In The Jungle Part 2

When I did our baby's nursery with the glow in the dark starry night mural on the ceiling, I was inspired to revamp the rest of it.  I've had the jungle theme since our now eight year old was a baby, but I really became inspired when my kids told started singing the "In the Jungle, the mighty Jungle" song.  I wrote about the ceiling mural and how to do it here in the first post about the nursery, but I still didn't show the whole finished product.  I was absolutely thrilled with how it turned out!

 

 

Obviously, this isn't a crib anymore.  Jackson figured out how to pull himself up and flip his feet over the rails so we transitioned him to a toddler bed.  I was so sad though!  It is just a tangible reminder that he isn't a baby anymore!  Anyways, I found the letters spell his name at A.C. Moore and painted them with the undiluted paint from doing the wash for the ceiling mural.  I loved this bedding from Target, but sadly they don't have it anymore.  They do have some other cute jungle themed sets that are pretty inexpensive.  We had quite a few stuffed animals that fit the theme so I set those out to decorate with.  Jack Jack loves his giraffe from my mom, although they occasionally are on the outs and Giraffe has apparently committed some travesty according to my two year old and is not allowed to be on the bed.  Two year old problems...

One of my kids' favorite songs is "In the Jungle" which is basically what inspired our nursery so it seemed like the logical choice to use that for some word wall art:

Getting Our Feet Wet

Embarrassingly enough, I actually kinda sorta forgot about my blog for a while.  And by a while, I mean for about 6 months...

These past few months have been challenging and amazing and truly demanded all of my attention.  At the time of my last post, we were in process of getting licensed to be foster parents.  Not long afterwards, our license was granted and we got our feel wet really quickly when we were placed with a precious nearly one year old little girl for two months within weeks.  I can honestly say that giving her back was one of the hardest things I have had to do and I'll probably write a post about it all later.  Our county is swamped with Child Protective Services cases right now and I recently heard that there are over 500 kids in foster care here.  Almost immediately, we started getting calls for other kids.  The week we were placed with our current foster daughter, I got four calls asking me if I would take kids.  I'm only licensed to be able to take one child right now, otherwise I probably would have more.  It is probably a good thing though, since I really have my hands full at the moment with our three boys and our sweet little infant girl whom we have had for four months now.  I can't really give details about her, but she has some major health issues (thankfully doing really well!) and taking care of her and working with social services has become really like a big part time job.  Our boys are all doing great and absolutely love her and are passionate about what we are doing.  I dearly want to raise them to be men who see the needs of others around them and are willing to step up and do something about it.  We try to shelter them from the bulk of information about the situations we are involved in, but it is important they grow up knowing that others are far less fortunate than us.

Mirror Mirror

It is hard for me to believe, but we just reached the five year mark of being in our house!  We've done quite a few house projects since Brian is incredibly handy and in a strange sort of way, random projects seem to qualify as date night for us!  One project that I've wanted to do since we moved in though is to replace the big builder mirror in our master bathroom with two framed mirrors so it would look a little more special.  Our house has all white cabinets with white plastic laminate counter tops so it looks kind of "blah" so the mirror seemed like an easy fix to give it some extra personality.  However, I fully acknowledge this is totally a first world problem since even though I might wish I had nicer counters, they still work great and look really clean.  I found a couple mirrors that I loved at Target on clearance for only $30 apiece so I thought it might be time to give it a try!

Brian took down the old mirror.  It was glued to the wall since it is so close to the window casings that there was no room for the builder to slide it into tracks that they sometimes use.  To get it down, he used a hammer and had at it!  Let's just say the kids were horrified since this qualifies as something that we've told them to never ever do...

Underneath, we found wall paper from the previous owners!  Apparently the builder had installed it since it was under the mirror.  Got to love the mid 90's colors!  As a side note, whenever a builder has installed wallpaper, be very very careful peeling it!  Typically, they don't always do it right and prime first which means the paper is glued directly to the drywall.  If this is the case, it is incredibly easy to peel chunks of drywall off.  This was the case in our powder room and so we just papered over it rather than replace all of the drywall because it was so damaged.  We peeled this paper really carefully and then Brian puttied over it to repair the damage.  Then we decided that it was too damaged since the layers of drywall had separated from the weight of the mirror and kept puffing up no matter how much we tried to repair.  So we went to plan B.

But He's Good

I have to apologize for my six month hiatus in letting my site go dark with absolutely no explanation.  Brian and I have been really busy due to a huge decision that we made in the fall and it hasn't been quite time to share it yet until now. 

While it doesn't make a lot of sense on the surface, we really feel like we are supposed to become foster parents.  I know, we already have three little boys, live in a three bedroom house and I have fibromyalgia.  And oh yeah, I just turned 30 years old.  Definitely not your typical foster parent profile.  But, I can't get away from it and I know that if I don't do it, I'm going to regret it.  Sometimes God calls us to do things that don't make outward sense because that is where He works best.  God doesn't work in the ways that we expect and I always think back to one of my favorite quotes from C.S. Lewis, "Safe?... Who said anything about safe? 'Course he isn't safe.  But he's good."  Truth is, I'm scared to death because I have no real idea about what we are about to step into, no idea when that call will come and who that precious child is that is about to appear on my doorstop.  But, God is good and if this is what He wants for our family, we are going to do it.

"Break Free"

With drop in temperatures combined with the rain from Hurricane Sandy, it is really difficult to type today.  While my hands have fortunately been doing a little better lately, it has still been a challenge to do all my normal stuff thanks to my fibromyalgia.  I find it really ironic that it has decided to settle into my hands making it almost impossible to move my fingers some days, especially when I want to write.  And yet, I feel so thankful since I have nothing worse to deal with unlike so many others.

Despite the pain and difficulty, I really wanted to write today (or more accurately, these several days since it has taken me that long to type out this post since my fingers will only let me do a few lines at a time).  The past few weeks have been hugely encouraging for me in regards to my fibro.

Halloween: Angry Birds Style

Last year, we decided it would be really fun to dress up thematically for Halloween.  At least, I decided that would be fun while the boys would still go for it and Brian would humor me.  I've been looking back nostalgically this year since the boys thought it was so fun dressing up as a group that they want to do it again this year just this time Avengers style.  This means, however, that being the only girl, I automatically get to be Black Widow with the cat suit as I accompany a miniature Hulk, Captain America and Thor around the neighborhood.  I'm somewhat doubtful that would be as cute as last year's white angry bird costume on me!

So many people asked me though how I made last year's costumes that I thought I would share it since it was really easy, and as I usually strive for, really economical. 

"Funny" Fish Tacos

As many of my friends and family have heard me bemoan, Mexican food is pretty hard to come by were we live in the South.  And by Mexican food, I mean things that actually resemble what I ate when I was in Mexico and when we used to live in Southern California.  We've had to explain what a tamale is ("no, you don't eat the corn husk"), fish is actually normal in a taco, and chile rellanos are not smothered in velveeta.  We've found a couple good places, but I have been attempting to create healthy versions of some of our favorites.

I cook a lot since it so much cheaper to feed our three ravenous boys healthily.  I've been working on healthy and quick recipes that I can easily make in about half an hour since between homework, soccer and bath time with our crew, nights are pretty busy!  So last night I came up with a new recipe for healthy fish tacos: