Traveling the world...with kids

I just returned home from an adventure. We decided our kids were ready to travel. And when you're ready to travel (again) and feel like you've been chomping at the bit for a decade while waiting for a chance to get back out into the world, why start small?

I mean, why go someplace easy?

We didn't.

For our first big adventure with our girls, we decided to take them to Asia. It was meant to be a test. We figured that if they could handle this trip, they could handle just about anything and maybe we'd have more trips in our future.

We started with a few days in and around San Francisco (clearly, San Francisco is not in Asia...but it was a great jumping off point), then flew to Hong Kong where we spent about five days, took a ferry to Macau for a day, and then flew to Vietnam where we spent another four days. All together, the trip was 18 days and our girls, ages 10 and 8, managed the trip like champs.

For just a second, I want to talk about why we decided to travel with our kids, and why we chose Asia for their first big trip. Scott and I both believe it is important for our children to grow up knowing that there is more to the world than the little community in which we live. We believe that in order to understand that most of the world is not like America, our kids should see the world for themselves. We want their view of the world to be not an us-and-them view, but a we-are-all-in-this-together view. I know that it's possible to achieve these goals without travel (neither Scott nor I traveled as kids and we came out okay) but travel seems like the best way to ensure that our kids will end up with the perspective we want them to have.

Also, we recently realized that we've only got 8 years left with our oldest kid before she might be out of the house. That's not much time and we wanted to be intentional about spending focused, concentrated time with both of our kids, creating memories and bonding as a family. To us, travel is the best way to do that.

Most of the people who heard about our trip asked the same thing, "Why Asia?" And some, the more bold of our friends and acquaintances, asked, "Why aren't you going to Europe?"

There were a few reasons. First, a good friend from my childhood lives in Hong Kong. We've wanted to visit her there and haven't had a chance, so this seemed like a great opportunity. But also, Asia is very different from America. If you haven't spent much time there, Asia shocks you. It's crowded and noisy and looks different and smells different and tastes different. The language is impossible for us to understand. The food is completely foreign. The customs are unfamiliar.

And also, Europe? I've not been to more of Europe than London (which I realize doesn't even count in some people's eyes), but my impression is that Europe is relatively comfortable. From my experience traveling, I've found that the times I learned the most about myself and the world were the times I was uncomfortable. And the more uncomfortable I was (both physically and mentally), the more I learned.

While traveling in Asia we felt stupid several times and uncomfortable most of the time. We were laughed at more than once. Not in a judgmental, "You stupid Americans," way, but in a, "How silly that they don't know how to ask for more tea," way.

And that was good. Being laughed at in that way keeps a person humble. It reminds us that the world does not belong to us and that we represent, in fact, but one small bit of humanity.

Philosophy aside, traveling with kids is intimidating. No matter how rewarding it might be, it's a little scary.

Because my kids having tantrums in my house? Where I can send them to their rooms? I can handle that.

My kids having tantrums on a train in the middle of a totally foreign place? Not so easy to handle.

So, here are a few things we learned along the way. Hopefully these are ideas you can use, ideas you will use as you drag your children around the globe.

1. Keep them fed. Duh, right? But it's harder than it sounds. As an adult, you want to get from one place to another and you can fight through an empty stomach, knowing that your next meal is not that far away. We tried this with our kids -- not that we were intentionally trying to stretch them, we were just trying to pack in as many activities and sights and experiences as we could. Brynn (our older one) can handle being a little hungry. Callie, our younger one, cannot. Much like I've heard her father was at 8 years old, Callie falls apart before her stomach even growls. Grunting, groaning, shaking her body, pissed off at the world. And if we let her get to that place where she is falling apart, she won't eat because nothing "sounds good." So once we figured this out, even when it wasn't convenient, we made sure to keep her fed. This meant frequent stops for snacks and it also meant keeping water on hand. Sometimes water was all she needed, but she didn't recognize it. We had to remember to offer it to her regularly.

2. Build in downtime. During our first couple of days in Hong Kong, we had a lot of ground to cover and not a lot of time. We were staying in an apartment in a great location in the middle of Hong Kong, but it wasn't a place we wanted to hang out during the day. It was small and a bit cramped (as are most places in Hong Kong), it smelled a little mildewy, and it was a little warm. Between not having an ideal place to come back to for a rest and not wanting to sleep during the day for fear of never adjusting to the time difference, plus wanting to see as much as possible in a short amount of time, we may have worked too hard. Callie fell asleep at dinner the first three nights. Head on the table, carried out of restaurants. Meals she normally would have loved she totally missed out on.

Looking back, what could we have done differently during those first few days? We could have found a place for the kids to chill. Some kind of park or open space (not easy to find in Hong Kong, but I'm certain if we looked hard enough we could have found it) would have been a great place for the kids to let their brains rest while their bodies played. That brings me to #3.

3. Find other kids to play with. Our kids are 8 and 10. They're not toddlers. They don't need a LOT of playtime. But they need some. And, frankly, Scott and I are not ideal play companions. During this trip it occurred to me that playtime is to kids what sitting back and drinking a beer (or a glass of wine) is to adults. It helps us unwind, helps us chill out, helps us relax so that we are prepared for the next big thing.

