can you believe it?

He's here.

A leap year baby!

Born February 29th at 5:52pm.

Both he and my sister are doing wonderfully, and I get to see them both later today! :) Amazing.

One of the best parts is my sister labored at my house for almost the whole day. Not a best part because she labored all day. Best part because it was here. It was such a blessing to get to share that with her. This is the eighth baby between the two of us and we have never been together when either of us has been in labor. So, this was new. And precious. I got to time her contractions and write them on our chalkboard door.





When I took that picture I thought, "I'm never going to get rid of this door." Being with her all day really meant a lot to me. It was a beautiful day... crazy warm. So, we let the children play outside on the driveway with chalk and scooters while I held Baby and Sissy sat in a folding chair... in early labor. SweetP asked to play around with Hipstamatic on my phone. I'm so glad I said yes!




The very last tummy shot!

When Heather left my house, her contractions were still 10 minutes apart, but very regular and pretty stinkin uncomfortable. I buckled her girls in their carseats, we waited until a contraction finished, and then she headed across the neighborhood to her house to put them down for naps. I wondered if that was a good plan... but it all turned out okay. She called me not long after - maybe an hour later - to tell me she had just called our parents and they were on their way. Half an hour after that (with mom and dad en route) she called to say she couldn't wait for them and asked me to come over so they could go to the hospital. So, all 5 kids and I loaded into the van faster than lightning and excitedly drove over. Two hours after that, my brother-in-law called to tell me I was Mimi all over again. This time to a precious, perfect little BOY :)

Babies are so wonderful, aren't they?

Pictures coming as soon as I can get my hands on his soft little newborn baby body.

Love. Love. Love.

****************************************************************


And now, for a little of my own sweet baby.

Girl has been waking up at night lately. Like she's ready for solids. Trouble is, she pretty much HATED the rice cereal I attempted to give her.









Not a success.

So, we're troubleshooting. And waking up. On this night, she was up at midnight...








More iPhone pics. I know. Grainy. Poor focus. Bad quality.

But, I love these.

Snuggle bug.

Linking up to Emily :)






p.s. house update coming very, very soon - for realz!

dear, sweet color wheel (nerdy post)

You should know I've been studying, again. And I get nerdy with my posts when I've been studying. This is about to put over half of you (silent goobers) to sleep before the second paragraph. So, maybe you should just skip it if the words "color" and "theory" spoken together make you want to head for the hills. I'll have pictures of the baby tomorrow for you instead.

Consider yourself advised.

I've been thinking about color... again. Specifically, the glorious color wheel. More specifically, about whether or not I'm still an analogous color girl. Analogous colors are the colors right beside one another on the color wheel. Depending on how detailed the color wheel is, they're color combinations like blue paired with green or like red paired with orange.

Source: Uploaded by user via Lelle on Pinterest

Analogous colors are besties named Ana and Gus. They're always side by side. There, now you'll always remember what analogous colors are if you didn't already know! Well, I've always liked analogous color schemes... especially in muted tones of the colors. A tone is any color/hue of the spectrum with gray added. I (nearly) always choose paint colors from the grays or neutrals. That's where you go to get subtle blues, greens, purples, anything.

Source: aussiescrapsource.typepad.com via Jacci on Pinterest

Isn't that beautiful?

That smallest inner ring would be my go-to for wall color - except for white, of course. So, see? Not pure colors. Slate instead of blue. My favorite colors are kind of nondescript. Is that gray or green or blue? The best answer is, yes!

apartment therapy

But, as I've been thinking more lately, this whole subtle-analogous-tones-of-color thing really only pertains to the color foundations of a room for me. The walls... the floors... the window treatments... the major furnishings. I like those things to be fairly neutral and fairly analogous... usually. (Wood floors would be an exception, but then rugs bring the floor color back into play). I like them to be shades or tones instead of purer hues...usually. And in this house I like them to be light in value. Very light in value. Value is how dark or light a color appears due to how much light it reflects. That inner ring is high in value. Pale pink is high in value... deep red is low in value. Like the colors on a paint strip... the ones at the top are higher value and the ones at the bottom are lower. There isn't a lot of natural light going on in most of our rooms (roof overhang... didn't count on that one), so we have to make up for it with higher value walls. Low value/dark colors would... and did... make it feel like a CAVE.

