Birthday!

Last Saturday, Ree (aka Jewel aka Rebecca aka our oldest child) turned 7. Seven years old. Sheesh, she's getting old. To celebrate, she requested a party at her dance studio.

Sidewalk chalk drawings and a sign welcomed our guests.

Different rooms in the studio were set up for eating, doing crafts, and, of course, dancing. The day before, Ree and I went to the decorate the studio, and when we got in the car, she had a large mixing bowl filled with pink paper. She had taken Victoria's Secret tissue paper and turned it into confetti to decorate the table. Clearly, there are glue guns in my daughter's future.

One of the high school girls who takes lessons at the studio was the helper for the party. She also performed a solo from Sleeping Beauty for the party goers to watch. Ree got to watch her rehearse.

The first "guests" to arrive were her siblings, and Leon and Michael were quick to join in the dancing.

As everyone arrived, they got to put on costumes.

The teacher led everyone through a short ballet class, and Leon and Michael disappeared when the ballet began. Throughout the party, we found them in various rooms of the studio, always playing Angry Birds.

Natalia, though, loved every minute of the class and did her best to follow along doing everything "Jewel" did.

After they finished dancing, it was time for pizza, followed by crafts.

Finally, it was time for cake. Ree had looked at cakes online, and she fell in love with a pale pink cake covered in marshmallows. We did our best to recreate her vision. (In doing so, we learned that Target marshmallows are not remotely uniform in size. And that perhaps we shouldn't decorate the cake 90 minutes before the party. There was also an incident with the original batch of strawberry buttercream frosting that will not be discussed. What you see is a proud work of chemicals held together with Crisco and sugar. (Did I mention the underlying cake was a boxed red velvet cake loaded in dye?) Disturbing as it is, the kids, of course, loved it!)

After cake, there was more dancing. And no party is complete until someone teaches Dad how to do ballet.

Ree's Room - Planning

Now that we have a functioning dryer again (heating element was broken due to overuse/abuse), we are hopefully done with home repair. That means it's time to move on to home improvement!

First up on the desperately needed home improvement list is Ree's room. She is getting a serious upgrade because:

• She has always hated the color of her room. She is turning 7 this week and has lived in the room for over 4 years. I feel kinda bad making her spend over half her life in a room that doesn't make her happy.
• Her ceiling fan is broken. You either get the fan and the light or nothing. This means she can't sleep with just the fan on in the summer, and it's a bit drafty in there in the winter if you want to see after dark.
• She is allergic to the carpeting. The previous owners had a cat that slept in there, and I've never been able to get all the dander out of the carpet.
• She is still sleeping in a toddler bed. As petite as she may be, this got to be silly about a year ago. At this point, it is getting to be borderline ridiculous.
• We are (finally! hopefully!) moving Natalia in there this fall, and we thought we would at least make the room nice before Ree is stuck with her little sister in "her" space.

Our first step is painting. A few weeks ago, Ree and I stopped at Lowe's, and she instantly fell in love with a line of paint for kids' rooms. She went home with a big stack of paint chips in really bright colors. I didn't think much of it, but that afternoon she spent a lot of time in her room. Around dinner she emerged with this sheet.

If you can't tell, the sheet has four columns, each with a theme and four colors of paint listed. She had decided to paint a different scene on each wall of her room. She then went through the paint chips and narrowed down the color scheme. She proudly told me, "We only need seven colors of paint!" Oh boy. I do have to give her credit in that they at least look pretty good together.

Since then there have been a few discussions with her on the cost of paint and what we can realistically accomplish. Last weekend we stopped by Lowe's again to get samples of four of the colors. I think we've narrowed it down to painting two walls fuschia and two walls royal blue with light pink accents, white trim, and white bunk beds. I am hoping the light pink and white break all the color!

A Tale of Two Siblings

My parents are visiting, and Natalia decided to take advantage of my mother on her first night in town. At bath time she led my mom into the kids' bathroom and acted like she takes a bath there every night. She doesn't - the kids always bathe in our bathroom which has more space and a bigger bathtub. Natalia also tends to run around when eating if not buckled into her booster seat, and we've spent all week fighting with her about this. (She was given many attempts to prove she is ready to sit on her bottom and eat in a big girl chair, and she failed miserably every time.) Still, at snack time tonight she informed my mom, "I eat in big girl chair." Natalia can be a sneaky little thing!