We were lucky that in San Francisco we stayed with friends who have three kids. All three are younger than my kids, but I don't think it mattered. They had a ball playing together and their playtime each evening was enough to unwind the kids for another full day the next day. During the second part of our time in Hong Kong we stayed with friends who have two year old twins. Again, much younger than my kids and, again, it didn't matter. My kids engaged with them and through play were able to chill. In Vietnam we were hoping to have kids around for our kids to play with during the second half of our stay there. That didn't work out as planned, but the girls played really well with each other during the afternoon when we had nothing else to do. In a hot, sweaty, difficult situation, their opportunity to play together is what kept all of us sane.

4. Have realistic expectations. Traveling with kids is not the same as traveling with adults. We didn't see and do everything with our kids that we might have seen and done had it been just the two of us. For instance, in Macau we planned to spend our first afternoon/evening seeing the Las Vegas-ish side of Macau. Exploring the hotels and arcades and wandering past the expensive restaurants. The next day, before catching an evening ferry to the airport, we planned to wander the old side of Macau which was colonized by the Portuguese. Unfortunately, it was raining. And it rained all day long. Scott had a whole walking tour planned for us, with cool facts about everything we were going to see. He had a list of food we wanted to try. If we'd been there alone, we probably would have sucked it up and done the walk in the rain. But with kids? Forget it. We tried sitting in a coffee shop, waiting for the rain to die down. We tried wandering through the Wynn, hoping that eventually the rain would stop. The rain never stopped, so we cut our losses and headed back to the ferry terminal to try to catch an earlier ferry to the airport. At least there we knew the kids could sit back and read or write in their journals and rest. Of course the sun came out as soon as we got on the ferry.

As it turned out, there was a problem at the ferry terminal with our Vietnamese visas, so the extra time came in handy. But even if things had gone smoothly, downtime in the airport would have been better than going with our original plans.

5. Guide them in their learning. Both of my kids were asked by their teachers to keep journals of their trip. You want to know what those journals looked like at first? "I just got on the plane. Now the plane is in the air. The flight attendant brought us drinks. We watched a movie." Yeah, pretty much a play-by-play of everything we did. I encouraged them to choose one thing that they noticed that day to write about. A smell? A sound? A sight? This worked for Brynn. At 10 years old, she's learned how to write essays and can write well from a prompt. Callie still needed extra guidance, though, and by the time we got to Vietnam, she was done writing. She wanted nothing to do with it. At that point, I actually had to write for her. We would talk about what she wanted to say and then she'd dictate to me. And I had to be flexible enough to be okay with that. We never did get through the second half of our time in Vietnam, but at least now she has experience journaling and I hope that next time will be easier.

Before Brynn went back to school on Monday, I asked her, "When your teacher asks you what you learned, what are you going to say?" Her answer? "Ummmm, I learned about rice." Seriously? We just spent how many thousands of dollars and how much time and you learned about rice? I know she learned more than that and I know Brynn's teacher. I know that he wants his students to think critically and expects a lot out of them. That answer wasn't going to cut it. So I stopped her and reminded her that her answer didn't have to be so literal. Her answer needed to be something she couldn't learn from watching a movie or reading a book. It needed to be something that required her being in a new place. That helped move her in the right direction. Then she was coming up with answers like, "I learned that Asia is really different from America," and, "there is a lot more of the world that I want to see." Those were answers we could work with and expand on.

When I think back to my first experiences being in new and different places, I'm not sure that I could have done much better than Brynn, and I was a young adult. I know that the answers are inside her, that she internalized all she saw, but it's hard to make sense out of it. It takes maturity and experience to put into words what you see and feel and learn when you travel.

6. Pack lighter than you think is reasonable. We tried to pack light, but we could have done better. We each had a backpack and nothing else which seemed pretty good when we left the house, but the girls' packs were too heavy for them (especially for Callie -- Brynn did well). Our trip included some significant changes in weather that made packing difficult. We went from the Bay Area (which Scott says is the coldest place he's ever been) to the Mekong Delta (which was in the high nineties and humid while we were there). I don't mind carrying a heavy pack, and neither does Scott, but next time we'll make sure the girls' packs are as light as possible to make transiting from one place to another even easier.

7. Don't avoid the hard stuff. For me, the hardest part of the trip was the two days we spent in the Mekong Delta. It was hot. Like 99 degrees plus super humid. It was a long (3 1/2 hour) bus ride getting out there. Brynn left a backpack in the bathroom of a bus station and we had to go through a pretty drawn out process with the police to get it back while our bus was about to pull out of the parking lot. The place where we were staying was supposed to be a "homestay" but turned out to be more of a guest house. There was no air conditioning and no shower. We were dirty, sweaty, and stinky. It was hard and sometimes it was frustrating. I almost suggested that we cut it short and run back to the comfort of our air conditioned hotel in Saigon.

But I didn't.

And you know what? The kids didn't think it was hard. Or at least they didn't say so. They had fun. They played. They learned. They met a sweet woman from Japan and a great couple from the Netherlands who were staying at the guest house with us. The girls engaged with these strangers from other parts of the world and caught glimpses of cultures that they'd never seen before. They smiled and laughed and answered questions and were really great representatives of America. They made us proud.

