I really enjoy summer.  However, the tension for me grows as our family grows (both in age and quantity).  I love going out and having adventures with the kiddos, with Greg, with friends or just flying solo.

Here's the thing.  I have four young kiddos who aren't great at helping out around the house.  Shocking, I know.  They have their chores, but it's pretty minimal in terms of responsibility (i.e. clean room, make bed, brush teeth) which leaves the bulk of the load on Greg & me.  Or just me because I think Greg is now banned from laundry detail after a dryer, ahem, issue this weekend.

So when it's time to clean, wipe, scrub, vacuum, sweep, or launder...it's on me.  Here's one side of the coin: it's more work to get supervise and instruct each kiddo with each job than just doing it myself.  And I realize that I am creating a vicious cycle of children who can't and won't help out.

The other side of the coin is this: I want the kiddos to enjoy their summer too.  I want them to run around through the sprinkler, ride bikes, play house outside.  I don't want to be the mom who calls them in from having fun to unload the dishwasher.  And bonus, they're outside...at least I have a couple moments of quiet in the house.


So for now my solution to this problem is to let them play until they begin bickering and then I start doling out chores, the ultimate punishment.  However, they're onto me and rather than coming to me with their disagreements, they've formed some brand of crude judicial system. Today, I overheard my oldest girl threatening to throw the other girls' stuffed animals away so that they wouldn't have to clean their room anymore.  My other solution is hiring a butler.

Not a bad idea, actually.

I want the story of our summer to be adventure.  All out fun-having, memory making awesomeness.  And when we come home, I want some locally sourced, organic masterpiece simmering in its delicious aroma on my sparkling stovetop.

Do any of you have a genius plan for balancing?  Or a great butler recommendation?  I heard this guy is pretty great...

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I've been thinking for awhile about adding a feature to the blog called Be Local.  It will be a good reason for me to get out and venture off the ol' beaten path of grocery store, library & Target.  Let's discover & explore some spots, food, events and people together, shall we?

We'll kick off with the Lakefront Festival of the Arts.  We headed there on Saturday and the weather felt like autumn but it was nice to be outside after a stormy week.  There was music, food and activities for kiddos to make it a more family-friendly event.  Greg & I went without the kiddos, which was likely for the best as there was thousands of dollars' worth of breakable items within reach of small hands.

The festival had a great collection of artists.

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The festival was time well spent.

I printed our summer adventure list and got it in the mail this week.  I was just as excited to get it as the girls.  The girls love referencing it for ideas!


I have been working for the past couple of weeks on the girls' playroom/work space in my "spare time".  It has a fresh coat of white paint and someday I will get around to finishing the primed woodwork.  Last week, I purchase a couple yards of fabric and tacked it to the wall.  I've hung some cool stuff on it and I love the dimension and color it adds to the room.  (And it's cheap!)

The chalkboard printable was the finishing touch.












I printed this on mpix.com as a 20x30" true black and white photo, which turned out with a nice matte finish which adds to the chalkboard look (printing it as a 16 x24 would also work well).

Finally, a chalkboard look for those of us who have HORRIBLE penmanship.  Happy printing!

A couple of weeks ago, we blocked off some holes in the house that squirrels have been using (and by "we", I mean Greg...but I watched).  There was one very unhappy squirrel in particular that tried and tried to get back in and was so frustrated that (as Greg tells it), charged toward him and screamed.

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If anyone would have been sitting on their front lawn watching yesterday, they would have diagnosed me with ADHD.

The two big girls were playing and riding bikes in front and the two little ones were down for naps.  (Score!  Two sleeping at the same time!)  I decided it was time to bust out my new heat gun for a little trial on the storm windows.  These window have 87 years of paint on them, so I figured they'd be a good candidate for the heat gun.



Clearly, I have given up on staging my photos.  There's the heat gun with a bunch of random debris in the background.

I dragged out the sawhorses, heat gun, extension cord and started taking the storm window down.  The window required some tools to get it unstuck and I was sure I was going to break the glass trying to get it off but luckily I was able to get off without incident.

I fired up the heat gun and it worked great!  So sorry that I didn't take photos of the process...I was just too excited to stop once I got started.  I will post a heat gun tutorial in a future post for those who are interested.  Anyway, the heat gun stripped that storm window down to bare wood.  Amazing.

Um, so now what do I do?  I didn't exactly have a next step in mind when I got out the heat gun.  I haven't decided on a paint color even though I've had paint color swatches painted on the windows for weeks.  None of the colors were singing to me.  And Greg told me that I can't just leave different paints up for months on the exterior like I do on the inside before painting. He's so square.  


Now that the wood was bare, I couldn't just leave it without doing something to it.

I ran into the house and got my hand sander and sanded the window smooth.  Okay, now I'll just grab the two paint pots of the colors I liked best.  Which one?  This is so much pressure.  This is the color on the exterior that passers-by will judge me on.  The color has to proclaim to the world how fun and incredibly cool we are.  I have to get this color right or no one will want to hang out with us.  Ever.

I gulped and chose the color that Greg liked the best.  This is usually the best strategy when I am in doubt.  I painted two coats, let it dry and hung the window back up.  And you guys?  I hate the color.  It's awful, just awful.  So now I've wasted all that precious, double napping time on a project that I loathe.  And now I have one storm window on my house painted an awful color.  People are probably gathering on the sidewalk right now pointing at the house and laughing while I hide inside.

Okay.  Switch gears.  I hate the paint project so I will start a new project.  Which one, which one? I'll try the heat gun on the house trim just to see if it works as well as it did on the storm window.  It works great on that, too.  Laura, that was a dumb idea.  You don't have any paint for that area either.  JUST PUT DOWN YOUR COOL NEW POWER TOOL AND WALK AWAY.  Ok, just do one more little spot in the windowsill to see if it works there where the paint in all chipped.  And NOW WALK AWAY FROM YOUR POWER TOOL.

Switch gears.  Put down heat gun and clean up mess.  Oh, there's too much dirt in the flower bed and it overflows onto the sidewalk when it rains. I'll rake the excess dirt away.  There's a manageable project.  I rake the excess into a pile at the edge of the flower bed. I think I've raked away too much.  I do it over.

Marielle is awake now and I have to abandon all tasks.  Well, at least I got the flower bed raked.  Maybe that window will look better to me in the morning.

I've been spending the past hour googling houses with similar brick colors to try to nail down some colors.  I've been thinking about a blue-gray color but that just doesn't seem to be working.  I am always drawn to just a simple cream, but come on.  I gotta try something just a little different.

After some searching, I am gravitating toward a gray-green for the outer trim and a lighter gray for the storm windows, similar to this:

You'd hang out with a person with this color on their house, right?

The kiddos are out of school and this is our first official week of summer. So far, we've cleaned out the garage, gone to the zoo, had a water fight, dug a flower bed, bought a bike, and have successfully packed away their winter clothes into their respective rubbermaid containers.  Whew.

It's pretty cool to look back on the first day of school: we had just moved into our new home and three days after moving, Marielle was born.  And their shoes were so clean!


And now they're all gigantic. To me, at least.


And yes, you can spy the smattering of paint colors I'm considering for the house trim in this photo.

On Monday, our first official day of vacation, we had a family meeting.  All the girls contributed to a list of things they wanted to do over the summer.  All my evenings this week, I've been working on making it into a poster with my limited-but-evolving design skills.


Now I hope to be able to find a cheap mat & frame for this.

Summer is off to a great start!