Crazy Days of Summer

Oh, my goodness, how did that happen? It's been almost a month since my last post!

This one will, of necessity, be mostly pictures. Lukie turned two, we dorked around for a couple weeks, and then, we spent 2.5 weeks in Illinois! Most of the Illinois pictures were taken with an iPhone, so please excuse the graininess, but we were out and about moving and that meant I just didn't have time to grab my camera very often!

First, Lukie's two-year-old photos. I expect by the next time I take photos, it'll be a little easier to keep him still. Right now, though, not so much.

He's also really into hats right now. He requests a hat every morning by pointing to his head, and then when we put it on, he rearranges it by pulling it almost over his eyes and cocking it to the right. If we take it off, this happens:

...until we put it back on.

House work also continues. I've been working on painting the hallway. It was a nasty color of peachy-beige, which I lovingly referred to as "soul sucking burnt flesh," maybe a little over-dramatic but still fairly accurate. I've been painting it a nice clean white, and I have to say, I love the results.

The white color brings out the woodwork so nicely, and it bounces light around like a light trampoline. It's so much cleaner looking!

Finally, we went to Illinois for 2.5 weeks. It was a long but thoroughly enjoyable trip. First, Lukie had a birthday party at MoMo's house.

He is certainly not confused about what to do when a flaming cake is brought to him. We had to hold him back until we could finish singing.

His cousin Mindy, who has four girls and two nieces and has been waiting forever to buy a birthday present for a little boy, got him a Despicable Me fart gun. It was a hit (maybe more with MoMo even than with Lukie, but Lukie loved it, too).

And he played with his cousins Phoebe and Avery in the swimming pool. The game consisted mainly of jumping into the pool, getting out, running halfway across the yard, running back to the pool, jumping in, and repeating the process for 45 minutes. Where do they get the energy? (Sorry for the iPhone photos.)

Then we went north for a week to see Peter's family in Hinckley, IL. Grandma Cindy threw Lukie a second birthday party.

And Lukie ran around like a crazy person with his cousin Roland (and his other 7 cousins--- the 8th joined us a week later).

After a week in Hinckley, Peter went to Canada with his best friend for a fishing trip and I took Lukie back to my folks' place for 8 days. We had lots of fun.

Fun included Lukie's first trip to Jarlings, a Chambana staple for decades.

That was the gist of our summer trip. We had lots of fun, but as usual, we are also glad to be home among our stuff and in our house with our dogs and bed. We always miss Illinois, though! We are Midwesterners through and through and the whole region feels like home. See you at Christmas, IL!

Happy Julyfest!

Happy Julyfest, everybody! 

What is Julyfest, you may ask? Only the most important month-long holiday on the calendar. Pete started Julyfest right before we started dating in order to impress me (I really don't know how that was supposed to work?) because we both have birthdays in July. When Lukie's due date was figured, we really, really hoped he'd make it all the way to July. When July 1 rolled around, I told him he was free and clear to make his entrance into the world because now, the whole family could celebrate Julyfest. I don't know what will happen if we ever have a second child...

All of this to say that, you guys, Lukas is TWO. It happened last Friday. He went to bed on Thursday night not two, and woke up on Friday morning TWO.

The problem, really, was that he also went to bed sick on Thursday evening...so he was kinda punky on his birthday. Yup, my kid got a cold on his birthday. On July 3rd. The season of no colds. He wasn't the only one, either. The rest of the daycare has been getting it. Pete had it. I have now had it. WHO GETS SICK IN FRIGGIN' JULY???

We do.

Anyway, didn't stop us from eating cake.

Now, I don't really do cake. I bake a cake maybe once per year. That's a big maybe. The thing is, pie>cake. At all times and in all situations. We had pie at our wedding reception for gosh sakes. So, given the option, I will choose to bake a pie. I did, actually, just this morning.

But birthdays require cake, and birthday cake requires frosting (not all cake requires frosting, though- Pete actually prefers his cake without frosting, which is just one of his many opinions on EVERYTHING).

So, I made a vanilla cake (because Lukas doesn't like brown foods, even if they are chocolate ice cream and/or chocolate cake) and made blue frosting (because Lukie doesn't communicate yet what his favorite color is, so he gets my favorite color for frosting). Pete told me I should smear the frosting on the wall, it was so close to my favorite color. DON'T MIND IF I DO, PETER NOLL!!!

Anyway, we ate cake on Friday night, just the three of us. Lukie will have a big birthday party at Momo's house in a week and a half.

Sniffing the cake (above). Everything gets sniffed in our house before he puts it in his mouth. Only, he doesn't understand what sniffing is. He's actually blowing OUT of his nose instead of sniffing IN.

After eating cake, we spent a low-key weekend getting over our colds and working on house projects. There have been more more more house projects.

First, I've been agonizing over painting the living room (please ignore the literally-falling-apart Craigslist couch...it will be replaced shortly but I'm not going into debt over a couch, so we have to save up). I've been labelled a lover of gray by both Peter and my mother, who likes to ask me which color of gray I plan on painting (---insert anything here---), so I thought I'd go with a nice gray-ish blue in the living room. I tested three different colors, picked the best one, and started painting. With a brush. Because painting plank walls with a roller doesn't REALLY work very well.

That's just one wall. The others are done now. I haven't decided what to do because I kind of don't love it and wish I had just gone with gray. Figures. We'll see if I can learn to love it (especially after buying a new rug, but who knows when that will happen) or if, someday soon, I find myself inexplicably standing on a stepladder holding a paintbrush slathered in gray paint. Or white paint. but probably not blue paint.

Pete has also finished the doors on the bottom of the built-in cabinet in the dining room. They are currently painted, but now need re-painted since he fixed the planing on one of the panels. Next step is making glass doors for the top two shelves. And possibly painting the inside of those shelves a different blue. Because I'm not sure I like that color either. But it won't be grey. Promise (she says while crossing her fingers behind her back).

For the last three years, our mailbox has been bare wood and messy paint. I fixed that last week. I'm going to landscape it next year, but with that being kind of icky soil, I want to wait until the spring to get some things in there so they have a better chance of establishing roots and making it through the winter.

Oh, and Pete is ripping apart the porch.

See, we have a nice big porch on the front of our house. It's the defining architectural feature on that side of the house. Buuuut, the posts and rails were built out of untreated lumber and never planed for shedding water. Which means that there is some serious rot on a porch that's less than ten years old. It's been giving Peter serious anxiety for about two years, so this week, he started knocking it down and building it back up.

That's a good thing because, as it turns out, the posts are approximately half rotted. Who knew, right? Not really what you want SUPPORTING THE WEIGHT OF THE PORCH ROOF. Oy.

So look forward to more updates on that...

Lastly, Pete and I did our birthday shopping for each other. Our birthdays aren't until the 12th (mine) and the 20th (his), but we found ourselves with some open space on the calendar last week, and we both kind of knew what we wanted for our birthdays. Coincidentally, both of our gift choices were available in antique stores...so for two days last week, we went antiquing.

Pete wanted a giant wooden screw that he had seen in the Greeneville Antique Market approximately a year ago. He negotiated the price down eight whole dollars and I bought it for him for his workbench. It was dirty and gross, but he proudly paraded it around the Chinese restaurant, where we saw a former student of his. Then he came home and cleaned it.

I wanted a white stoneware pitcher for my new dining room cabinet. I was willing to buy new if it was the only way to get a decent price on one, but really preferred antique if I could find it. I didn't necessarily need it to be the most ornate or beautiful one out there; in fact, I preferred simple but heavy. After going to Kingsport, TN looking, we finally found one and it was on sale. Score!

We think this is a lovely birthday tradition and saves us both the hassle of figuring out a gift. Plus, it combines birthday shopping with Date Day, which is nice.

Oh, and I couldn't resist this little apothecary bottle when I saw that it was from Monticello, IL, which is near my hometown. So that came home with us, too, for $3. It's got a chip in it, but I don't care. I like to put flowers in them, and they're one of very few doo-dad type things that I like. I now have a whopping TWO apothecary bottles in my collection.

Outdoor Updates!

Man, we have been seriously CHUGGING through house projects! Admittedly, that's helped along by the fact that A) I'm off of work this summer and B) Lukie goes to daycare for a good chunk of the day every week day...but wow, what a change over the last two summers when I was pregnant or chasing a one-year-old. The house tour (link on the right side of the page) is going up probably late this summer so you can see all the fun things in one post, but here are some of the productive things we've been doing...and a lot of them happened this weekend, with Lukie actually on the premises!

First, Pete's been working on the deck on the south side of the house (near the driveway). He's got the posts and rails on it...now we just have to wait a few weeks to paint it. Treated lumber doesn't really appreciate paint until it's a bit seasoned.

Dang, it's looking cute. To the right of the deck is our black-eyed Susan trellis (made of hog panels that Pete attached with hooks so the plants aren't actually on the clapboard siding)...and they are starting to bloom. Fun story, I planted both pots the same weekend but with two different bags of soil. I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say something FUNKY was happening in the bag I used in the pot on the right. Anyway, the fist bloom is open, and pretty soon, there will be hundreds of them!

