Snapshots

Featuring blurry cell phone pictures of the day.  {Although the most hilarious pic of all, I've deemed unfit for public consumption.  It involves a pair of Spiderman underpants.  And Alex.  Haha.}  Here is how today went...

Once the kids were off to school, I spent the first hour of the morning cleaning up the main floor of the house.  For whatever reason -- perhaps it's the five kids -- the kitchen and family room cannot stay clean to save our lives.  And it doesn't help that the kitchen continues to be the Achilles' heel of our whole family chore operation.  You would think they were all allergic to cleaning it up.  The result is that if I don't get on top of it in the morning, it will never get cleaned at any other point in the day. 

Once everything was nice and neat and tidy, I was pleased to see Alex and Jane voluntarily removing themselves from pbskids.org in order to play together, and I decided to tackle a project that I started before my trip to Utah and never finished.  Back in the fall, I found a dress on clearance at Old Navy that I liked, but was just a tad bit too short.  I figured it should be easy enough to add a band of fabric to the bottom to extend the length, so I bought the dress and brought it home and then left it hanging in the closet {and then crumpled in a heap on the floor} for the next 5 or so months. 

Before.

During.

After.

Even though the level of difficulty for alterations on this dress was relatively low, working on it reminded me once again of how frustrated I get when trying to sew anything other than quilts.  Me and the seam ripper spent a LOT of time together this morning.  Haha.  While I was working like the proverbial bee, I was entertained by the sounds of Alex and Jane playing in the background.  Believe it or not, Tiana was the highly coveted Disney Princess Little People of the day and Jane had a merry old time taking it away from Alex again and again and then hiding it.  Once they moved on to playing superheroes, all was quiet on the kid front for a few minutes until I started hearing them shout, "Stab! Stab! Stab!" with gusto and force.  Like any good mother, I figured it was probably time to set my own project aside and go and check on the children.  As I walked into the family room, I found them maiming a cardboard box with plastic kid knives from IKEA. 

{Jane was especially into the stabbing part of this tableau.}

After deciding they probably weren't going to hurt each other, I went back to the sewing machine and finished up my task in just the nick of time before having to feed them lunch and get Jane to preschool.  I even got dressed in real clothes for the occasion.

Shameless full body shot selfie.  I'm working on trying to make less weird faces when I take them.  Clearly I've still got some work to do.

During naptime, I worked -- unsuccessfully -- for about 45 minutes on my lesson for Relief Society on Sunday and then decided I should try again tomorrow and work instead on finding something for the kids to eat for a snack after school.  I had just enough time to whip up some applesauce oatmeal muffins before leaving to pick up Jane, so I turned the oven on and got mixing.  It was only when I opened the oven up some 15 minutes later to put the muffins in to bake that I discovered the following horror:

That, my friends, is a completely melted plastic popsicle mold that I assumed Jane had stuck in there sometimes this morning.  I assumed right.  After turning off the oven and cleaning out the mess, I still managed to get the muffins in on time and ran to get Jane who confirmed that she had indeed been trying to "make popsicles" this morning and had stuck the mold in the oven for pretend.   New life lesson learned -- always check the oven before turning it on.  

The afternoon and evening passed swiftly by and since Scott got home a bit early from work today to watch a little March Madness, I seized the opportunity to run a few errands after dinner without any children to slow me down.  Before leaving, I ran up to my room to grab the shoes I needed to return and found Swiper-No-Swiping on the iPad in my bed, snuggled up with elephant and watching Superman cartoons on Netflix.

That sneaky little Swiper.  Hahaha.

Twinsies!  You can see by the look on Ethan's face that he is merely humoring my request to get a picture before I left.

Before running out the door, I had to snap one quick shot of my boys wearing the Superman shirts that were so lovingly and enthusiastically picked out by Lover Boy.  Ethan's is the newest acquisition which Alex glommed onto during our last trip to Target.  Like I've said before, Alex REALLY loves Target.  Probably because most of his favorite superhero paraphernalia have come from there.  Haha.  

Once I was home from running my errands, I finished off my day by taking a couple of pictures of my "new" dress to get a fresh perspective on its aesthetic before deciding what to do with it.  After poring over the image, and hemming and hawing over the styling, I have to say I'm still on the fence about this dress.  I don't know if I love the color-blocking of it, and I kind of think the length is now slightly too long.  As in it looks kind of matronly.  And cuts me off at the widest part of my calf.  I'm also undecided about the blue color of the dress and ultimately I question whether or not I'll ever actually wear this out in public. 

Hmmmm.

Hmmmm?  Hmmm.

I still don't know.  I think I will take up the new hem by half and then see what I think.  If I'm still not in love, perhaps I'll save it for Grace.  She really likes it.  And I really like her.  Hahaha.  Until next time...