D Blog of D Life

We had a great time this weekend. My best friend Catherine had her annual Memorial Day swim party/cookout - what a blast! I was worried to be honest. I was afraid it would be a beat down and filled with me chasing Addison around trying to keep her happy. However, one thing I have learned in the last few weeks about Addison is that she THRIVES around crowds! I mean - this child is quite the social butterfly. She normally hates pools - but yesterday I put her in her swimsuit and as soon as she saw all the kids in the pool she wanted IN! There was only ONE person she was willing to let walk around with her in the pool though and that is her trusted friend Bethany (Catherine's youngest daughter). She was perfectly content in the pool so long as Bethany was somewhere near and playing with her. Really cute! I enjoyed watching her have a good time with the kids and was thankful for Bethany being so willing to hang out with her as much as she did! Shayna did her own thing and ha...

It is well underway now and in fact nearing completion! I am VERY excited about how it has turned out so far. I still have some things to do - baseboards have not been purchased or stained yet, so we are still baseboardless - need to do one more coat of paint on the shower trim that used to be brass and need to actually do the light fixture haha. I will probably buy new mirrors ultimately as well. But for now...I am MORE THAN PLEASED with the turn out! Here are few pics of the new room as it stands at the moment. :D Shower and bathtub area - After Shower and bathtub area - Before Shower Brass and clear glass be gone - After Shower brass and clear glass be gone - Before Frosted window and painted chocolate around it - removed blinds that used to cover it.

We had a great time last week at the zoo with Stephanie, Gavin and Grayson H! Sadly, I think the favorite part was the park time with the sandbox lol! Whatever makes the kids happy though right! :) Here are a few pics from our time at the zoo - definitely needs to be a repeat before the weather gets unbearably hot for the summer!

Only to be forced by the weather to stop again... But I am thrilled that today I was at long last able to at least BEGIN the process of staining my bathroom floor! I started in the small toilet area so if I don't like the finish - or run into complications - I can tweak it before moving on to the main floor. I have the first three coats "ragged" on - one of each color so far. Unfortunately, I remember hating all of my floors at this stage - and I am pretty much there with this one right now as well. It takes several applications of the color combinations before I start liking the way it looks. At the moment there is too much red and not enough of the dark brown - but I am not at all worried about that since I know that it will all come together as I do the final applications. What I am worried about is the design that I picked out as my "let's try something new." I had thought that I would do a cool little design around the toilet area and in the cent...

It is just past midnight on Mother's Day - my thoughts are on you. My thoughts are on the woman who brought you into this world and raised you to be the woman you are - the woman with the value set to raise me - to be the woman that I am. My thoughts are on the woman who brought my father into this world - who raised him to be the man of honor that he is. All amazing women - women that I love - women that I admire - women that I hope my daughters will see the qualities of when they look at me and my life someday. Mom, you are the person I most rebelled against as I was growing up. You are the person that I fought so fiercely to "not become" when I was a teenager. You are the person who knew what I needed most in life as a teenager. You weren't there to be my best friend, you weren't there to be my "buddy" - you were there, to teach me right from wrong. You were there to set a moral example of what a Godly woman should look like. You were there ...

Today - yes - Saturday - my family celebrated Mother's Day! After years of fighting crowds in restaurants on "Mother's Day" - getting cruddy service cause they are trying to rush everyone in and out since the waits are so long for the after church crowd - and just in general thinking the day was a bit over blown and rushed. I asked Steve if we could "celebrate" the day on Saturday this year instead. Being the control freak that I am, I had already purchased my own mother's day gift - I know - I suck...but I found something I wanted so I bought it! So I was leaving the planning of anything else up to my sweet husband and my girlie pie *obviously the older one cause the youngest is too young to have an opinion other than "more" or "no"* They did an AWESOME job! They wouldn't tell me where we were going until we got there - but you know me and my "psychic" abilities (hehe) - I had it figured out...but since I wasn'...

I have been a HUGE fan of cereal my whole life. In fact, some of my fondest memories stem around my love of cereal. A silly and rather ridiculous memory involving cereal is one of sibling rivalry. My sweet little sister Debi and I used to sit at the breakfast table and would actually FIGHT over who had more sugar in their cereal. If she got up to get something, I would quickly sneak another teaspoon of sugar in my cereal bowl, and she would do the same if I got up. We must have been the most sugared up cereal eating kids on the planet. I'm really not joking when I say that sometimes my cereal wouldn't even taste all that good cause I had "one up'd" her a few too many times and my cereal was more sugar than cereal. Another of my favorite memories involving cereal is of my Grandpa Null - he was always quite the jokester. I have vivid memories of sitting at the breakfast table one morning on a visit to my Grandparent's home and having him tease me merciles...

...come again some other day.... mommy wants to stain her floor... if you keep coming back I might get bored and wind up in there painting doors!

If there is one thing I have learned with my multiple DIY projects over the last few years it is this.... If at first you don't succeed .... keep on asking people until you get the answer you want! I know ... that sounds weird, and I don't mean it to be "quite" the way it sounds. But really, Home Depot, Lowes, even the hardware rental places that you can check out don't know SQUAT half the time! I have been told NO NO NO - can't do that - this won't work - do this - do that - and most of the time, the answers are either not what I wanted to hear, or were complete and utter BS to begin with. I'm sure THEY didn't think that...but I knew that to be the case at times so I simply shook my head and did the "oh...okay" dumb blonde looks and then left the store. Then I return four or five hours later and ask a different person the same things and get totally different answers. This last week was absolutely no exception to this rule. When I b...

Shayna and "all the usual suspects" went out on the town last weekend. They dressed up and invaded Waters Creek here in Allen - a swanky little shopping/food area where they dined out at PF Changs and wandered around just having a good time being 14 year old girls. The celebration was Kaylie's birthday - sounds like they had a fun night to me. :) Oh to be a teenager (and look like these girls) again! Here are a few group shots of the girls: Shayna and Erica (this is one of the first friends Shayna had when we moved to Allen during her third grade year - I love that they are still great and even better friends!)

I struggle off and on at times. I am a high stress - all or nothing - black or white kind of person. My reactions are usually strong one way or the other - and this can sometimes leave my family a little bit scared of me. haha. Kind of the "how is mom/wife going to react sorta deal. I do not deal well with unplanned - and I do not fly by the seat of my pants with near the grace that I used to in my younger days. I have to have a plan - a map for every minute of every day and when things change...it kinda freaks me out a bit. When life starts to really set in - where I wanted to be at this age/stage of life, who I wanted to be - I start to get overwhelmed even more. Then there are the kids and husband. They all have their own plans of who they want to be, where they want to be, and even more - who they want ME to be. I start getting panic attacks - and I get depressed. My life has not gone according to MY plan. Clearly God's plan has been different ... and that's ...