Free carpet...sort of.

Griffin really is much happier than this pouty face would indicate

For anyone who has been to my home, you'll probably remember the carpet in our basement. It's disgusting. Purchasing a home that was repossessed has its risks, and for us the risk was nasty carpet in the basement. Landon and I have been talking about frugal ways to re-vamp that basement ever since we moved in, but inspiration struck back in August when we were visiting my family. My mom told me about this calico-carpet thing that her mother had done a few times when my mom was a kid. It sounded fun and interesting, but best of all: it was cheap. The idea is basically to take carpet remnants and cut them into squares then create a patchwork carpet using carpet glue. When I describe it like that, it sounds like a really straightforward one-day job. Not so.

We spent several weekends searching for just the right free carpet, endured several carpet salesmen looking at us like we were crazy, spent several more weekends tracing and cutting carpet into squares, and then a few days gluing it all onto our existing carpet. Then it took me a while (I am embarrassed to admit how long) to muster the determination to finish off all of the little oddly-shaped pieces around the edge of the room.

So now, after more than a month of work, I am happy to debut the finished carpet here on the blog. I am really proud of how this turned out. And I am even happier with the price. If anyone wants to do this type of thing my recommendation is to give yourself a month of work time, and buy the biggest tub of carpet glue available (it's worth it, if only to save yourself four different trips to Home Depot).

A belated BOO!

I realize that I'm very late in posting this picture. And I realize that all of Landon's family has seen these costumes before. But I feel that these costumes are cool enough for a repeat, and cool enough to make up for my delayed posting.

In case you are not an avid Pixar fan, we're characters from The Incredibles (Elasti-girl, Jack-Jack, and Syndrome). One of our friends told us, "It's weird to see Elasti-girl fraternizing with Syndrome." When you think about it, though, Syndrome is a way cooler costume than Mr. Incredible. Plus, I don't think Landon would have been excited about wearing red spandex.

Funnily enough, Landon's cape got caught in the door on our way out:

"NO CAPES!"

Snow Day!!

Growing up in Arizona, I never experienced the childhood pleasure of a snow day. The closest I ever came was one day when the power to our high school went out. I remember that day as possibly the coolest day of my adolescence: board games, movies, ice cream, etc... I suppose it wasn't the activities of the day, but just the unexpected liberation that really made it fantastic. Anyway, in my mind snow days always had a somewhat mystical appeal.

Last week a snow storm rolled through and dropped 14-18 inches of snow over the course of 2 days. Because of the road conditions, Landon decided to work from home. In my mind all of my imagined "snow day" dreams were about to come true. I was really excited that as an adult I was finally going to get a snow day. My list of snow day expectations was as follows: hot chocolate, popcorn, blankets, movies, crackling fire, warm socks. Unfortunately, my imagination did not include the fact that "working from home" actually meant that Landon had to work. To his credit, Landon didn't get frustrated when I kept interrupting with things like, "Hey I was thinking about Christmas ideas and..." or "I'm rethinking our plans for that basement bedroom and..." or "What do you think about hanging curtains in Griffin's bedroom?" or "Remember that one time when..."

Truthfully, my mind is normally jumping around mundanities like that, but Landon typically isn't here to vocalize all of these thoughts to. It took me a while to muster the self-control to allow him to work in peace. So my snow day, in reality, was much more similar to a regular day than I expected. It just meant that I got to eat lunch with Landon.....ok, ok, so we took a hot chocolate and popcorn break too.