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.

A few of his favorite things

Sure, raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens are just fine, but Griffin has a few favorite things he wants to add to Frauline Maria's famous list.

Spiderman toy
carpet lint
empty soda bottles
giant flashlights
watching mom brush her teeth
a package of earplugs (unused, of course)
chewing on flip flops
his teddy bear, Radar (thanks, Spencer)
pictures of himself
a wet washcloth
blowing raspberries
"helping" with dishes
open cupboards
drooling on mom's phone
unrolling toilet paper

Italy pictures

These are some of the favorite pictures from Rome. We spent three days in Rome and saw everything as quickly as we could. But even with our grueling touristic pace, we felt like we could have spent 10 days there and not seen everything we wanted to.

Truthfully, our trip could not have been better. We stayed at a marvelous bed and breakfast inside Rome's city wall. The guy who ran the B&B spoke something like 5 languages fluently. When we acted impressed he simply said, "What kind of a host would I be if I could not visit with all of my guests?"

And, of course, Griffin was a prince in Rome. LOTS of little Italian women (and men) made kissy faces at him as we walked by. One cute little lady we sat next to on the metro even gave him a saint medalion thing (I know there is an actual term for these but I can't think of it.)

Anyway, it was a fantastic city and an amazing end to our Europe excursion! Landon's favorite thing to say as we walked around was, "Can you just imagine this when it was in it's heyday!?" He said it so often that I started to recognize when he was even thinking of saying it.

Truthfully, now that we've been home for a while I've blogged less and taken way fewer pictures. I feel somehow a little less interesting in Denver, but I'll still try to keep the posts coming, you'll just have to forgive me if I'm slightly boring.

Prodigal Sleep

Since we've been back from Europe, Griffin has not once slept through the night. I know, I know, this could be considered my just desserts after all of the bragging I did about his early sleeping patterns. This could also be the price I pay for neglecting to give him a consistent environment for nearly one-third of his life thus far. Whatever your theory, this situation has been taxing, to say the least. There have been many nights where I've rocked a silent pattern of self-pity in the rocking chair as I tried to put Griffin back to bed, and many days where I've complained a not-so-silent whine of indignance to my family.

You may recall the biblical story of the prodigal son and the accompanying parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin. (I realize that this seems like a tangent, but trust me, I'm bringing it full circle) At the end of each of these parables the owner/parent/shepard of the lost coin/son/sheep call all of their friends to celebrate the restoration of something that once was lost.

And so today, my dear friends, I ask you to celebrate with me the return of my lost sleep. Last night Griffin slept for eight full hours in a row! Sweet, indulgent, eight hours. When he woke up at 5:30 this morning I could have clicked my heels. Hoorah for Griffin!! And Hoorah for me!!

Oh and yes, I still need to post pictures from our Italy trip, I'll do that soon.

Recommitted

Ok, folks! I've been back for nearly a month now and sadly haven't posted one darn thing. I've got pictures of our trip to Italy still to post, plus a little international quizlet for you all, but for now I'll start with a sumary of the last month.

First point of interest: jetlag is a monster. Griffin is still recovering from it...which of course means that Landon and I are still recovering as well. Poor baby doesn't know which way is up.

We got back into Denver on August 8th and spent a week here letting Griffin readjust to his home environment, before we confused him yet again with another plane trip, this time to Arizona. Griffin loved hanging out with my family, especially his Grandpa Griffin...I think that was because my dad kept feeding him cookies on the sly, plus he let Girffin play with his cowboy hat. I guess that's what Grandpas are for, right?

Then we came back to Denver for a few more days, just in time for Griffin to be really confused when we took off for Utah to visit with Landon's family. We had a great time getting to see Griffin interact with all of his cousins, and hosting a Greek party for Landon's family: gyros all around!!

Now if you're considering calling me a cruel mother for dragging my poor kid all over the place and neglecting to give him a consistent environment, trust me, I'm with you all the way. When we purchased these plane tickets it seemed like a great idea to visit family after we got back to the U.S. The logic being, of course, that we hadn't seen them in several months and Griffin was bound to grow up during that time. Would it not also be cruel to the grandparents to withhold their grandson from them? At least, these were our thoughts when we purchased the tickets.

Not that I'm having any regrets about visiting family. We really had a fabulous time. But perhaps it would have been a little wiser to space our travel out a bit. As it is, I'm sure that Griffin assumes that any day now we're going to pack up and move again. Hopefully, he'll get into a more consistent rhythm now that we are finally back in Denver for good. We've decided that we are not doing any traveling until Christmas time. So if you want to see us, you'll have to mosey on over our way because this rolling stone is kaput and ready to start gathering a little moss...but not too much moss, that might cramp my style.