bedrooms part ending: pictures!

I have some before and after pics!  I love before and after pics! The room as a two-kid-bedroom had little space for more than the beds. Bug kept his dresser in it, and all his stuffed animals and books.  All other toys were in the playroom. 

The room as seen one night last year when I found Bug sleeping upside down in his bed Pippy Longstockings style. I see that Teddy was kicked off the bed. Pook is sound asleep like a straight little log in his neighboring bed.


The paint stamped jungle animals which were put along the chair rail by my MIL and pregnant-with-Bug me.

 Mid paint job.


The new room, with the new home for stuffed animals on the trundle.

The walls are covered with tons of posters and art. Bug wanted all the old returned up and the new added and we didn't argue.

It didn't take long for Lego to spill out everywhere, making this a pretty honest look at his room.


Pook's room is almost finished and will be shown next week.

bedrooms part next-to-last before the pictures

I was going to write today about the problems between the boys, dividing up the toys, but as you can see from the conversations below, they ARE able to work together:

"That's my poster. Ms.F in the library gave that one to me." "Well then I get the one of Tim Hudson." "No way! The other Braves one has Bobby Cox and stuff on it. It's ancient!" ...."Mama!" (in unison)

"You know that spear that came with the dude from the XYZ Lego kit? Do you know where it is?" "I used it for my new creation." "Well I want it back." "But the other one I put in your guy's hand is even better."  No it's not."  ... "Mama!" (in unison)

See? "In unison" means they are doing something together.


The good side of splitting up the toys is that Bug has been playing with toys he hasn't used in ages. There they were, sitting on his closet shelf, calling to him from up high. Nothing at all like having them on the bottom shelves of the playroom, ignoring him.

more than painting

I did more than painting today!  (I went to the farmer's market, the grocery, and the bagel store.)  I also cooked!  I've been holding onto a recipe from Cook's Illustrated for a veggie lasagna. I enjoy their show on PBS and have found all their recipes to be good and a few of them to be worth the effort. Tonight's dinner has not yet been judged for that effort to deliciousness balance.  But it looks good and with these ingredients, how could it be bad?

I started by cubing eggplant and tossing it in the microwave for ten minutes w/some salt. Seemed like a good time saver. While it cooked I picked up Bug from piano lessons and asked Pook to make the "no cook Alfredo sauce." He did, using cottage cheese, Parmesan and heavy cream. (We added milk because it seemed too thick... possible flaw in the recipe.) Then I sauteed yellow squash, zucchini, and the eggplant in two batches while I chopped more of each veggie, some basil and thyme from the garden and a few fresh tomatoes (to make up for the problem of not having enough canned tomatoes to make their "no cook tomato sauce" correctly.) All that layered with grated mozzarella and no-cook noodles. It is teetering over the top of the glass pan, but I blame that on my over-exuberant veggie purchasing at the farmer's market, not the recipe.

And the verdict is...

 ...worth the work..I think. We always need ideas for squash and eggplant in the summer, so this will be a keeper. I will decrease the amount of cheese and be careful that I don't overload the pan - meaning I should own a food scale so when a recipe calls for a pound I can give it a pound - but it was delicious despite the effort.

bedrooms part next: Bug on board

For eight years the boys shared a bedroom and had a room to leave messy as a playroom. I always assumed we'd need to change this at some point, but wasn't sure when.

Pook had gone to bed an hour post-Bug for a year without conflict, but several factors made it seem like it was the right time to make a change. Bug, as crabby in the mornings as a crab with a claw caught in a trap, needed to be alone. Middle school starts for Pook this fall/next month and with it comes a change to a later schedule. Someday he will hit puberty, learn to sleep in, want privacy and enjoy having a place to get away. Now seemed like a good time.