Old Vietnamese women grabbed Callie's arms and smacked her behind and pointed at her and smiled toothless grins. (We can't figure out why, but old women and animals all love Callie.) Kids waved at us and yelled, "Hello!" through huge smiles. The girls chased minnows in the muddy water outside our cabin. They adjusted well to the heat and humidity.

As adults, the hard stuff is what makes us physically uncomfortable and makes us nervous because we don't know what to expect. But not for the kids. They took it all in stride and pushed us to be cheerful (or at least pretend to be cheerful) despite our discomfort. For kids, the hard stuff is walking through museums, reading guidebooks, being forced to sit at a table for long stretches of time. For them that isn't fun. Playing in the mud is fun. Meeting new people is fun.

That last part of the trip, the hardest part, reminded me of why I believe in traveling to challenging places. Sometimes it doesn't feel great. It isn't relaxing or luxurious or simple. You don't return home feeling recharged or revived or ready to take on the world. As I get older I see myself wanting to go someplace simple, someplace where I don't feel so challenged. I want to go lie on a beach or sit in a nice restaurant and drink wine. And we will. We need balance. But the stuff that's hard for Scott and me is great for the kids and so I have to remind myself not to avoid it but rather to seek it out and be intentional about including it in our travel plans.

I'll probably write a few more posts about our trip, but I'll do it over on our family blog. If you're interested in following along, feel free to check up on The Friendly Home on Facebook or follow me on Twitter. I'll publicize any other travel posts there. Also, we finally joined the Instagram family while we traveled. You can see all of our pics on Scott's Instagram page, here.

Have you traveled with kids? What would you add? I'm sure there's more to know!

Merry Christmas!

{backyard redo} The Plan

You know from this post that a couple of months ago we ripped out our sorry excuse for a deck. That was the first step in renovating our backyard, something that has been on our to-do list since we moved into our house in 2004.

I liked to call our old deck "the raft." Or "the dock." It reminded me of a little dock out in a lake...the kind you'd swim to when you were a kid and then lie around for hours in the sun, occasionally doing flips off the side of the dock into the lake?

I didn't spend a lot of time at a lake with a dock as a kid, but somewhere in the recesses of my brain, I know that at some point I experienced a dock like that. And I'm certain that docks like that belong in lakes, not attached to houses and surrounded by grass.

Our backyard before we started work on it.

Another before, but from a different angle. There are, ahem,
a few extra pieces of furniture sitting back there in this shot.

The dock/raft was not a great place to gather. It wasn't big enough, for starters. There was no great focal point and no good way to arrange furniture to seat more than six people. I always kind of wondered when I might fall off and break my ankle. It also lacked afternoon shade and in the summer it turned into a great place to get a tan as long as you had a ten gallon jug of water to keep you from dehydrating like a raisin.

The patch of grass between the deck and the retaining wall wasn't really big enough to play in and it was hard to keep it green. We live in the desert. Grass doesn't really belong here, so to have grass in the back that wasn't even the right shape or size to use for anything seemed kind of lame.

Shall I continue with the multitude of problems in our backyard? Let's see...we back up to a hill and at the top of the hill is a neighbor. There are two scrawny pine trees between our house and theirs, but no trees to provide a great screen.

Deer walk through our yard regularly and browse on whatever is not deer resistant, so the few trees we've attempted to plant have been consumed. The back hill is hot and dry and the soil is a crumbly mess of dried clay. We have a drip system but we never enriched the soil and because it's not an area where we like to hang out, I haven't put much effort into getting anything to grow. So it looks like crap.

I do have some awesome peonies, though...for two weeks a year.

When we were ready to get to work on the backyard, we knew it wasn't something we could tackle ourselves. Plant a few plants? Yes. Reroute the sprinklers, pour concrete, dig out part of the retaining wall? Uh, not so much. That's the kind of stuff we leave to the professionals.

So I started with my friend Patrick's awesome service, Home Project HQ. I listed our project there and got bids from a few different contractors. The one who we ended up going with, the one who I now consider a friend, was Andrew Newland of Newland-Scaping and Whole Yards.

When Andrew came over to see the yard and chat about what our goals were for the space, I knew pretty much immediately that he was the one I wanted working on my yard. Andrew is not like other contractors I've encountered. Let's just start with this: he doesn't look at me like I'm nuts. That was enough of to sell me, right there. But on top of that, he's creative, artistic, and willing to try something different. He gets bored when he does the same thing over and over again and he seems to enjoy the challenge of working with materials in unconventional ways. He cares about sustainability and we see eye to eye on the elements of a healthy lifestyle. My initial impression of him was super positive and I'm thrilled that we were able to work with him on our yard.

During our initial meeting, these are the goals I gave Andrew for our yard:

• rip out the whole concrete block retaining wall and replace with river rock
• bump back part of the wall to enlarge our backyard space
• pour an exposed aggregate patio with a flagstone border and make it big enough to cover almost the entire backyard
• install a wood-burning fire pit
• build a pergola using wood from the existing deck (this made other contractors squirm)
• plant at least three, preferably more, Blue Spruces to screen our yard from the neighbors

I gave him a budget of $15,000 to work with which is, frankly, not nearly enough for the kind of work I was asking him to do, but that's what we had to work with. I also asked him to incorporate used wine bottles into the retaining wall. Between that off-the-wall request and the undersized budget, I figured Andrew would be totally justified in walking away and never coming back again.

