the east is a corn field. To the south are two empty lots that haven't been built on yet. To the west and across the street are other houses, so we'd have some neighbors too.

Best of all this one is NOT a short sale. That doesn't mean it's a done deal or anything, but at least we'll be able to hear back a lot sooner.

Update on house #3, the owners decided that they didn't want to short sale it anymore. So instead of accepting our offer, the caught the payments up, and are going from there. So pretty much, house #3 is out. But we'll still call this new one house #4 just to minimize confusion. 

Valentines Day... Not Perfect, But Still Good

If I lived in a picture perfect world, Valentines Day might look something like waking up to a spotlessly clean house and breakfast in bed. My children would all dress themselves, in cute, clean outfits, where the pants and shirts matched, because they'd know I wanted them to look good for pictures. (And I'd have the photography skills to make them look good, too!) They would play together nicely and calmly all morning while I did some baking and dinner preparations. Aaron would come home early with a gorgeous bouquet of flowers. We'd all sit down to a five star dinner, the children would be polite and make nice conversation. No one would spill anything. Then they'd run off happily to bed without a fight. Aaron and I would enjoy a wonderful romantic evening without any interruptions. And to top it off, the dish-fairy would come and make all the dirty dinner dishes disappear. Sounds good, eh?

Well, in real life my kids all got up way too early. They didn't dress themselves, and since they're still fighting colds, they have snot constantly running down their faces and drying there. I didn't ever get around to doing Adelia's hair and I couldn't find the cute outfits I wanted them to wear anyway. My house was a disaster area, like we probably should have put up caution tape. And while I was baking and trying to get things ready for dinner, I kept having to pause to do things like: mop up the floor after a child spilled the container of prune juice (why do we even HAVE prune juice, I'd like to know! Something to do with kids helping with shopping...), pick up an entire bowl of popcorn someone spilled (ya, this was after I mopped once already), break up fights, change the laundry, scrub out a pair of poopy underwear and bathe a child because he didn't make it to the bathroom fast enough, and so on. I never got around to putting up cute decorations. I never got around to dipping the strawberries I bought in chocolate. I never even got around to writing a card for Aaron. After the kids went to bed, Aaron and I folded laundry to make room on the bed, then I fell asleep while he gave himself a hair cut. We didn't even drink the sparkling cider that I actually remembered to put in the fridge yesterday so it would be cold. And I stopped believing in the dish-fairy years ago.

But you know what? I had a wonderful Valentines Day. My house was messy, but my husband made us a wonderful breakfast of grits and cinnamon rolls. He even made the grits into a heart shape. There were a lot of things I wanted to do that didn't get done, but I did do a lot of the things I wanted. I tried a new recipe and made a FABULOUS three layer Black Forest Cherry Cake from scratch, whipping cream and all. The dishes didn't disappear, but we ate an excellent steak dinner, with homemade steak fries, and a hand tossed salad. The kids weren't angels all day, it's true, but they were impressed with the Kool-Aide heart-shaped ice cubes I made for them to put in their Sprite at dinner. My husband didn't come home early, but he didn't come home late either, and he did surprise me with a very large bouquet of beautiful red roses that smell heavenly. We didn't have what some people might call a particularly romantic evening, but after 11 days of Aaron on a business trip, I'm so happy to have him home that, yes, even folding laundry together is good enough for me. 

President Uchtdorf said at the First Presidency Christmas Devotional, “We have in our minds a picture of how everything should be—the perfect tree, the perfect lights, the perfect gifts, and the perfect family events. … [But] sooner or later, something unpleasant occurs … and the picture-perfect Christmas we had imagined, the magic we had intended to create, shatters around us.” He was talking about Christmas, obviously, but I think we can apply this to all kinds of holidays and life events. So often, I find that I do have a picture-perfect image of how I think something should go. But things rarely ever come out looking like a Halmark card, ya know? When I focus on everything that went wrong, the things that prohibited me from obtaining the picture-perfect whatever-it-is, I have a really hard time seeing all the things that went right.

And so, I'm glad I had a minute to think about this Valentines Day. I'm glad it wasn't perfect, and I'm even more glad that I could recognize the good things that happened, and still come to the conclusion that it was an over-all good day. I'll stop yapping now, and share my very unprofessional photographs of the event. :)

House #3 and Stuff

Aaron left Wednesday morning at about 3:30am. Yuck. We've been trying to keep ourselves busy around here.

I've mentioned our Do-A-Dots before...we still love them. Even Adelia. In this picture, she had purple Do-A-Dot all over her face. For kids that won't color with crayons, they sure spent a lot of time with these Do-A-Dots. Maybe it's all about finding the right medium?

