Monkey Faces

Yesterday a bored little monkey begged me to let her take pictures with my digital camera. She has used a disposable camera before, but never my digital. She begged. I gave in. She IS nearly five, after all. Here's a sampling of what I found on the camera 20 minutes later:

drawstring bags are my best friends

Anyone who has a little boy knows that they start accumulating toy cars at an early age. And before you know it, they have quite the collection.

These cars are mostly small, and easily misplaced. I don't know about everyone else, but I find little matchbox cars ALL OVER THE HOUSE. (Also: random snack stashes...)

And if you pick up these cars and put them in the toybox at the end of the day, you will inevitably have a toybox that ends up tipped upside down every morning in order for your car-obsessed toddler to fish EVERY LAST CAR out of it. So, I made them a new home. Thankfully, Ryker's collection is still small enough to be contained in a cute little bag. It works out nicely. Ryker knows that THIS is where his cars live. He (sometimes) shoves them back in there for safekeeping. He no longer dumps out the entire toybox first thing every morning. And a little drawstring bag is easier to store than one of those plastic totes or matchbox car organizer boxes.

I used this tutorial to make mine (because I am still learning to sew, and could not figure out how to make one without a step by step tutorial). And then, since Anicka has her own troublesome collection of Littlest Petshop toys, and My Little Pony toys and itty bitty animals...
I made her a bag, too. Hers has kitties on the inside fabric, and puppies on the outside. And she loves it, which is always a plus. Yay for staying organized!

Cats are Prohibited in this Area

You've all seen these signs, yes? The Neighborhood Watch notices?

Well. There is one posted near the entrance to our apartment complex. Anicka, the dear, thinks it means No Cats Allowed. I let her think this. It has stopped her from asking me why we can't have a pet. (Apparently "because those are the rules" is not a sufficient answer. There must be a posted notice in order to convince her. )

Post Script:
If you squint and tilt your head a little it kind of looks like a cat, right? A cat with a very pointy goiter.

More stuff about my living room

We've been married for nearly six years, and we just barely bought our first piece of brand-new furniture. No joke. I'm sure I've mentioned before that all of our furniture was either thrifted or gifted. It always seemed a little pointless to me to fix up an apartment that seemed like such a temporary home. (Not to mention that I hate spending money on things that aren't essential. Which might change if we ever have extra money lying around. Someday.) Well. Six years later...We got a new entertainment center:

And I painted our old, ugly corner-shelf to match it:

Don't they look nice together?I mean, besides the fact that I need to rearrange our wall decorations, now. But I think it's quite an improvement.
This is what it used to look like: (Bonus: a little baby Anicka!)What you can't see in that picture is that there was an equally mismatched media tower on the other side of the television. Ugly. I hated that there was nowhere to keep the dvd player or the dvr on the dinky little table that held our tv. So most of it went on the corner shelf, (which you can't really see in that picture, but trust me, it was cluttered and awful). But now it's all contained in one lovely place, and my corner shelf has been freed up for nicer things.
We also got a new cover for our couch, and I made some pillows to dress it up:
I can't bring myself to buy a new couch just yet. Our old one works fine, it's just a little bit ugly. See?Cute baby, ugly couch.
But a couch cover makes a huge difference.

I'm thinking about painting this little mosaic table to match the corner shelf, but I'm not sure if that would be overkill. What do you think?:

Too much matchiness? I'm not sure. There's that beautiful vase again, though. The one that I'm 'borrowing' *wink wink* from Eric. This month it's dressed up with flowers to celebrate Spring. (Which officially starts tomorrow! Woot!)
And, can you see the print leaning up against it? That some of Randi's photography. She's pretty awesome at it.
Anyway. I suppose that's enough rambling for now. *sigh* Hopefully one of these days I'll have a lot of fun decorating a house.

Photo Tag

So. I was catching up on my blog reading a couple of days ago (sorry guys, I've been busy) and realized that my buddy Randi tagged me. Like... a month ago. My bad. But here we go, a month later:
For this tag you have to take pictures of the following things, as-is. No cleaning up allowed. Yikes. Luckily I did this on a pretty good day. (I actually took all of these pictures on Tuesday, but just barely found the time to put them up.) Sorry for the bad lighting in the photos but, well... there's bad lighting in our place.

Your Favorite Room:
Probably the living room, since we spend most of our time in here. It's the t.v. room, the computer room, the dining room, and the biggest room in the apartment.

Plus, we've been slowly fixing it up, since it's the first thing you see when you walk in the door. But I'll talk more about that tomorrow, or else this post will be too long to handle. And just so you don't think it's always this clean, here's what it looked like when I got home from YW last night:

Next up is the Bathroom:

(Lucky it was clean today!)
And then the Laundry Room which was... um... less clean. So instead, here's a picture of the laundry room in my dream house:

Did you enjoy that nice distraction? Good, because you're not getting a picture of my laundry room. I'll give you a hint, though. It doesn't look anything like THAT. ^

Favorite Pair of Shoes:

Those would be my Mohops, which my husband bought me for our anniversary last year. Because he's awesome.

Self - Potrait:

(ugh, no make-up)
It's hard to get a picture of yourself in mid-air...

Refrigerator:


I hope this means the outside of my fridge, because that's all you're getting. Hah!

Closet:

Kitchen Sink:

What Your Kids are Doing Now:

Eating some dogs in a blanket. :)
And I'm going to tag Ashlie, Tiffany and Brooke. :)

Artistic Inspiration

I want to be like Alisa Burke when I grow up. For real.

Barely a blog post at all...

...but I feel as if I need to update this page with something. So.






















What Anicka is Currently Obsessed With:

• Littlest Pet Shop
• Rhyming ("Mom, these all rhyme! Listen: dog, frog, log, bog, sog, rog... are those real words? What rhymes with puppy? Shmuppy? Is that a real word?")
  
• Writing and Mailing Letters
• Turning Five (which happens next month)
• Wearing Makeup
  

What Ryker is Currently Obsessed With:

• Cars
  
• Choo Choos
• Copying Everything his Big Sister does
• Learning New Words (and repeating them over and over and over)
  
• Tea Parties (No, really.)