But instead he sent me this amazing video of what our yard could look like. Not everything on the video was within our budget, but Andrew was willing to work with us to get the yard done in phases or to let us do what work we could do ourselves in order to get close to our budget.

Here is the proposal that Andrew sent:



I know, right? Is that completely amazing?

To stay close to our budget, we agreed to shrink the patio a bit and only push back the retaining wall in the immediate vicinity of the fire pit. We also agreed to use river rock to replace just the part of the retaining wall that we pushed back instead of all ten million feet of retaining walls that we have in our yard. Instead of doing all the planting for us, we agreed that Andrew and his crew would just plant four Blue Spruce trees. Scott and I will landscape the rest bit-by-bit. We also agreed (after some research and discussion) that the fire pit should be natural gas instead of wood burning, and so in his bid Andrew included the cost of running a gas line.

I was a little wary of having a fountain -- I wasn't sure that we could deal with the maintenance, but Andrew talked me into it and Scott and I are both thrilled that he did. It's much less maintenance than I thought it would be and it looks and sounds lovely. Plus, it's made out of copper pipe, reclaimed wood, and reclaimed corrugated metal. My vocabulary sadly lacks the appropriate words to describe its beauty. You'll just have to see for yourself.

I'll be back in a few days to show you how things are progressing!

psst...for more about our backyard redo, check out these posts.

Kids' art wall

The girls' Pink Kitchen (as we call our loft area) was falling apart and messy.

And the big, blank wall above it was calling my name, asking for a new way to hold the girls' artwork.

Ikea to the rescue. On my first trip to the brand-spanking-new Denver Ikea last week, I picked up three of these Dignitet cable systems. They can be used to hold up curtains and who knows what else, but I'm using them to hold my kids' artwork.

The package didn't give me a whole lot of insight into how I would get it up on the wall.

And at first the typical drawing-only Ikea directions didn't, either. But eventually I figured it out.

In addition to what came in the package, I needed some wood screws to mount the system on the wall. If I were going into drywall, this would have been a major pain. I'm not a fan of drywall anchors (even the new, easy screw-in ones -- I never seem to be able to get them in exactly the right place). What can I say? Not so detail oriented, I guess.

 I marked my holes and pre-drilled.

And then screwed the left part of the cable system into the wall. The next few steps didn't get photographed since they happened at about one in the morning. Such is life as a mom, right? I had to abandon the project to pick up the kids from school and didn't get back to it until really late at night.

 

Here's the final product: 

 

The artwork is held up by little metal clips that come with the cable system. Easy to change out, easy to re-arrange. Perfect for artwork.

 Scott even replaced the broken hinges on the Pink Kitchen's cabinet door. I'm thinking this kitchen should be good for another year or two before we re-vamp the space as a computer lab/homework area. In the meantime, we'll enjoy the girls' artwork and the ease of updating it!

Family Friendly: Kitchen Chalkboard

About the same time I started building, I quit grocery shopping. Actually, let's be honest, I quit grocery shopping in any organized way when we joined the CSA about four years ago because produce would just show up every week and I woudl figure out what to do with it. But when I started building last fall all grocery shopping stopped.

I used to be so organized. I would write our dinners for the week on one side of my shopping list and everything I needed to buy on the other side. It took one trip to the grocery store and I had everything I needed for the week. I also used to pay all of my bills on time. What happened to those days?

Someday I'd like to be that organized again, but for now, this will have to do. This is my new form of organization. We run out of something, one of us writes it on the board, whoever runs to the store next picks up everything on the board.

Except maybe the brown socks. Those are hard to find at Safeway. And Whole Foods.

By the way, don't judge my list. We get our week's worth of produce from the CSA, which is why there is nothing green on the list.

The chalk board is made from an old cabinet door that was attached to a cabinet I bought at the ReStore this spring. The rest of the cabinet is down in the basement now, with new doors on it, and I've got several more cabinet doors hanging out in the garage waiting for a similar treatment. They might make fun birthday presents for the girls' friends, right?

To make this bad boy, first I attached a 1x2 to the bottom of the door and then added some bead trim to it to keep chalk close by. Then I primed the whole thing with a few coats of magnetic primer, painted the frame my favorite shade of teal (RL Aged Mint), painted the center with chalkboard paint, and distressed the frame with fine grit sandpaper. I screwed it directly into my pantry door with countersunk wood screws and filled the holes with wood plugs that are easy to remove in case I decide to take it down some day.

But I can't imagine why I would do that!

The "S-Word"

Tonight while they brushed their teeth, Brynn and Callie were having an argument. In the midst of that argument, Brynn threatened to use the "s-word" on Callie. Later I asked her, "So what exactly IS the s-word?"

She held up two fingers (Dr. Evil style) and whispered, "Shut up."

Ooooh, right. I should have know that.

