I Heart Faces – Happiness
This photo was submitted to the I Heart Faces photo challenge – www.iheartfaces.com
Doesn’t the look on his face say happiness? All I know is that Nathan could not stop talking about his visit to see my friend’s chickens, and he has asked just a “few” times to go back. 
Our new “baby” – Copper
For the past 13 years, I have tried every avoidance technique possible to keep Mark from getting a dog.
So, even though Mark agreed that a big dog is not good for city and indoor living, here we are with a dog that will get big, will stay in the house, and will get to roam the little box of our city yard. Ugh. How did this happen? :)
I lost, but at least the kiddos and Mark are happy. :)
Read MoreOur house – the beginning
Just for fun…this is the video my mother-in-law took right after we found out that our offer was accepted on our house. Enjoy seeing lime green walls, tons of wallpaper, a psychedelic flowered bathroom, gold and green carpets, a pink tiled bathroom and so much more.
Read MoreI Heart Faces – Favorite Face Photo of 2011
Well, of course, my favorite face has to be one of my children. Jordyn is the most cooperative with pictures, so she’s my feature. :)
Messy face, bad lighting, cluttered background, adorable expression!
Our Quirky Hidden Rooms
We have a….
It all started a couple years ago when Mark and I got to thinking about what could be behind these stairs:
Mark had heard before that sometimes when people built homes, they would attach a gold coin under the first stair for good luck. We figured, if nothing else, that there was some unused space under those stairs so we might as well open them up to see.
No coin…but we gained storage space. That is, until our kids got a little older and we started thinking…
Maybe we could sweep it out a bit. Maybe a nice coat of paint. Since we did that, we might as well add carpet. Now it’s looking kind of cool….rope lights, strobe light, black light, t.v., dvd player….Okay, things got a bit out of hand. :)
To make it even cooler, we wanted to make sure that the entrance (in the dining room closet) wasn’t instantly obvious. Mark set about designing a door that looked like a regular part of the back of the closet.
Not long after this, Mark’s wheels started turning again. In one of the bedrooms we had a “little door”. It looked really out of place and was basically an access to a small space under our attic stairs. Mark became determined to disguise this door and came up with the “bookcase plan”:
We threw some carpet and a light in there and called it a day. Soon we’ll fix up the walls. On some we’ll put chalkboard paint, and the others will have dry erase. There’s enough space in there for Ben to set up his trains and keep the mess out of his bedroom.
So, that was it, UNTIL….
the-balcony-turned-into-a-bathroom remodeling project. Mark had to tear out quite a bit of lathe and plaster only to discover an opening that was above our front porch. We kind of shrugged it off at first figuring the shower would block that space anyway. After observing how roomy it was, we did a little more assessment of the space and realized that part of the space went up against the back of Nathan’s closet. Secret room #3 was born:
This room will house Nathan’s lego table and will hopefully contain the Lego pieces out of site.
By this time, we were hooked. We had already planned a secret room for the attic specially made for Jordyn. (Because, alas, the poor girl was the only child without a secret room attached to her bedroom.) We had a space that was cut off from the rest of the attic by the stairs. Since it was awkward to reach anyway, we came up with plans for secret room #4:
So, what do our kids think about these playrooms? They don’t think much about it at all! They are so used to them that it doesn’t seem like anything unusual. In fact, with our first secret room, we forgot to tell our babysitter about it. She went into the kitchen to fix dinner for the kids. When she went to call them to eat, she could hear them but couldn’t find them. Oops! Need to add that little tidbit to the babysitter notes. :)
We may be a bit quirky, but I would have thought this was the most AWESOME thing ever if I had something like this as a child.
Read MoreI Heart Faces – Black
Trying to find a photo for this theme made it clear that I need to get back to taking pictures. I think I have been in a sort of drought of picture taking. Enough of that! I need to get back to capturing moments like this…
What’s better than a trampoline? A trampoline battlefield for a silly string war!
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