Lonny mag

I'm all settled on everything color-wise up to this point. But, then we get to accent colors and I'm still learning about myself. I used to think I liked the accent colors to be fairly analogous, too, like the foundations. If the walls were blue gray, for instance, I liked the accent colors to be within some part of the blue range. Or maybe one hue over on the wheel... green. But, definitely not waaaaaaaay over on the opposite side of the wheel. Like - orange! Eeek.

I don't have those same opinions anymore. It may be a phase, but right now the very FIRST accent color I'd want to put in a blue gray room would be orange. Just a little bit. Colors across from one another on the color wheel are complimentary. Beside one another = analogous and across from one another = complimentary. In general, analogous colors are soothing and low energy while complimentary colors are stimulating and high energy. I get a lot of visual stimuli in the course of an average day (5 children and all their happy stuff), so I still lean toward less is more in our most frequently used rooms. However, when winter days go on and on, I'm all about the color... all about a little complimentary action on that wheel.

(quick side note for the really nerdy: the complimentary pops of color in most of these photos follow the pattern of across and then over one. Nicole Balch, for instance, likes to put pops of yellow with pink. Pink, which is a tint of red (white added), has green as it's complimentary color directly across from it. One hue over from that is yellow. Across and over one is a pretty common trend right now for color accents. It's the "slightly off" look that Domino inspired. It's "off" because it just slighty left or right of the true complimentary color. I just figured this out! Nifty, eh?)

Source: makingitlovely.com via Jacci on Pinterest

This is why I'm hoping to rely mainly on easily changed items to provide the accent colors. I want to play round with the color. Make changes without breaking the bank and without taking lots of time. I want to fiddle with color and keep learning about it... how it works and what I like. But, what I like changes so often - see the cyclical nature of all this?

apartment therapy

All the photos in this post are rooms that, for one reason or another, I'm really drawn to right now. All of them use color well and in a way I feel like I could live with and easily change up. I'm learning from these rooms and thinking through our own. One of the things I'm trying to focus on right now is learning how much color I'm after. For me, color is not a case of 'more is better'. I like it to have simple impact. No Miles Redd. How much is too much for me? How much is not enough and just too bo-ring?

Just some rambly color theory thoughts for your Wednesday.

Have a great day and happy Leap Year! (Wouldn't it be CRAZY if my sister's baby came today?!)




p.s. great summary of all the junk i said about hue, tint, shade, and tone :)

my boy, roy (g biv)

Just thinking about the color wheel this morning.

And the spectrum.

It's sunny here, today, and the bulbs are beginning to pop up. I'm making note to be sure to plant some crocus bulbs this fall. they'd be making an appearance right about now.

thinking about spring bulbs is happy. color is happy. taking pictures is happy. so, here's a happy post for us. my boy, roy g biv.













Have a great day!

iPhone dump

Hey!

So, how was your weekend? We had great one. I feel like we hit a good balance of getting stuff done around the house and having solid family time. Plus, we were all able to go to church together Sunday morning... which hasn't happened in weeks due to a pretty nasty respiratory virus that our friends kindly shared with us.

Thank you, again, for the encouragement after my last post. Four of you are officially pardoned from goober status. The rest of you? Well...

I promised a happier post today. And, although I do have a few house related thoughts here at the end, I thought - what's happier than a random photo dump?

Hold on to your seats!



Nice. My kids take pictures all the time now. Bonus because, obviously, that means they're getting to capture their childhood their way. Bummer because they're not going to cull the shots like I do... and this kind of raw glamour is what will make it into their photobooks as a result.



This one comes with a funny story. I'm not the most technologically "with it" gal around... not until Sam bought my this iPhone did I stop hyperventilating if someone texted me. I hate texting. Or did, anyway. But it's easy with the iPhone. Sam's the only person I ever text, though. We just keep the same text going for days and days, just replying back and forth quite a few times each day. Anyway... I was so excited when he showed me that I could text photos, too. I thought, "Awesome! How fun! I can include him in our days so easily with this!" Look, honey... lunch. Look, honey... math. Look, honey... Baby's diaper. So, one morning I had slept late-ish and he was already gone for work when I woke up. I think we had been up late the night before because I did not want to get up. And the children didn't sleep in like I had been hoping. I took this photo and hit reply... there was some message I hadn't gotten from the day before about wanting to talk about granny. Granny? Since when did he call Grandma granny? Whatever. I hit reply to send him my picture and wrote, "It's too early!"