And then there is Michael. The kids had watermelon for snack tonight, and after snack there were a few slices left on the cutting board. My plan was to put them away after the kids went to bed, and I didn't pay much attention to the leftovers as I ran back and forth through the house trying to wrangle everyone to their rooms. At one point Mike stopped me and pointed out that one of the slices was actually mostly eaten. The cutting board was on the edge of the counter, and I assumed Nati ate it, and if not her, then possibly Leon. The following conversation then took place.

Me: (Casually) So who do you think ate it?
Mike: I don't know.
Me: Come on. Think about it. Who would sneak watermelon off the counter.
Mike: Um...(really long pause)...um...Leon?
Me: Maybe. Who else would do it?
Mike: Nati?
Me: I think she might do something like that.

I started to comment about Ree probably not being guilty when he interrupted me.

Mike: It was an accident! I was still hungry!
Me: (Confused) Wait? You ate it?
Mike: It was an accident! I was still hungry!

The poor child was almost in tears, and I was at just the right level of exhaustion to find this absolutely hilarious. I had to very carefully tell Mike that I was proud of him for telling the truth and that next time he should have a grown up help him if he wants more to eat. And then we discussed how awesome that watermelon was.

Lesson learned: In her junior high and high school years, Natalia is definitely sharing a room with Michael.

Home Repairs

We've lived in our house for a little over four years. Amazingly, in the first three years we had to deal with no major home repair, and aside from the usual clogged sinks and leaky toilets, almost no maintenance. It's like the universe took pity on us. After all, when we moved in, Ree was the same age that Natalia is now..

...and my little men were only five months old.

We moved in May, and by mid-July we had made two week-long trips to Ohio with the whole family so that we could go to weddings. Clearly, we were nuts. So nuts, in fact, that within two years we added another little munchkin to our bunch.

During Natalia's first year, we went through our first hurricane and thought we lost a tree (it's as big as ever, two years later) but the house was still fine. Apparently our honeymoon/grace period ended last summer. It started with us having an emergency heat pump replacement. That was followed with a refrigerator that started dying at Halloween and was replaced by Thanksgiving. Within a week of the new refrigerator being delivered, our oven started acting funny, and we replaced the heating element in it just in time for me to bake Christmas cookies. (Funny Natalia moment of the new refrigerator saga: The new ice maker is quite loud. You can hear it dump ice and about two minutes later you can hear water fill the ice trays again. For the first few days we had to stop what we were doing every time this occurred to discuss the ice making process.)

Things were quiet for awhile, but two weeks ago our air conditioner went out. Again. Thankfully this time we just had to have a wireless thermostat installed, rather than replacing a heat pump. And we were only out of our house for 3 days instead of a week. And instead of staying at my parents' apartment 20 minutes away, we were able to stay at their house 10 minutes away. Not to mention, the repair guy was nice enough to leave us a large, portable window unit so we could at least keep the main part of the house cool for the dogs while we ran back and forth between houses. (Funny Natalia moment of the most recent air conditioner saga: For the first few days back in our house every time the air conditioner turned on she cheered, "Yay! Air conditioner works!" and every time it cycled off, she got very concerned.)

We've been down to one toilet since April or May, and staying at my parents' house helped us remember the beauty of having two toilets for six people. Plus we really ought to potty train Natalia one of these days, and it would be very helpful to have two toilets for that oh-so-fun process. So I went toilet shopping. (Jeff had already spent several hours working on the existing toilet when it first stopped working to no avail.) The new toilet was installed last Wednesday, and, inevitably, there was fighting and tears over who got to use it first. (Michael took the honors, Leon was "very sad" about the outcome.) Interestingly, it has gotten little use since then. We aren't sure if the kids are forgetting we have it or if they are afraid of it. (Funny Natalia moment of the toilet saga: On Wednesday night I asked her if the plumber had been to the house. Her response was, "No, just the toilet guy.")

Because we were obviously bored, yesterday Jeff got to spend a couple of hours battling a fully clogged sink. He eventually plunged it, and now it's working better than it ever has. (I never would've thought to plunge a sink. Thank you, eHow.) Today I was in the midst of battling a trashcan that STANK of dead fish despite it having a clean bag in it and us not having real fish (i.e. not canned tuna) for weeks when I discovered the dryer wasn't actually drying clothes. I then spent an hour cleaning out the lint filter, pulling the thing out from the wall (it has a storage drawer underneath which is wonderful, except when you need to pull it out from the wall), disconnecting it and cleaning it, and then putting it all back together. No luck. And having just seen something yesterday about half of home fires being started by dryers, I took that as a sign to leave it alone and call in a professional. So now we will wait for our dryer to get fixed. I would really like to just skip to the funny Natalia moment of this saga. And hope for no more home repair sagas, at least for a good, long time.