A new bed for Big Boy!

Change is a coming...slowly but surely. The kids are growing up doing more things big kids do. In fact Boopy found that she grew this summer and can officially pedal her big girl bike all herself now that her feet fully reach the pedals! Big Boy has gotten to where he can almost get himself completely dressed on his own. He sometimes struggles with his shirt and occasionally gets the underwear on backwards, but hey at least he tries! As we prepare for them both to be bigger kids and less and less the toddlers and babies that they were, we been working towards the great room switch project. Our upstairs is still in a complete state of disaster, but slowly and surely looking more and more like a nice livable space.

This weekend, we finished the trim paint half of our bedroom, enough to move in the furniture (3 bookcases and a futon) from the guest room. There are still boxes of stuff to go through and books to organize but it's really getting there and looking quite nice. I took "in progress" pictures but haven't loaded to the computer just yet. What I do have though, is Big Boy's new room/bed as of last night. We managed to get the new bed, which is a twin/twin loft bed put up as well as the air hockey table he was gifted from Big Anne's son, Russell. The bed is one bed up top, one trundle in the bottom drawer, a pull out desk, built in dresser and cool storage/hideout in the back. I have better "in progress" pics of his bed with my room pics that I'll load this week. Below is the quick cell phone picture I took to share of the kids already enjoying the bed.

Next weekend we'll work on moving Big Boy's stuff over to his room and maybe getting Boopy's new bed up in their current room. We still need to get paint for Boopy's room which may have to wait until the following weekend depending on time and money. Whew....one little idea and we've got a project that may just take us the rest of the year.

Hope you all had as productive a weekend as we did!

We took LABOR day seriously....

There are times that my life simply makes me tired. Tired when I think about all we try to squeeze in, even if it all sounds like a good idea at the time. Labor Day week was no exception. Papa Vaughn ended up with the entire weekend off, only to work Monday night. So...I got the great idea that we should start in on "Operation Room Change". We've been talking for some time about switching the upstairs rooms around and giving the kids their own rooms. To do this however, we need to clear out what is currently the guest room, the first room at the top of the stairs.

Our upstairs consists of 3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms and our laundry room. The guest room currently houses 3 bookcases, 1 futon and misc items. These will all move into the master bedroom. We are blessed enough to have a very large bedroom, one that in the original floor plans could have been divided to be a master and smaller bedroom. In order to move the guest room furniture into our room however, we realized that we needed to redo the layout. So, we started "Operation Room Change" by overhauling our room. This is a good thing as it has been long overdue. Our room has our home computer in it and has become the room that things get put in and the door shut. This said, we really needed to reorganize and clean up old unnecessary papers, etc. While starting in on our room clean up with took all day Saturday, we realized that since we were rearranging why not go ahead and paint too. Yeah, let's just make it a really big project!

So, Sunday, after I did a photo shoot for Ashyln's 7 months pictures in Madera, we grabbed lunch and went to Lowe's to pick out paint. The rest of Sunday was spent moving furniture around and prepping for painting on Monday. We did take some time to rest and had Big Darren, Carolyn and her sister, Kelly over for dinner. They then stayed at our house with the kiddos put in bed while Papa Vaughn and I skipped out to see the 9:30 pm showing of "The Dark Knight". Which, by the way, we both loved!!! It definitely lived up to my expectations.

Monday, I had a photo shoot for baby Ryan's 5 month pictures in Clovis, then went home to paint our room. Of course we had big helpers who were really excited to paint. They didn't do too bad. Boopy ended up with the most paint on her body, which thankfully I had decided to strip her down to her pull-up beforehand and put her hair in a pony-tail. Papa had to go to work at 5 which left me to finish the trim at the top of the wall and the second coat. We ended up sleeping on our mattress on the floor that night.

At this point in time, we have our room mostly put back together. We've flipped where all our furniture was to opposite sides of the room and I'm really liking it thus far. We've haven't moved any of the guest furniture in yet as we still have the ceiling to paint, which we'll get to in a couple of weeks. This weekend we'll all in Vegas again. Papa's there for a Photoshop Conference and I'm going to help Guya and D move as well as 2 photo shoots. Yes, our life is tiring, but never boring!!!

Enjoy the pictures below!

My Little Carpenters

I didn't realize that by having children, I'd actually be giving myself little house helpers. That is, creatures that "really like to help"! For the most part I don't mind and I'm anxiously awaiting the time that they are expected to help and really share in cleaning up their share of stuff around the house. What I do love is their eagerness to learn and offer help and to want to try it all themselves.

So in an effort to organize the kids room and help in the situation of the ever expanding library they have, we picked up a new bookcase for them on Saturday. Papa Vaughn had to work in the evening so I was going to leave the bookcase for him to put together Sunday morning. But then I got bored with laundry and all the other chores taunting me, so I decided to remind myself how handy I used to be. I opened up the box to review the directions and once I got started I couldn't stop! The kids were so intrigued and couldn't wait to get their hands on the tools. Big Boy actually hammered some of the connectors in for me and then held the sides still for me while I screwed them together. Really a big helper! Boopy wanted to help a little more than i needed but as we all know she thinks she can do anything!

And not to be out done by big brother, Boopy had to give the screwdriver a try.

Always time for a quick game of peek-a-boo! (We finished the bookcase after bath time.)

Finished project!

And because I was able to pull out books we had stored since there was no room, I quickly found the new bookcase filled up. So, I left the old one in the room with all the "Boopy" size books and their coloring stuff.