It's common to hear that kids are growing up too fast these days. Girls hit puberty earlier than ever before, they have sex earlier than ever before, and they fight for their independence before they are mature enough to handle it. One might expect that by second grade a child would know what the real s-word is and how to use it, especially if that child goes to public school and occasionally witnesses ugly outbursts from her parents. Even more so if at age five, that child screamed about the "faaaahking" rental car window that wouldn't roll up. (She was swiftly told that "faaaahk" is in fact not a real word and, not wanting to sound silly, that word magically disappeared from her vocabulary.) I'm thrilled to say that, although some children definitely are growing up too fast, my children have somehow been spared from that fate. So far.

If you build it, they will clean.

The bathroom cabinet we put in the girls' bathroom upon moving into this house nearly seven years ago has seen better days. Target furniture was not meant to last this long. Not only is it chipped and falling apart, it's gross, too. Covered in toothpaste, hair, and other unidentifiable goobers, the cabinet was beyond saving.

So last week, as I began to scrape the popcorn ceilings from the basement and quickly realized how much fun that is, I decided to design and build a new cabinet for the girls.

The girls' bathroom is on the list of projects to tackle after I finish the basement. I may have even promised to start it this coming fall if the girls can keep their sink and vanity toothpaste-free for the next six months. Ha. I won't hold my breath. In the spirit of clean, though, this cabinet is a place for the girls to keep their hair clutter, toothbrushes, and tubes (and tubes and tubes) of toothpaste. How did we end up with so much toothpaste? Maybe the cabinet will help them toward their goal of maintaining a clean bathroom (I did, in fact, say that with a straight face).

In anticipation of gutting and re-doing the girls' bathroom, I built the cabinet not only to grow with the girls and be one of few fixtures that will return to the bathroom after the remodel, but I also painted it colors to go with the new bathroom. The deep teal inside the cabinet and inside the drawers will blend perfectly with the new Mexican sink. I imagine that the rest of the bathroom will be white, or nearly all white.

Love that teal interior -- it's actually much lighter than it appears in this photo. As soon as I can pick up some more wood, I'll cut and paint the shelves for the interior.

This cabinet was a great learning experience for me. Designing it from scratch took some time and a few wasted materials, but I figure I will be building similar ones for other bathrooms eventually, so I took copious notes as I worked. In the end, here are the things I learned:

1. Do not be afraid of making drawer faces and cabinet doors fit tightly. They can always be made smaller, but not the other way around.


2. Krylon "crystal clear" spray finish is not actually clear. It's yellow. I will be budgeting some time for re-painting this piece in the next month or so. But it WAS on sale for $2.55/bottle at K Mart, so I now have four bottles which I will happily use on colored pieces from now on. Or sparingly over white. (2/4/2013 edited to add...I now almost exclusively use Vermont Natural Coatings PolyWhey for a clear sealer. Apply it in thin coats over white paint because it has a very faint yellow cast to it. But it's non-toxic, so totally worth the barely-there, only-notice-it-if-you-put-it-on-too-thick cast in my book.)


3. Using the table saw to route space for 1/8" MDF for drawer bottoms or cabinet backs works well (as seen on The New Yankee Workshop, thank you very much Norm Abrams). But the MDF cut to fit in those spaces must be square. And you should do the routing BEFORE cutting the wood to size. Routing small pieces on a crappy table saw is like asking to get a finger cut off.


4. Plan for drawer faces to be a dimensional wood size so that you don't have to rip a half inch off of a drawer face to make it fit. If I had made the drawer spaces a tad bigger or a tad smaller, I could have used 1x6s or 1x8s. Instead, I had to rip a 1x8 to fit -- always a risky procedure on my lame (but better than nothing) table saw.


5. Cabinet makers build overlay doors for a reason. They don't have to be as exact as inset doors. Duh. Maybe next time.


6. Cute trim takes a piece from boring to adorable -- it is okay to trim a cabinet within an inch of its life. In this case, that meant quarter round around the top (which covers a multitude of cutting sins, such as having a miter saw too small to cut a 1x8), beaded crown under the top, more beading around the middle (covering more mistakes but also adding fun detail), and base trim at the bottom. Trim really makes a piece look finished and covers mistake after mistake after mistake.


7. Learn your stinkin' math facts so that you don't end up with a drawer opening that is off by an inch and a half. But I'm the only one who will ever know!


8. Shelving jigs rock. The one I bought was not cheap (about $20 for a piece of plastic) but it allowed me to drill perfectly spaced holes for shelf pins on the inside of the cabinet. I will definitely get my money's worth for that overpriced piece of plastic.


9. A bathroom cabinet can't be too big, especially in a bathroom inhabited by two semi-high-maintenance girls. This one is 24"w x 40"t. It might hold most of the stuff it needs to hold.

So, yeah, I learned a lot. But am I totally stoked to have a new cabinet to organize the chaos that is the girls' bathroom? Absolutely. Am I thrilled that it has an endlessly wipe-able surface? Even more. Will I be making a second (although not identical) cabinet to go in the new basement bathroom? Without question. And eventually two for our bathroom, also. Yep, despite all of the "learning experiences" involved in building this, I love my new cabinet.