Lincoln has been taking swimming lessons since the middle of January. He loves it, and I love that he has a place to channel his unlimited amount of energy. We go to his lessons twice a week. Aaron and I decided that swimming is an awesome life skill. For one, it's good exercise, so even if he somehow manages to not learn a single, solitary thing, he's at least getting exercise. For two, it's likely that he will learn to swim, and that is a handy skill to have. For three, if he really likes it and keeps going with it, it could lead to potential job opportunities for him in high school, like life-guarding or teaching swimming. Both of those would keep him out of the fast-food industry, and he probably wouldn't have to work on Sundays (if we still live in UT by then). But, if nothing else, it gives him an opportunity two times a week to go and learn something from someone else and to have a "classroom" ish, type experience. So ya, we'll keep doing swimming until he gets tired of it. In fact, since Ivan turns 3 in the middle of next session, he'll be starting lessons soon too. He's very excited.

This isn't a great picture, Lincoln is the one in the middle. That day in class they were learning how to get around the water in life jackets.

One day, I sent Linc into my bedroom for quiet time, while I put the other two down for naps. Usually, once the other two are sleeping, I'll go in and read a chapter or two out of our read-a-loud chapter book with Lincoln an then leave him to the rest of his quiet time. But when I poked my head in, this is what I saw.

I guess he was in the act of playing with the head lamp and fell asleep? I don't know, but he was totally out. He doesn't look very comfy though. :)

Friday, I met with our realtor (by myself!) and went to look at another house in Springville.

5 beds
3 baths (2 full, 1 half)
3600 sqft
.28 acre yard
built in 2007

I took a lot of pictures for Aaron, and tried to draw up a floor plan for him. My floor plan is not even close to scale, but you can get the gist of it.

The inside wasn't anything fancy, the walls were all plain white, the kitchen floor was linoleum, the carpet was low grade...but the walls and appliances and all that seemed to be in good condition. No gaping holes, no glaring paint, etc. I really like it. I think it has a lot of potential for us to make it ours. The floor plan is awesome, and there is so much space! And it has a big yard, and is within a 5 minute drive of Aaron's work. I think as far as floor plan and amount of space, and yard go, this one is my favorite. The location isn't as good as the other two, and I don't like the look of the outside of the house as much as the other two. But those seem like little things to me.

Anyways, we put in an offer. It's another short sale, so we'll see. The hunt continues.

Friday night, after stopping in Orem to put in the offer, we drove up to Hooper to spend a long weekend with my Mom and Kerry and Tanner. I always love going to Hooper.

This go around, my mom got me sucked into doing a fun Valentine craft using wood blocks, scrap book paper, mod podge, vinyl letters, and ribbon. When you're all done, you have four wood blocks tied together with ribbon and they say the word LOVE using a heart for the O. I was just going to help her make all the sets she was making for people, but then we were having so much fun with it, and I wanted to keep experimenting with different styles and colors, so Saturday morning we went to a construction site and took a bunch of their junk two by fours out of the dumpster. I ended up making 7 sets of blocks. Between me, my mom, and our friend Susan, we ended up making, I think, 24 sets of LOVE blocks. And I still have more ideas I like to try out on them, but we'll have to wait for another day.

The kids had a good time in Hooper too. We got them started on making their Valentines. My kids are nuts for glitter glue and stickers, so that's what their Valentines are going to be made out of this year.

My mom also gave the kids much needed hair cuts. Ivan was so funny/frustrating. He wasn't upset about having his hair cut, but he wanted Lincoln to go first, and when we couldn't find Lincoln and tried to cut Ivan's hair first, he had a complete and total melt down. And since you really can't cut a child's hair in the middle of a full-blown, arms flailing, feet kicking melt down, we didn't have much of a choice but to go find Lincoln and cut his hair first. Then Ivan calmed right down and was really good for his hair cut. Especially after Gramma Tam gave him the squirt bottle to squirt in his mouth while she did it. Anyways, that's why my mom starts laughing in the video when Ivan says he likes hair cuts.

One of the afternoons, I was sitting at my mom's computer checking my email. The sun was shining in through the window, so I couldn't see the screen very well. I stood up and shut the blinds half way, until a shadow was over the monitor, but the blinds were covering the window all the way so there was still sun shining in. I guess when I moved the blinds, it kicked up some of the dust on them, but I didn't think much about it, and sat back down at the computer. Lincoln walked in the room, and said, "Mom! What's that!", I was only half paying attention, so I said, "I don't know." without turning around. Lincoln stops and thinks for a minute, and then in a really quiet and excited voice he says, "I know what it is...those are Molly-Q's! Usually they're too small to see, but I can see 'em! I can see the Molly-Q's! Look Mom! Turn around and look at the Molly-Q's." I'm wondering what in the world he's talking about at this point, so I turn around and look. He's standing stiff as a board and staring wide-eyed at the dust particles that are floating around in the beam of sunlight. It dawns on me, that he thinks the dust particles are molecules. And I start laughing and try to explain that they aren't, that they're just dust. But he was 100% convinced that he could see molecules. 

Here's a couple pictures of the kids that my mom sent me from when she came down and stayed with them while Aaron and I went to see Brian Regan.