The photo above is of me in Branson, MO, wearing the pants I show how to alter below.
If you got the title reference, you know that I watch American Idol. I enjoy music reality TV. It often results in goosebumps. It’s full of feeling and movement and unexpectedly special moments. Know Pentatonix? We saw them first on the Sing Off, a show where acapella groups competed, nauseatingly hosted by Nick Lachey.
I was excited when I saw Idol was coming back. In fact, while I don’t know Katy Perry’s (the new token female judge) music well, I really like her. As a fellow PK (BOTH her parents were pastors), I feel like I “get” her. And she has such a great spirit.
Even though it had been two years since Idol last aired, the Chaplain or I would make a Randy Jackson reference almost weekly. His “For me, for you, Dawg,” just doesn’t have a better translation in American English. Also, “I don’t know, Dawg.” or “That was pitchy.”
To get back to the Sing Off, we enjoyed that show so much that when they went on tour, we bought tickets and went to the concert. I am almost embarrassed to admit it. But it was such an adventure. I was fascinated to see who else watched the show (a whole theater-full of people, as it turns out). The concert was fantastic, and sticks out as one of my favorite date nights.
Where am I going with this? *grin* Stick with me.
About a month ago, I watched War Room with my husband, mom, and three oldest kids. I didn’t know much going in other than that it had to do with prayer. It was tough to watch. I’ve felt the weight of spiritual warfare in our own house lately, and that is a big theme in the film.
One of the powerful effects of the movie was learning to think about the prayer closet as a literal thing. Sure, in the past people may have prayed in closets, and it’s even biblical. In the movie, it’s one of the central themes.
So when I came upstairs recently and found my daughter in her closet, asking me if I’d noticed what she was doing (I hadn’t), she stopped me dead in the middle of a rant when she showed me her prayer closet.
In our second apartment, year two of our marriage, we painted feature walls in the living room, kitchen, dining room, and master bedroom. Our ground floor apartment got little light and had all white walls. Before the feature walls, our living space was both dark and stark. Not a good combination.
My favorite wall was the orange faux finish we did in the dining room. I don’t really like orange, so I don’t know why I ended up going with that color, but it was rich and deep, and made me happy every time I walked past it. I was sad to paint it over with primer when our lease was up at the end of the year and we moved into our first home.
While I miss my orange feature wall, I could never make myself do anything so bold in this house. Each time I paint a room, it means my kids have to fend for themselves for 24-48 hours, which they don’t mind, but means that laundry, dishes, and cooking aren’t happening. Plus, my energy waxes and wanes, and if I paint it and hate it, I may not have the get-up-and-go to fix it for months.
I don’t know about you, but for me, winters have gotten harder as each year has gone by. My body and mind suffer from the lack of light. Many times when I start getting my energy back in the spring, it is spent working to bring more light to the house to help with the dark next winter. I paint lighter colors on the walls, add timers for my lights (the poor man’s smart bulb), and make new pillow covers and quilts.
During one of these nesting pushes, I painted two walls in the gold living room a shade of cream, thinking it would help bring more light in. I had already painted my dining room blush pink and loved it, and figured this would have the same effect.
In 2015, we upgraded from a full size mattress to a queen. Our Ikea bed frame, which pre-dated our marriage, was no longer able to hold our mattress. I had a good idea of what I wanted to replace it, but I couldn’t find anything that I was willing to pay for that looked like what I wanted. I looked for plans to build a frame, but I didn’t really like any of them, either, so I decided to do it on my own.
Here are my original plans.
I built my frame out of 2×4’s, 1×10’s, 1×4’s, and some scrap wood.
I based the 2×4 frame’s measurements on the dimensions of the mattress, with a little added width and length (1-2 inches) so that we could change the sheets without too much of a struggle.
Everyone helped.
One of my favorite projects I’ve done with the kids was our watercolor silhouettes.
We started out in a dark room with white 8×11″ card stock, a pencil, and a flashlight.
The person whose profile I was tracing stood in front of blank wall (or in our case, a door) while the other person was about ten feet back from them holding the flashlight. You can use painter’s tape to hold the paper up while you trace.
I had my six year old at the time hold the flashlight. If I had it to do over again, I might have rigged some kind of tripod up to hold the flashlight, as there were a lot of moving parts between the flashlight and the subject! A benefit to having an actual person hold the flashlight is that they can move forward or back to help get the outline on the paper to be crisp, and the right size. I recognize that this is super low tech, but it was part of the fun of the project for us.