 

There are multiple varieties of black-eyed Susan vines, and lots of different colors. I went with the more cottage-ish one...the one that made me think of the cover of my copy of Mandy. The flowers will be all different colors, but all with soft, mixed tones.

The garden is looking pretty impressively good, if I do say so myself. When I picked flowers this year and had them shipped from Romence Gardens in Michigan (what an awesome experience that was-- they contacted me about my ship date, changed it when I realized I'd be traveling, and quickly answered my phone call when one of the plants arrived a little shaken up. I will NEVER order from a giant nursery again-- small ones are the way to go, and the variety they offer is SO much better), I purposely chose flowers that were enticing to bees and butterflies. As a result, we've had visits from humming bird moths, lots of honey and bumble bees, and tons of butterflies. 

Which has been awesome because it turns out, Lukas is obsessed with anything with wings. I mean, drop what he is doing, throw his toys to the side, run around chattering with his arms outstretched obsessed. So, we chased butterflies on Sunday morning. For, like, an hour.

The butterflies clearly favor a few of my plants, one of them being that coreopsis that I showed you last week. It's becoming more and more beautiful by the day. I think I'll get a few more next year...and plant them in the BACK of the garden, because seriously, it wasn't supposed to be this tall...

The other plant I'm loving? Well, besides the adorable catmint at the bottom of the picture above? The Bells of Ireland that I started myself this year...

Now, aren't those awesome? Those spikes just get taller and taller with more and more bells on them every day. I can't wait to cut some, but I'm holding back until they get taller. They'll look so pretty on the dining room table.

I've been into Bells of Ireland ever since our wedding reception. I ordered all of my flowers wholesale and had my brilliant grandmother make 15 arrangements for the tables at the party, and my all-time favorite flower out of that experience was the Bells of Ireland. They're hard to start on your own; they don't like being moved because they have an impressive but sensitive taproot, and I looked into it too late into the season to start them outside (they require a period of cold, which I suppose you could simulate in the refrigerator). I started them indoors, got them just barely above the soil, and then very carefully transplanted them without disturbing the taproot. Most of them survived, and next year it won't be so difficult. They are apparently very aggressive re-seeders. I'll just pull the ones I don't want.

The garden, in general, has been a serious source of pride this year. Remember when we moved in and it looked like this? 

Four summers and endless weed-pulling later, it finally looks like this:

Ugh, okay, so that picture is pre-weed eater and I'm not going out there to take another picture. But you get the point. Pete built the porch, we painted the back door that welcoming paprika color, and I have added tons of flowers. Four years ago, I thought I'd never get here. It drove Pete nuts that the back garden looked overgrown all the time, but I kept telling him to give me time; I just had to get rid of the seed bed, bindweed, daylily explosion, monkey grass, and overgrown sedum...look at it now! Dang! (Please ignore the mess spilling out of Peter's woodshop. The work has to get done somewhere and when it's closed, his garden shed, built completely by himself, is adorable.)

Next up is finishing this deck:

Pete built two summers ago, but we never got a chance to paint it. I primed the rails yesterday, and we'll paint the decking. then the door will get the same spicy paprika treatment that the other ones have gotten, and we'll have a nice deck. Oh, and there will probably be some posts and rails on the right side, as well.

And the front porch swing had to be repainted to go with the new paint. And that's my vegetable garden. Which is a fancy way of saying tomato and basil garden, because I don't have the space or patience for a real vegetable garden. Priorities. 

And finally, indoor work. Pete closed off the door to what used to be the dining room with a built-in cabinet a few weeks ago. He's been hard at work building the doors for it. Pete does everything with hand tools, which you would think would be slower, but really, it's not that much slower. It's just a bit messier...but you end up with beautiful furniture that fits a 100-year-old house.

I told him the plane (below) looked special. He said, "It should. It was made in England." Thanks for the info, Pete. So thorough.

So that's getting there, too. There are actually two doors on it right now, and I'll have to post about that some other time. I'm still not sure about the blue I chose for the two upper shelves (which will be behind doors with glass panels). They might be a bit too true-blue. Might need to go for a greener or grayer shade...but that's an easy fix for another time.

That's where we're at. Also, anybody have any good ideas for renaming the blog? I'm pretty new to all of this, but I'm starting to realize how incredibly boring "Noll Family Blog" is...I mean...it's descriptive, so that's nice...but if I decide to keep doing this, I probably need a better name for it.