Then I sent this one...



"Make them go back to sleeeeeeeeeep!"

He replied back right away.

"I'm sorry. I think I had the wrong number last night."

(pause in my brain)

What? What?

What?!

And I looked at the number at the top of the screen. It was not Sam's number. It was a stranger's number. I sent those pictures to a stranger!

"Eeeeek! I'm sorry! Umm... have a good day!"

I'm such a dork. Seriously. Who does that?



And how cute is this?



These were so good... and easy! Adapted from Pinterest. It's just marshmellow creme between two graham crackers with melted milk chocolate chips spread on top. The milk chocolate hardens back up after it cools. Game night at our church. They were gone lickety split!



Did I already show you this? Sam and I celebrated our 12th anniversary earlier this month. Love that guy.



Weird homeschoolers.



I'm at a tricky place right now with bathing the babe. She's way too big for the sinks, and since we put the extra deep bathtub in, trying to lean over that thing to give her a bath is murder on my back. I just won't risk hurting myself. I've tried several different options with varying success. This was fun, but not something I'll likely do again.



I usually just pop her in the bath with me. Is that weird?



There's kind of a theme emerging here. I'm not really great about waking up in the morning. They kind of have to bombard me to get me moving.



Here's my sister, Heather, and her Wumple. Heather is great with child. She always seems to make blog appearances when she's great with child. Maybe that's because this is her 3rd baby in less than 3 and a half years.



Every time they have a baby she tells me they're going to space the next one out. She hasn't quite figured out how to actually make that happen, yet, though. So stinkin' excited to meet her little guy!!!!!



Anniversary date with Sam. But, I'm not with Sam in the picture... I'm in the bathroom. Dark, dark purple bathroom. Very red lipstick. I look straight off Twilight.



She sings all the time.



Oh, look. They're waking me up, again!



Lots of Baby shots. Can't help it.



She's definitely loved.



Maybe a little too loved sometimes.



I haven't finished the redonk Lego cabinet,yet. But, I am close. There've been some... set backs.

You know, iPhone posts can get out of hand really, really quickly. Like, NOW kind of quickly. They upload so fast! It's very gratifying. And I haven't even shown you the house thing I mentioned.

Nothing big. Just a kind of realization.

I had the children paint on canvas the other week, and I wanted to hang their little masterpieces up somewhere around the house. They already have quite the gallery going on in the kitchen... you know, with the clipboards. And I had this pretty green paint and this letter M I thought I wanted to do something with...



But that looked even more redonk than my Lego cabinet thingy. The M looked pretty much EXACTLY like Michigan State. Boo. So, I took it down... the same day I put it up.



Their paintings are very sweet, but they just didn't look good there.



I was sitting at the kitchen table one day last week, looking at that wall and just thinking it wasn't working... at all. Too cutsie. Too sweet. Too KIDS KIDS KIDS, all the time, KIDS!!!!!!

ha ha.

Really, though. It was too much of all the same thing. Especially from that point of view. It needed something different. Something opposite.

The black door helped, but... so, I went downstairs and dug through a pile of dusty wall stuff and found a mirror that I still liked from our old house.



It's a kind of formal, fancypants mirror. Feminine to balance out the black door. Grownup to balance out the kids, kids, kids.

You know, then I thought about gardening. In garden design there's this really simple rule of a "pointy next to a roundy next to a spready"... or something like that. Basically, just a grouping of different, but complimentary shapes to achieve a unified and interesting whole. Here, on this wall, I had a happy next to a chic (I think) next to a fancy. The kid's art and funny print (happy) next to the chic (black door) next to the mirror (fancy).



And it worked.

Then I started thinking all over again about those design style word games of yore. But, it's late and this is quite possibly the longest post I've ever put you through. My crew is going to come bounce on my bed all too soon, so I'd better call it a night.

Have a great Monday :)