2/3/2013 edited to add...almost two years later this cabinet is still going strong! I don't know what we'd do in that bathroom without it.

A little like Groundhog Day

This is the third cube bookcase I've built from these Ana White plans and I love it just as much as the first two. I love that it keeps Callie's stuff organized, I love the size and weight and strength of it, and I especially love the color. It is painted in Ralph Lauren Aged Mint topped with two coats of polyurethane. I bought the Aged Mint a few years ago to match Callie's wrought iron bed and also used it on the locker cabinet I built for our entryway this fall. Callie was thrilled to see the bookcase (it was a birthday present, but don't worry -- it wasn't the ONLY birthday present) and she was even more excited that it isn't painted white!

For this bookcase, I had the lumber cut at Lowe's, which proved to be much easier than cutting it myself. The cuts are straight and square -- always a good thing in carpentry. This bookcase comes out big and heavy and sturdy. Exactly how I like my furniture.


Check out that perrrrfect corner cut! Scott squared up the miter saw for me a few weeks ago. Thanks, babe!

Quote of the Day

Having another snow day here. Somehow the girls found my basal thermometer and are taking their temperatures. Here is what Callie had to say.

Callie: Mom, my temperature is 90.5. I think I have a fever!

Mom: Anything below 100 is fine.

Callie: Well then I guess I have a cold.

Game storage...check!

This project started as a way to get our family board games out of the basement. Because, remember my big project? De-cluttering, de-carpeting, de-popcorn the ceiling...and on and on. This storage unit (see the plans here) is just a small cog in a very large wheel.

And it's done! All but the last coat of poly over the touch-ups on the trim.


What do you think? I would be happy if it were simply square and not ugly. In fact, I used MDF for this project (a rare occurrence because of the formaldehyde in the composition of MDF) because I thought this project would be a total FAIL and didn't want to waste money on expensive wood that would end up in the trash. But I think it's actually a lovely addition to our house and it doesn't seem like it's going to fall apart! The tall base trim on it really makes it look substantial and heavy (which it is) -- perfect for our big space. And, it was another good learning piece for me. I'm working up to big things, I tell you!


I put the whole thing together with glue and our pneumatic nailer since our cordless drill batteries are DEAD (new ones on order -- thankfully we have a lifetime warranty!). For the finish, I used Kilz low-voc latex primer and several coats of Sherwin-Williams ProClassic trim paint color-matched to our personal furniture white. I sanded between every coat and used several coats of Minwax Polycrylic in satin to harden up the finish. The finish turned out super smooth. Just the way I like it!

To make the drawer bases look more built-in, Scott and I removed the baseboard on that wall and pushed the whole unit flush with the wall before cutting the baseboard to fit tightly up against the trim on the drawer bases. This may cause some problems at Christmastime...the drawers are encroaching on our tree's space. Other than that, I love the placement of the drawers and the super soft olive green corduroy, too.

Putting the upholstered top together was a bit of a process. At least, it took some thought. I spent about two weeks dreading buying expensive foam for the cushion and then having to sew a cover for it. Cutting the fabric for the welting, sewing the welting, attaching the welting...okay, maybe it was mostly dealing with welting that I was dreading, and I didn't want to do it without welting. But, really, my box cushions usually come out far from perfect and I wanted this to be perfect. You can see this piece of furniture when you walk through the front door of our home. I pass it every time I walk from the kitchen downstairs to the family room or my bedroom. I couldn't take looking at an awful cushion every time I walk by.

So one night around midnight I was taking a long shower. I find long, hot showers to be a great catalyst for creative thought. I was brooding over this box cushion and its welting when I realized...I could make a no-sew top! I didn't have a piece of MDF large enough to fit the top of all three drawer bases, but I had lots of long, skinny pieces. If I put them together with my pocket hole jig, drywall screws, and glue, I could add 1" foam to the top (which I already had), wrap the whole thing in batting, and staple the fabric to it.

Duh. How could I have been so dense in the first place?

Here is what the cushion looked like while it was in the works (upside down):

See all those pocket holes? Here's a closer-up shot of them:
The pocket holes create one solid piece of MDF (thanks to Ana White for teaching me this trick!), plus there are some little skinny pieces attached on each end. I glued and screwed those with regular countersink holes because they seemed too fragile for pocket holes. I split the skinny MDF strips a few times before I got the big part of the countersink hole big enough for the top of the screw.

Once I had the MDF put together, I spray-glued the foam on top, turned the whole thing upside-down on the batting, stapled on the batting and then stapled on the fabric. I had enough fabric to run it lengthwise without having to sew anything, but I wanted the pattern in the corduroy to run perpendicular to the length of the bench. The bench didn't need to look any longer than it already is. So, I did the old curtain trick -- a full width in the middle plus a half width on either side. I've got a ton of fabric left over, probably close to three yards. Since I only paid $4/yard for it, I'm not bummed to have so much extra. I'm actually looking forward to using it again!

As with any big project I tackle, I'm pleased with the outcome but, most of all, happy to be done!

Psst...for more on how I built the bench, check out this post.

I wonder if this means I'll be cleaning up board games?

Richard at Lowe's rocks. He cut up ALL my MDF (nearly 3 full sheets worth) on Tuesday (for $0.25/cut), and he got every cut right. I think when I am finished with this project, I will bring him photos...because it was some major work for him. Every piece of my three storage bases is square! So different from me trying to wrangle a giant piece of wood across our undersized table saw. It's really amazing how simple it is to build something when all of your pieces are square.


Anyway, so the giant board game storage bench is underway, as you can see. Boxes are built, faces for the drawers are built. Today I'll be filling holes, sanding, and priming. I'll head out to Lowe's to buy drawer glides which I have NO idea how to install, but I guess that will be a new, er...fun, learning experience.

I'm also trying out the hardware on the drawer face. It's an extra-long black cup pull that looks like hammered iron. I think I like it -- big and chunky enough to fit the furniture, black to tie in with the myriad of black frames on the wall where the bench will live, and on sale for $4/each. Not bad.

Now I'm starting to wonder...once I get this giant bench and all of its storage capacity into my house, and I fill those giant drawers with board games, am I going to spend every afternoon picking up board game pieces after my kids do a post-school raid of the games? Right now the games are out of sight, and kind of out of mind. Not for long, though. Hmmm...maybe this isn't such a good idea.

Classical conditioning and training your kid

About four years ago, as we prepared to adopt Libbie, I had an insatiable appetite for dog-related books. I wanted to be prepared. What I learned, mostly, is that if you give a dog food treats while she's doing what you want her to do, she'll do that thing more often and sometimes even on command. How great is that? So simple and, as we're finding out with our kids, so applicable to other situations. Even people situations.

Like, say, a family with a dad who would love to spend Sunday watching football but who has two little girls who would rather not. Little girls generally aren't known for their love for football. Even our kids, who would watch grass grow if it were on TV, don't sit and watch football well.

Enter classical conditioning for kids.

In our family, classical conditioning must be done with food treats that are extra special. In dog training, these are called "high value" treats. For our pooch Libbie, it would be salmon skin, cut up hot dogs, chicken...you get the idea. Her very favorite treats. For the kids, it's processed snacks that they don't get any other time. Today it is Chipotle BBQ potato chips (the Boulder kind), although pretzels or crackers with smoked salmon dip or salt and vinegar chips work just as well (as long as nobody has cuts on their fingers -- then it turns into a salt-in-the-wound screaming fit).

So far, the classical conditioning seems to be working. The girls don't love football yet, but they are asking questions about the game and they are sitting still while they watch with their dad. I'm pretty sure that with enough tasty treats they could actually grow to love watching football. THAT, my friends, would be a major victory around here.

Ten years and counting.

Photo care of Nick and Natalie Foy. :)

Why is it called wedded bliss? Bliss? I mean, really. Bliss? That phrase was coined with sarcasm, right? Marriage is not a relationship with a house-trained, obedient dog. It is not a contract with a robot. It is one life shared by two people, people who can sometimes be stubborn, prideful, arrogant, conceited, and ignorant. What could possibly be blissful about that?

On December 29th, Scott and I will celebrate ten years of marriage. I know ten years is nothing, at least not in the real scheme of things. Scott's grandparents have been married for 60 years. We have friends whose parents have been married for 40 years. Ten years is barely a blip on the radar screen compared to those marriages that have stood the test of time.

But, we also have friends who divorced after two years. We have friends who are single and wondering whether the right person is out there or whether they are even meant to get married. In ten years, we've created a life for ourselves. We have two children who are miraculously well-adjusted (so far, at least). We have a dog who thinks we're better than a raw beef rib and a cat who sticks by our sides as if we regularly bathed in catnip. We've bought and sold one condo, bought a house, bought two cars, four Apple computers, a lot of furniture and we're only a little bit in debt. That is, assuming you consider a mortgage just a "little bit." We've encountered causes that touch our hearts and organizations that inspire us to give beyond our comfort level. We've made friends -- good friends. Friends whom we trust with our children and with our emotions. We've found a neighborhood that we love and a church where we feel at home. We are blessed.

Scott and I laugh together. We communicate through glances and raised eyebrows and nods and postures and occasionally a well-placed grope. Sometimes Scott can talk me into scratching his back and once he even rubbed my feet. That was a moment I'll never forget. We serve each other and balance each other's weaknesses. We listen to one another and believe in one another, we inform each other and broaden each other's worlds. We introduce each other to new things and we challenge one another.

Occasionally we slam doors. Once I threw a full Nalgene bottle at the wall. When Scott filled the hole left by the bottle, he repaired both the wall and my pride. Sometimes we call each other names and blame each other when things go wrong. Sometimes it feels like we are speaking different languages. We're not perfect. We're people.

But we're people who love each other. We're people who forgive each other. Over and over and over again.

On the day we got married, we believed that forgiveness would be the key to a long and happy marriage. We stand by that today.

Here's to ten more years of bliss!

The finished locker cabinet

I was actually done with this before we left for vacation last week, but the baskets hadn't arrived yet and I didn't really want to post the finished product without the baskets installed. So, here it is!