Only they were reluctant to get it. Pook, while getting the brunt of the crabbiness, didn't really want to move out. Sweetly, he told me he "sort of likes to hear Bug snore." Bug said he was unsure he wanted change. Pook didn't need to say it. Neither wanted us to get rid of the Bouncy Bed. No one could decide how toys (read: "lego") would be split.

I put the Bouncy Bed up against a wall to see if anyone asked me to lay it flat again. A month went by and no one cared. I began to talk up the change and the New Stuff required to make two rooms. Bug got on board. We had an incident involving a stomach bug and the need for carpet cleaning. While the furniture, including the bouncy bed, were displaced, I decided That was It. Out went the huge and in-the-way mattress. Someone picked it up from the curb within hours.

Hoping to get Pook excited, CD and I assembled the double bed frame we'd had in storage (my father's from childhood) and a double bed mattress was purchased. We agonized over sheet purchasing. He finally found some with navy blue and tiny red stars on white that "were fine." Still not into the whole thing. He began to sleep in his new room. It was "a bit lonely."

Meanwhile Bug was picking out paint colors. His room has the chair rail, so he decided he wanted blue under it and yellow above. I convinced him to go lighter than he first wanted; his side of the house is very dark. Finally a clear but deep sky blue and a butter yellow were chosen. The schedule was consulted. Vacations and other plans necessitated a wait until July.  July came.

next up: photos before and after

bedrooms part one

This needs to be part of a series, since it is happening slowly and involving both much work and much stress.  Today is mere background.

Our home has three bedrooms-- all we needed when we were dual income no kids people. We had a guest room and an office. All worked great.  Then we gained a Pook and we put the queen bed in the office. Then we remodeled the space above our garage and made a new office. Then we gained a Bug. We bought a trundle bed set for Pook and put the crib next to the queen bed and all was fine. We had a choice of moving Bug to a pack-n-play and giving guests the queen or popping up the trundle to full height, putting a king sized sheet over the whole thing and giving guests Pook's room.

It was after a period of house guests when tiny three year old Pook spent the night in the queen bed bed. When Bug awoke he stood at the end of the crib, calling out his brother's name with excitement. Pook loved it and remained in the queen bed for a while.

One day I realized that keeping a toddler in a queen bed and having a twin trundle in an unused room was ridiculous. I decided to make one room a playroom and move the twins into the bedroom.  As I began to  haul the queen mattress out, my mother came up with the brilliant idea of keeping it on the floor of the now-playroom.  For Bouncy Bug, this was fabulous (and saved our furniture ten times over). The Bouncy Bed was created.

Covering the mattress with a carpet colored fitted sheet made it inconspicuous. Kids played toys on it, they certainly bounced on it and when we needed to move them for guests, they slept on it (short-ways!).  And so it continued for eight more years. (Except Bug finally got a bed frame for the now popped-up trundle.) One room for sleeping, one room for toys.

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next up: big change ahead

life: a big topic

Where have I been? Mostly at the pool, the only logical place to be in this weather. Perhaps all my good posts melted away into the depths of my overheated brain.

Today however, my kids came through with blog fodder for me. Maybe the amount of time they've spent underwater recently has saved their brains from melting.

We'd gone to a relatively new science museum in north Georgia, the Tellus Museum.  In addition to a big mineral exhibit, a dinosaur exhibit and one on the history of transportation, there was a planetarium. We had tickets to see a show about Black Holes.  It was after lunch, and those lovely reclining chairs were a bit too much for me, so I missed a few bits and pieces of the presentation.  The kids must have absorbed it all.

Over dinner, unprompted, Bug declared that "Isn't it cool that every moment is eventually in the past, present and the future?" He went on to say that he thinks the past and future are the same length of time. He proceeded to get paper and pen and draw a timeline. Seen from the beginning of time, the distance to the present (and yes, he called it "A") was the future. Now it is the past.

Pook disagreed with the assumption that there is an end to time. He compared it to someone who is immortal. They were born at a specific time but if they aren't ever going to die then they have an infinite future.

And then we had root beer floats.