The first room when you walk in the house was also the messiest, with too many instruments and craft stuff in it to function!  But now, thanks to my sweetie and IKEA, I have a gorgeous new office to fuel my creativity.

Before:

UGH!!  That's pretty much what it looked like all the time.

After:

WOW!!!  I love it!!  Two desks, one for computer, and one for sewing.  Lots of storage, and cute too!!   New curtains to freshen it up, and the piano more accessible to the children.

My grandma's antique secretary desk still holds most of my yarn.

Doesn't this just inspire you to make something?  It sure inspires me!!

Thanks to my whole family who devoted a weekend and plenty of dollars to this project!!

The kids had fun too, because IKEA packaging contains lots of big sheets of paper:

This kept them busy for a while, and prevented us from using the table, so we had picnics upstairs at mealtime.  :)

"Welcome to Boxtown."  I didn't actually get a picture of Boxtown, but we build one every time we do something like this, usually after a trip to Costco.

Audrey likes to experiment with her boxes.

Bu was completely unimpressed by the whole thing.

So now that I have a new gorgeous workspace, I just want to hang out in here all day!!

Hello friends and family!  I just wanted to let you know that I am going to be better about blogging this year.  When the blog broke last summer I got out of the habit, and once it was fixed I never got back in.  Paul also had the blog linked to post on his Facebook page, and while I know that this is by no means a private blog, I wasn't comfortable "advertising" our family adventures to all of our casual aquaintances on Facebook.  But now it is not (thanks honey for accommodating me).  So now I need to get back into the swing of things.

I wasn't just lazy, you know.  Last fall I started up yet another venture, making and selling handmade items.  The Christmas rush of orders took up most of my free time and lots of my sleep time.  Now that things are slightly at a lull, it's a good time to rediscover blogging.  More about my business another time.

For now, here's a peek at the First First of 2010: Audrey's First Haircut!  Miss Bug has been getting shaggier as her superfine curly hair got longer...she had grown two loooooong tails on the back that we called her "swallowtails."  It gave her a crazy Einstein kind of vibe that really fit her personality but made her look like a little ragamuffin. 

So, in Hooper family tradition, Mommy sat her on the edge of the master bathtub with a lollipop and cut her hair.  (It didn't take long, hence the lollipop.  For Katelyn's much more involved haircuts, we use a bowl of chocolate chips to keep her still.)

I'd show you the finished product, but Paul didn't get a great picture because Audrey was ready to get back to playing.  She still looks like a wild thing, though!

Testing -- To be deleted

These two crack me up!

(In the car, on the way to meet Daddy for dinner)
Mommy:  Kids, after dinner, I'm going to rehearsal and Daddy will take you shopping.
Katelyn, with disdain:  Mommy, Daddy is not exactly a shopping expert.

(At dinner, Audrey says the blessing.)
Audrey:  Dear God, please help us be sweet and Daddy's the boss.  Amen!!

Is anyone still out there?  Guess I'll find out...just wanted to share a hilarious addition to the family dictionary.  Kate has invented a new term, based on a "teaching moment" we had last night regarding prompt obedience. 

"Mommy, next time I will obey, but I will also do it really really fast.  I'll ALLEGROBEY."

I've just upgraded the blog to the latest software version and updated our hosting plan to .NET 3.5 (yikes, we were on 1.1!).  What all that means is that hopefully we will be back to regular posting soon!

We took Sunday off (mostly) for our date (too tired to drive downtown, we went to Z'Tejas, which was wonderful, and then to the movies).  Back to work furiously Monday morning.

First step:  paint the epoxy on the floor.  Then you toss these confetti paint chips up into the air so they land in the epoxy and create a speckly texture on the floor.  Paul and I both had a little too much fun with the confetti throwing so when we got to the last section we were running kind of short, so the speckles are kind of skimpy there.  But who cares, it's a garage.  This process took us all the way up to lunch.

This is what it looks like!  It had to cure for 8 hours, so we had lunch, hauled some old motor oil to the recycling center/dump (spared you a picture of that), got a frosty cold beverage at Sonic, came home, Paul made phone calls to various places and planned out where the shelving would go, and I cleaned the bathrooms (spared you a picture of that too).  Around 8:00 I started painting the garage and Paul made YET ANOTHER Home Depot run and then came back with a pizza.  So we had a date.

Aww...This brought back memories of our pizza date the first night in this house.  We had closed on the house on Dec. 23, 1999, and were not moving in until after the Christmas holidays.  So that night after closing we packed for our trip, left our apartment, brought a pizza to the house and ate it in the living room, and then slept on the air mattress in our new master bedroom.  The next day we got in the Ford Probe (yeesh, remember that clunker?) and skidded all the way up to Edmond in what was one of the worst ice storms we've ever seen.  Ah, memories.  But I digress.

I took this picture around 12:30 am.  Paul got all of this shelving up and we started moving stuff in as quickly as we could because of the threat of rain.  Actually, it's thundering right now (9:49 am Tuesday), and it's not all back in the garage, so I better get back out there and help him.  If it rains today, I am not sure how much we will get done on the wall, but at least we can say that we did a great job in the garage.

First of all, Happy 12th Anniversary to us!  Instead of a VA-cation, we are having a STAY-cation to celebrate.  Thanks to Freescale's delightful Mandatory Time Off Without Pay But Just Be Happy You Aren't Getting Laid Off program, we find ourselves with a week off.  And many thanks to Marc and Kandi for keeping the kids.  (Kids!  Mommy misses you and has cried every night so far!!!)

So here's what we have been up to so far.

We are building a path and flowerbed here in the backyard.  The path goes from the gate to the porch, the flowerbed retaining wall will have two separate tiers and will be up against the house.  If you look very closely you can see how Paul has strung the level lines between posts and marked the different levels of the stone wall.  Setup for this kind of project takes forever.  The light is because it is so dang hot he has been doing as much as possible at night.

Wow, that's a lot of stone.  Home Depot delivery ROCKS.

Working hard.

Starting to look like a path!

Yes, that says 106.5.  Time to stop.  Move to the garage.

While he was working on the path, my job was to get all of this junk in the garage OUT of the garage.  Now some of it is on the back porch, some in the house, some on the front porch, some just behind the gate...well, you get the idea.  This is all so we could etch and epoxy the floors.  But sometime over the course of the day we had a discussion about what other things we might like to do to the garage, and how it made sense to do it all at once while everything was already out.  And that's how this happened:

If I look a little crazy, well, heat exhaustion does that to you.  It also apparently makes you spend another $600 at Home Depot. 

You probably can't see it, but the car is full of shelving for the garage, not part of our original plan.  (Home Depot also tried to tempt me into some wood flooring for my office, but Paul got me out just in time.)  Hey, if you're going to put everything back IN the garage, you might as well put it back into a freshly painted, properly shelved garage, with a beautiful epoxy floor.  So far this staycation is turning out to be one of the most expensive vacations we've ever had.  But we'll have something to show for it in the end.

We worked until about 1 am, but we got the entire thing primed, half of the floor etched, and then this afternoon Paul degreased and etched the other side.  So tomorrow (Monday) when it is all dry we can paint the epoxy on, and when that is dry enough to walk on, we can paint the walls (we are NOT painting the ceiling again, it can just STAY primer white!) a nice garage-y beige.  But tonight, since it is our anniversary and all, we are going to go out for dinner and a movie and forget about home improvement for the rest of the night.

Speaking of, my date is ready, so I'm signing off!