The teal paint is called "aged mint" by Ralph Lauren. It's the same color as Callie's wrought iron bed and the frames on the artwork above her bed. I was originally planning to paint the cabinet the same white as our trim ("the right white" by Restoration Hardware) but got bored just thinking about it and decided to go for teal instead.

The cabinet is made out of solid pine with paneling on the back. I added eight inches to the height of the original plan (to accommodate the drawers) and took off about 15 inches in width. Each locker has two hooks on the inside, for hanging the girls' backpacks and lunch boxes. Callie's locker is on the left -- you can see her school calendar hanging in there. It is so great having everything in one place. The baskets hide Libbie's collars and leashes, our library books, and my purse and the drawers house our cell phones (plugged in for charging), extra keys, chapstick, sunblock, and sunglasses. Originally I hadn't planned to put hooks on the side for keys, but Scott insisted. Not so pretty, but very useful!

Here is what I learned from building my first piece of furniture: BUY STRAIGHT WOOD. Duh. Probably going to the hardware store without my children would help me accomplish that next time. Besides the crap wood which made it impossible to build a square cabinet, I'm very pleased with my first adventure in furniture building!

A sneak peak

My new entryway locker cabinet, inspired by this one by Ana White. Not quite square but not bad for my first shot at furniture building. Ready to prime and paint.


And, proof that I actually DID do it all myself.

Not your resolution, your story.

I recently finished Donald Miller's new book, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, and as soon as I finished the last page, I promptly turned back to the beginning and started over again. Yes, it's that good. And that transformative.

I've never been a fan of New Year's resolutions, but, here's something I can run with. It's a blog post written by Donald Miller where he explains how improving your life story might be a better idea than setting goals that have no real context. This whole idea of improving your "story" builds on what he wrote in A Million Miles. Even if you haven't read the book (yet), you should check out his post. It will give you a whole new (and healthier) perspective on resolutions.

Edited to add: Today, Miller wrote a second post with some ideas for how to create more memorable scenes in order to live a better story. I love this idea and have been trying to do it more often and have, at times, made a fool of myself. But my children will remember those scenes fondly!

New entry closet.

I first learned about mudrooms in 2003 when I read Sarah Susanka's book, The Not So Big House. Even in a small, efficient house I remember her singing the praises of a well-organized mudroom. I've wanted one ever since, but also had lots of other wishes on my house wish list when we bought our current home, and a mudroom wasn't my top priority. Plus, any houses that had mudrooms already in them were way out of my price range. When we moved into this house four years ago, I knew I'd want to re-organize the entry closet to serve as a mudroom on a miniature scale. At least it could be an organized catchall for bags, coats, shoes, hats and gloves. So, why did I finally do it? Well, I was inspired by this blog entry and by my in-laws coming to town. They're handy -- both with home improvement projects and with watching the kids. Scott told me to think of a job for them, so I figured it was time to work on the closet. I pulled out a pad of graph paper (I have a few of them stashed around the house for when I need a quick place to put inspiration to paper) and started drawing.

This habit of sketching out my life on graph paper is something I learned (or maybe inherited?) from my mother. We used to cut out paper representations of furniture to scale, sketch my bedroom on graph paper, and then move the furniture around on paper before moving it around in my room. I'll never forget her excitement when she found a professional-style graph board that came with furniture in typical shapes and sizes to move around on the graph board. So, I guess what I'm saying is that I come by my graph paper obsession honestly. Unfortunately my math skills and my creativity don't often match up. Here are the plans I made for my miniature mudroom/entry closet:


Here's a photo of the closet before (although I'd already started emptying stuff from the top shelf before I thought to take a photo):


And our closet now:


I really wanted the inside to be the color of a ripe tomato but ended up with a closet the color of an almost ripe tomato or a ripe chili pepper. Fitting, I guess, since the name of the paint was chili pepper. There was no tomato-colored paint. The closest was called grenadine and, although it was only one number over on the color spectrum from chili pepper, it was too pink for me. I don't do pink if I can help it. Normally when I can't find the color I want, I mix my own paint and have the paint guy match it. But, really...this is a closet. Not worth that much effort, right?

The new closet makes much better use of space than the old one. The kids can now reach their jackets and put their shoes away in their sliding baskets. They've each got a cubby, which I'm thinking will be used for hats, gloves, scarves and other cold weather gear, but for now it's got their ballet backpacks. The cubby shelves are angled so that they come all the way to the front of the closet, making the best use of every last inch of space. The girls and I have our shoes tossed in the baskets, which works well for us. Scott's shoes are enormous, so he keeps his in our bedroom closet but was thrilled to find out he was allotted a basket to do with whatever he desired. So, his is filled with his running gear (lumbar water pack, ipod, and of course his Cleveland Sucks button pinned to the front of the basket).

Putting this closet together was a bit more labor intensive and precise than other closets we've done. We used stock Home Depot organizers on the girls' closets but I knew that I wouldn't be able to customize a stock organizer as much as I wanted to for this closet. So, we bought two sheets of MDF (only needed one, but after the inevitable screw up we were back at the Depot buying another), four lengths of 1x2, four Closetmaid sliding baskets, a metal closet rod, and a gallon of paint. I think the final cost was around $200 for the whole project...and worth every dime.