It was the eggs...

It was the eggs. The eggs were the straw that broke this tired momma's back. I have been contemplating lately about making a blog to record my experiences raising 4 boys and a newborn girl all under the age of 6. I have been hesitant though, because I just don't know how many people will actually believe me. But after the day that I have had today, I decided that I need to jot down my experience in hopes that writing will keep me from running away to a remote island in the pacific ( because trust me,  it has crossed my mind several times today). So here is my story of today...

Monday: Monday's are rough. Everyone is tired from playing hard all weekend. Weekends around here provide quality time with dad, and so we play hard on the weekends. Mom is tired, dad is tired, dog is tired, kids are tired. Needless to explain further, Monday's are just hard. I know that Monday's are always difficult, and today I should have known better than try to catch upon laundry from this weekend. However, McLane was at Jill's house, Cooper was at school, and swaggy P was asleep, so I figured that it would be an appropriate time to fold the laundry. AJ and Brayden were playing outside with their tools. After folding one load of laundry AJ came into my room and told me that he and Brayden had been busy working. I figured he was talking about working with his tools, so I didn't really think much of it. But I walked into the kitchen about 2 minutes later to find egg cartons all over the floor. As I kept scanning the room, I found about 6 eggs smashed on the kitchen floor, the fridge open, the back door open, and the remaining 2&1/2 dozen eggs thrown all over the back patio.... Perfect! They sure had been working. :)
At is point I had a decision to made. Do I scream and shout and cry and clean? Or do I laugh and teach and clean? I decided to choose the laughing option. I talked to them calmly about how eggs are not balls, or toys, and that we shouldn't throw them. Then I got busy cleaning it up. Meanwhile, as I am cleaning, Jill brings McLane home through the back gate because we didn't answer the door. AFter explaining to her the mess that I'm cleaning, Daisy decides to let herself out for a morning run. That's when the tears started. ( anyone that knows Daisy will know exactly why I cried when she got out).
Neighbors were texting telling me that Daisy was out. A couple of neighbors came over to let me know that she was running around. Paige was asleep so I couldn't chase her too far from home. After an hour of her running and me attemping to lure her with pieces of cheese thrown all over the street, Brayden decided to wake paigr upby jumping on her face. so with a run away dog and a screaming newborn, I loaded the kids in the car to chase down Daisy. The first time she saw that it was us in the car she ran away. So we made another loop around the block. She finally jumped in the car and we took off. I had to get out. I called josh to tell him that I was driving to the mountains to drop off Daisy in some field far away. My blood was boiling. McLane, in tears, tells me that I can not leave Daisy. He loves her and wants to keep her and is afraid that I will made her sad. We drove until I stopped crying and the kids all fell asleep. We came home and I planned to take a nice long shower, in hopes to save the day from getting much worse.
But, Just as we are leaving to get Cooper, AJ tells me he pooped in his undies. As I'm cleaning him up, Brayden pees on the floor. I clean that up. Load up the kids. Late picking up Cooper. Get home to shower. Shower went great. Cooper did his homework. I made dinner. Got the kids ready for soccer.
As I'm just getting ready to load them in the car for soccer, my destructible duo decides it would be funny to turn on the hose and water the kitchen floor. I left the high powered noisel on the hose from earlier in the day when I was cleaning raw egg off my patio. Water was every where. Kitchen floor, microwave, front window, all over our dinner that I just pulled out of the oven. I'm trying to scream at them to turn it off but they can not Gra me over their laughter. They are spraying me in the face as I'm trying to get to them to turn off the water. And that is when I lost it. We are already running late. Dinner is ruined. I'm soaked. The house is soaked. The windows are soaked. Everyone to their rooms. I'm selling the dog. I'm selling your toys. I'm selling the carpet. I'm selling dinner. If we had a cat, I'd sell that too.... :)

Seriously??? I feel like I'm running a zoo around here! Hoping that tomorrow is a better, drying, less eggy day around here. :)

Another Bedroom Set

We built this set for about $45 and sold it for $200.

Table fixer-upper

This:

To this:

Sectional for our Front Room

We just finished building this last week!  Each bench is a storage bench, and all the benches can be rearranged into a bed for when we have people visit (hint hint)!

Entertainment Center

We designed and built this for our family room!

Bedroom Furniture

We built the nightstands and headboard from scratch (and mostly from scrap wood we picked up).  I love the way the headboard turned out! We are still working on a small matching dresser to replace the plastic drawers in the corner.  The headboard is my favorite part!

Here's a better picture of what the nightstands look like. 

We designed the nightstands and headboard ourselves.  Most of the wood comes from my favorite scrap pile, or from some scrap from other projects.  So far we've only spent $35 total on all of our bedroom furniture!  

Side yard rehab

First off, here's a picture of our house, since most of you haven't seen it.

The guy who used to own the house would fix up cars on the side of the house. When we bought it the side yard was a nasty section covered in old carpet remnants with weeds growing though the carpet, old screws, broken plastic, etc.  

You can kind of see it here. Kinda gross, right? 

This area of the yard has always been at the top of our priority list, but it always seemed like the cost to fix it put it just out of our reach.  Then one day this summer we heard about a place just down the road that had a good price on gravel.  

...so nevermind the fact that I was 5 and half months pregnant and Dan was just barely off of crutches from his hip surgery.  We're farleys, so we went for it! 

We took out all the carpet, tried to level all the ground, and added gravel. 

Here's the job with half the carpet removed.  

Doesn't this carpet look great?!  You wouldn't believe the large assortment of bugs, weeds, worms, slugs, and even a few snakes that we found living underneath it.  Fun, right?  

Here is the completed area of our yard!!  Disregard the few weeds that have popped up here and there.  

We love it!  Gabe particularly likes that he now has a million rocks to throw.  Many thanks to Jen and Travis for letting us borrow their truck, and especially to Travis for helping us haul and fill in the last half of the rocks when we realized that it's really not a good idea to install several cubric yards of rocks when one of you is just barely off of crutches and the other one is pregnant :) 

1 More Dresser Re-Do project

one more dresser re-do project. This one was really fun. We bought this set for $40, taped it off, repainted just the aqua part and resold for $120.

ANOTHER DRESSER RE-DO

Another Dresser Re-Do

I bought this dresser for $40, taped it, repainted it with a high quality Baer paint and these are the results. I sold it for $150

CLASSROOM MAKEOVER PROJECT

Ok so some of you know my classroom this year is a mess. It was a wood shop, then auto shop, then ceramics room and now still has to function as a ceramics room and cheer office and cross age PE in addition to being the home of my English classes. So I am going to document my journey of rehabbing it into a decent space. Here are some of my before pictures.

Here is what I have done so far. Step 1 I painted a cabinet with chalkboard paint

Step 2 I spray painted one of the cool locker style cabinets in here

Suggestions for step 3 would be appreciated. More to follow.