My house smells like bubbilicious (and other tidbits of life)

I know, I know, I'm well past my usual "at least once a week" blog post due date. It's just...well...there isn't a whole lot going on. It's post-Christmas, pre-birthday and Valentine's Day, and mostly we've just hibernated in the 3 (!!!) degree weather (luckily it's warming back up into the 30s and 40s now). Then again, I suppose, there's always a few things one can manage to muse upon.

First off, my house smells like bubbilicious. This weekend, I noticed my 2 wallflowers had ran out of juice, so I swung by Bath & Body Works while in the mall on my quest for fabulous jeans. Feeling the need to spring Spring a little early, I figured I'd try something fun, fruity, and a little exotic. I happened upon the Pineapple Orchid scent and thought I had found my match. That was...until I plugged it in. It's just so fruuuity and sweeeeet (minus the exotic). It took me about a day to figure out what the scent reminded me of, but once I labeled it, it was absolutely unmistakable. As I don't completely abhor it, combined with the fact that I'm uber-cheap (I spent a whole $5 on a pack of two)...bubbilicious-smelling my house will remain.

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Next up...Remember this post about the giveaway on The Vintage Pearl? Well, guess what?!? I so totally won. How super-duper exciting is that? I got my gift (a circle chain bracelet) in the mail last week and I was beyond pleased with it. Not only that, but the sweet girl who runs the place threw in a replacement chain for my dainty name necklace for free because I had mentioned the need to purchase a new one in an email I sent her about winning the giveaway (mine broke a few months back). How cool and uber-sweet is that? Now I'm officially the proud owner of two Vintage Pearl pieces and I'm so in love with them both.


Last summer, Spencer and I began our hunt for the perfect new dining table and chair set. We soon realized that with our non-existent budget, that perfect new table would actually have to be a less-than-new table. *sigh* Undeterred, I hunted high and low on craigslist and at garage sales. Mid-summer, I found it. It was just the right combination of clean lines and whimsy detail work. Not only that, it was a mere $75 for the table and six chairs. Only problem, the set definitely needed to be painted, reinforced, glued, puttied, reupholstered, etc. I left it up to Spencer because I knew he'd be doing the majority of the work. He figured it'd be a relatively easy project, just fairly time-consuming and so we went for it. It's an old-school harvester table, so the two ends pull out, making it really quite long when the need arises, but slides back in for compact, everyday use. It was perfect fit for our little dining space.

A mere (ha!) 6 months later, we have a fabulous new dining set that I am soooo in love with. Kudos to my fabulous husband who, as predicted, really did do a majority of the work. I helped a bit with a little painting and sanding of the table and reupholstering the chairs, but he did all the rest, which was A LOT.

Warning: these are crap pictures. I had my sewing stuff in the corner, a towel draped over Ezra's chair to avoid messes, my floor was desperately in need of a thorough vacuuming, and the light was horrendous. The blinds in the background, however, now those I love [insert eye roll here]. Consider yourself warned.


Georgia hates getting her hair done. She screams and writhes, making the already-painful and difficult task of getting the snarls out of her curls all the more painful and difficult. She does not like any kind of pigtails, ponytails, braids, etc. in her hair and insists, if she allows us to do anything at all, that we only put a bow clip in. As if the whole process wasn't frustrating enough, Georgia has now decided that she wants her hair flat and straight. So, she spends the entire hair-doing time trying to push her hair flat with her hands, the whole time insisting that her hair is "ugy" and "not bootiful" like I say it is and that she only wants it "fyat" and "taite". Come ON! I spend my entire friggin' life wishing for curly, voluminous hair (I have the thinnest, straightest, flattest hair ever) only to have a daughter that daily hates hers. To top it off, she's two!!! This is something I expected sometime around age 14, but 2 and a half!? You've got to be kidding me, right? I predict a looong 16 years in our future. *sigh*

Scarlett's skin has been hit really hard by the recent bitter cold. Particularly her face. Therefore, she's almost continually lathered with lotion. Well...apparently that's given her some ideas of her own. As, at the time, she couldn't get a hold of the Eucerin, she decided that Butt Paste would have to do.


The hilarious thing about this, though, is that Ezra was so shocked by the whole thing. He's the one who found her and came a-running to me completely scandalized. All it took was a couple minutes searching through the blog archives to remind him, and me, of Ezra's escapades slathering lotion-like substances all over his body, the walls, the carpet, etc. This didn't happen only a couple of times, but in fact, all. the. time.

(In case you're curious, Ezra was about 2 yrs 4 months in these pics)


Since we're talking about Ezra...

My friend, Heather, recently introduced me to the book, Parenting the Ephraim's Child. At the risk of sounding melodramatic, this book was like a being given a life raft while on a sinking ship. I'm so often so completely overwhelmed and bewildered while raising my children and I felt, more then once, that I was drowning. Discovering that I was raising two Ephraim's Children (with the strong potential of one more in Scarlett) not only gave me guidance in my parenting, but it, more importantly, let me know that I was not alone. My kids, Ezra especially, are extreeemely high maintenance. They're extremely emotionally intense, active (more Georgia on that one then Ezra), sensitive, picky, often difficult children. I love them dearly despite, and often because of their intense personality traits and this book has reminded me of all the good that can come from those traits. Georgia's not just manipulative, but she's also charismatic. Stubbornness is not just negative, it also has a positive flipside in persistence. Not only that, but it helped me recognize in myself a previous Ephriam's Child. It helps me understand my own children better when I can remember so many of the same emotions and experiences growing up. So, to any of you out there feeling completely overwhelmed with your handful of a child, know that I understand. I really, truly understand and I'd love to introduce you to my new best friend of a book.