Dyersburg or Bust

Over Memorial Day weekend we went to visit Craig and his family who are on the entire other side of Tennessee. As we are 30 minutes from the Virginia border, they are 30 minutes from the Arkansas border. We discovered that there is a lot of Tennessee in between.

 Above, you can see, the kids working on one of their current favorite outside activities - making clover chains as long as they can. They are getting so good that we measure them in body lengths instead of feet.

 After giving Heidi the slip by sneaking into the reptile room, Craig embraces some snake time. I am just going to mention that my kids do so much better with snakes than dogs. When we see dogs on our walks the youngest two kids climb up to my head using fingernails and sheer grit in 15 seconds flat. Whereas with snakes they are more than willing to touch them. I think it has something to do with size differences and quickness of movement.

Here we are on our boardwalk hike under the cypress trees. What a cool hike!

I'm pretty sure we doubled their branch size all showing up on Sunday.

Here we are remembering soldiers on Memorial Day. Ryan forgot to put the flag in the picture. I don't know why, since it was a giant Confederate flag. Then we took the kids downtown for a Memorial Day service. I wish I could make it through one of those without tearing up. In fact, I didn't even make it through the opening prayer. Oh well, remembering sacrifices can do that to a person. Everyone's favorite part was the, "Can I get an, 'Amen'!" shouted half way through the keynote speaker's address. I think Craig is enjoying his time in the South.

Helen agreed to ice cream for her birthday. It's so good to turn 8 on vacation. Although to say she  doubted she could even be happy away from home on her big day does not even begin to capture her trepidation/angst/sadness. She really did manage to have a great birthday.

Remodeling Fun

This winter and spring we finished up two bedrooms and a bathroom. I really wanted to take off these dark colors and put up some lighter wallpaper.

 I made great blackout fabric for the kids bedroom window so the kids have an easier time falling asleep in the summer. We also learned that even though the wallpaper on the bottom looks random, it is not, and required great eyesight to line up the pattern.

We were a little worried to only have a half bathroom upstairs. To say nothing of the sketchy carpet patterned with all kinds of mysterious stains. One day while sitting up there I realized that if we took the closet wall out there would be plenty of room for a shower. In fact, it would be much bigger than many of the bathrooms we've used around the world. Luckily in Tennessee building codes are mere suggestions and we ran with it. 

We had a great contractor who came in an helped us take care of everything except for the wallpaper. This was the hardest room to wallpaper to date. Something about only having one night to get the job done (Ryan assured our contractor that we could do it in a few hours) and a sloped ceiling.

I am particularly proud of the slanted shower curtain I sewed up. That's a bendable curtain rod that can be used for bay windows. We just attached it upside down and it works great. In fact, this bathroom is so nice that Ryan and I started using it and let the kids use the downstairs one. It's kind of like going to the spa.

We finished redoing our last upstairs bathroom last month. Choosing the wallpaper was more tricky because they had to match my curtains. I made these black out curtains for our last home and by some modern sewing miracle they fit perfectly in this room.

Alice would rather take wallpaper off the wall than anything else during quiet time. Probably because it gives her a chance to use a squirt bottle and chat my ear off. And just in case you were wondering we painted over the mysterious letters and didn't put new ones up. Although it would be fun for the next homeowner to find a bunch of Ms and As.

 Our last room upstairs got a new closet with the bathroom remodel. We are really happy with it and the inside is slanted to match all the other closets upstairs. 

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Note the wallpaper in the hall that's safe for the time being. It will be coming off, but not until after summer and fall are over. It's hard to find time to wallpaper with a garden and yard to tend to.