Caught up! For like, 3 days anyway. I also forgot to take pictures for most of this week somehow, despite having done this for 326 WEEKS in a row.

Sunday:

You can’t tell, but this is the clean version of this closet

All of these are going to Goodwill

Monday:

You know the world is ending because I drank this and I liked it.

Linc took this without my knowledge

My little star

Tuesday:

Watching the big kids

Super pleased with his first time being wrapped on my back

Tired terror

Wednesday:

Look, I don’t have poop on my hand!

Love

Working on their BFF status

Thursday:

Before

After!

Another cute picture ruined by barf

Friday:

Somehow the only photo I took all day

Saturday:

Tiny dancer

Super Lincy to the rescue

This week feels absolutely endless and it’s only half over. I’m starting to run out of things to organize that will make me feel like I’m accomplishing stuff. I’m going to have to move on to rearranging furniture and painting walls. It’s pretty serious.

Happy Thanksgiving! I’m a little late and fully into Christmas mode now, which is my favorite part of the year. I’d like to just live in the 4 weeks before Christmas forever. We had friends here for the holiday and it was so, so great. They did so much work/child entertaining that it felt like a vacation instead of hosting.

Sunday:

Super excited to give this to Evan for Christmas

The extent of my Thanksgiving decorating

Sibling cuddles

Monday:

First snow!

Linc likes “helping”

Hello cutie

Tuesday:

Making his Christmas list

The most beautiful wrap in the world

Sunset = same time as bus pick up

Wednesday:

Shop til you drop

Don’t even care what they watch as long as they’re quite for 20 minutes

Thursday:

Men doing manly turkey frying

Potato masher

Caroline is the quality control department

Friday:

Black Friday Hanna shopping

Linc was SO into decorating, it was adorable

More gingerbread building

Saturday:

Christmas tree hunter

Small town adorable parade

Tree is up!

For the record, I am still sick. It’s now been 4 weeks with the cough, that has now become a sinus infection, most likely an ear infection and a weird painful bump on the roof of my mouth the internet tells me is probably related. I’m almost desperate enough to go to the doctor, although I’m still 90% sure they’ll say “it’s a virus, nothing we can do”. Maybe just MAKING an appointment will scare the virus into going away. I’m pretty sure that’s how viruses work.

Our big (ugly) family room couch is one of those sausage-casing monstrosities, where all the cushions are attached, with built-in recliners and cup holders. It’s truly hideous. But while we’re in the “Oh my god where did you get that yogurt?!” stage of children, there’s no point in having NICE furniture, so I settled for comfy and functional in a beige color that hides dirt.

The biggest problem with that kind of couch (besides ugly) is that it’s pretty useless when it comes to couch forts, and couch forts are an essential part of childhood. Luckily, when I was trying to fancy-up our living room last year I found a nice mini-sized couch that a) is also a good dirt-hiding shade of beige and b) has two nice huge cushions that make an excellent fort wall. The kids LOVE that couch – it’s the perfect size for them to spread out and watch iPad, set up all the dolls into elaborate tableaus or just climb all over while they hit each other with lightsabers. Lovingly, obviously. Lovingly hit each other with lightsabers.

I got an email from Wayfair saying they put together some super cute sofa fort plans and asking if my kids would be interested in building one. They even sent a super cozy Lush throw blanket to get us started. Check out their fun ideas:

We chose the Dreadship Blanket and got to work rearranging the furniture, finding supplies and collecting throw blankets and pillows.

Real life talk: This is what passes for “super clean and organized” in our living/play room. It’s half grown-up, finished space (art! mirrored table! fireplace! throw pillows!) and half kid zone (toys! more toys! even more toys!!!). Please ignore the photobombing cat.

And here’s what happened when we created our own Dreadship Blanket:

We left the fort up for a week before I wanted my living room back for a grown up event, but pretty much any time they want to rebuild a couch fort I’m on board. It’s the kind of fun, creative, independent play that ends up with about 80% cooperation and only 20% screaming at each other. In case you don’t have multiple kids, those are REALLY good percentages.

Thank you again Wayfair for the fun idea!

My house is sort of a disaster right now. There’s a two foot tall turkey made from a paper bag left over from Thanksgiving that I can’t throw away because Caroline is in love with it. There’s a bright orange toddler slide the kids keep dragging in from the porch. There’s a broken camera in five pieces on the kitchen island. And the dining room (a.k.a. Party Central) looks like a winter candy cane forest wonderland threw up on it.

But Mandy posted some adorable pictures of her adorable home decorated for Christmas and I wanted to play along. I love seeing people’s decorations in real life versus the ones in the Pottery Barn catalog, which basically just makes me want to give up on life.  My decor this year is a mix of stuff I put up every Christmas and stuff that’s already up for Caroline’s birthday. The party stuff will probably be up until February because I hate putting so much effort into decorating for just ONE DAY. I realize the solution to that problem is to just not put so much effort into decorating, but I am not entirely rational when it comes to holidays/birthdays.

This is Mr. Bear. I won him one year when I worked at Target for getting the most customer compliment cards. I used to think he was hideous and tacky but I sort of love him now.

What do you think? Are my halls thoroughly decked?

Confession: I’ve taken the “before” pictures for this makeover no less than five different times. Every time I walk through the living room (which is every time I go upstairs or check the mail) I am underwhelmed by its boringness and uselessness. We live in an old house, designed for formal entertaining (you can see the house tour here, although we’ve changed almost every room since then) which is fantastic when it comes to throwing parties but not so great for every day life. We don’t use the front door and we almost never use the dining room, so the front of the house has become a catch-all for junk. There isn’t even a couch in the living room – the free one I got off Craigslist went out with the trash before Evan’s 1st birthday and I haven’t found something I like/can afford. Which means for the last year (and then some), our living room has looked like this:

I know it was built for afternoon teas and dinner parties, but living in half our house is stupid – why feel cramped when we have an extra 300+ square feet of EMPTY SPACE to spread out in? And why do I keep insisting on using it as a FORMAL living room, when almost none of our living is formal?

So my mission was two fold:
1. Make our living room both more functional and more fun and
2. Don’t spend any money

Enter Pinterest.

{handprint art, chalkboard table, bright colored room, fabric garland, covered canvas, button letter}

And here’s how it looks now:

Breakdown:
-I bought the canvases from Michael’s when they were on sale AND I had a coupon, to save for a day when I was feeling creative. The striped ones are tissue paper attached with spray adhesive.
-All the paint, felt and ribbons are from previous projects, especially Caroline’s Nursery.
-The bright colored pillow covers are from Life’s Candy, my wonderful friend Mae’s shop. I relocated them from our entrance bench.
-The fabric on the garland was tablecloths at Little Evan’s 2nd birthday.
-The plates are straight up dinner plates from our cabinet, purchased at Walmart in 2001.
6. The empty frame was in our basement.
7. I bought the vases at Target for $3.24 each back in March to fill in the empty mantle.
8. The coffee table was in the basement, the blue chair was in the attic and the toys were in the toy box.

Since the coffee table is black you can’t really see the chalkboard paint unless I’ve drawn on it, so all it takes is a quick swipe with a damp paper towel and we have our grown-up piece of furniture back. The baskets underneath neatly hide all the toys and the chalk.

So paint, buttons, fabric, and some repurposing turned our boring wasted space into a cute, usable room. Now I just need to find a small couch, some big comfy floor pillows and a DVD player for that TV and we might actually start spending some time in there!

Of course I finished this just in time to change it all again for Christmas. Maybe we’ll go with a rainbow theme for the holidays this year.