foyer, with a different dresser and painting

A while back I read this post and thought, "oh! I need closed storage for my foyer!' I also didn't like that the open, leggy piece showed all the lamp cords as soon as you walked in the door.

I liked the Ikea piece in the linked post, but had no desire to spend $387 on new furniture.  Over Thanksgiving I thought I would move the dining dresser into the foyer to see if having a more substantial piece with closed storage would look good, or if it would make the hallway look too crowded.

I moved it in and loved it. I didn't even move it back to its place in the dining room.  (Which is what prompted moving stuff around in the dining room.)

Every lamp in my house has crooked lampshades.  It accentuates the crookedly hung painting and jaunty Christmas Cookie Monster.

A year or two ago I would have immediately taken multiple and much better posed/cleaner/no Cookie Monster/straight lamp shade pictures. In fact, this post has been sitting in my draft folder for a month, waiting for me to take better pictures.  However, these days I just have other stuff taking up my time.  Half-assed is better than no-assed, amirite?

I hope that you have had a lovely holiday season, filled with happiness and love, and barring that, lots of hot cocoa and cookies.  

Sufficient unto the day

I wrote a blog post about all the anxiety dreams I have been having lately (getting swept away in a flash flood; going to a party with Kim Kardashian; throwing a party where I send out an invite with the wrong date, wrong address, wrong time, wrong child, and there isn't any coffee for my relatives; brakes locking as I speed around a curve and plunge to my fiery death on the road below, etc.) wondering why on earth I am having all these anxiety dreams.  Then I wrote this post and had an "aHA!" moment.

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I've debated publishing this post, since it feels....sort of vulnerable.  My blog is in a weird place the last year or so--I blog about pillows and medical problems and my wardrobe and possible death and how much I love Anthropologie sofas, and it just seems like a weird mishmosh of "lets have fun!" and "I have problems!"

That's me, I guess.  A weird mix of awesome and crazy.

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After Peter's most recent allergy attack, we had a fish panel done again, since he had just eaten salmon with lentils.  We already knew that he was allergic to shellfish, but so far he has been fine with some fish, and had even had salmon a few weeks earlier.  It turns out he has developed an allergy to Nearly All The Fish.

This does not really affect our daily life. I don't like fish so we rarely eat it.  I will add "all seafood" to the list of things I read labels for.  The real problem is that I've now added not just one item, but an entire class of food to the "List of Things That May Someday Kill Peter."

He has a 7% chance of growing out of this allergy.  Call me an optimist, but I look at it as a 93% chance of retaining it.  He is also statistically likely to add more allergies as he hits his teens and twenties.

Peter is currently eight, and 99% of what he eats comes handmade from my kitchen. Some day he will be fourteen and invincible like all teenagers are and surrounded by idiot friends offering him candy bars, or thinking its funny to hide a peanut in his homemade muffin.  Someday he will be twenty and surrounded by idiot friends at a diner offering him beer and a hangover order of french fries fried in the same fryer as the fish special.  Food is central to socializing and it is going to be a difficult and potentially life-threatening journey for him.

I don't verbalize this often, but I'm really afraid that my kid will die. Eating is unavoidable, in the long term.

*breathing into a paper bag*

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I have another issue, one I don't talk about online very often.  I'm trying to make a decision, one that is important and needs careful deliberation, one that will affect everyone in our family. I've done as much research as humanly possible. I've been going around and around on this for months.  No good answers have presented themselves.

Today I read this post by Hands Free Mama.  The title gives it away: "Note to Self: You Don't Have To Have The Answers Today."  And there are a few words of advice in it with the line "maybe the best thing you can do right now is just sit with it awhile."

I can't sit with it forever, but I could put it aside for a while.

Sufficient unto the day are the troubles thereof.

Dining room, rearranged

I've been on a rearranging kick.  All over the house.  I call it "free redecorating."
The dining room, previously:

For a few days I repainted the cobalt dresser and moved in the peacock mirror (see here).  And now:

The white Billy bookshelves with doors were previously on the other side of the room near the kitchen; they hold our excess kitchen stuff like baking utensils, coffee pot, children's dishes, etc.  They are much narrower than the dresser that used to be there, which makes the space feel bigger.  The white also feels lighter.

I also took down all the curtains.  There is much more light in here.  I really love curtains, honestly, and have a million pairs, but on both sides of the room the curtains were constantly trapped and pulled by things in front of the window (a bunch of electronics and printers on the dining side, a sofa in the eat-in nook on the other side of the room.)

The peacock mirror and the fake Monet used to be in the playroom, but I think they work nicely in here.  The garland is a paper chain that the kids made.  We filled each paper strip out on Thanksgiving of things we are thankful for, and then made them into a paper chain that we will use for Christmas.

You might notice I got rid of the uncomfortable tolix chairs and replaced them with rusty red cushy comfy chairs.  They are so much nicer to sit in.  Do I wish they were in a different fabric? Yes, but the rusty red complements the sad beige walls and the chairs were for cheap at a thrift store, so I am enjoying the cushiness.

I had plans to make some new art for this spot, but I've decided I really like the peacock mirror and candlestick lamps there.  When I bought the canvas at Michaels to make the new art, an entire stack of canvases fell on my head, so I think the universe was telling me that the peacock mirror looked just fine.

Dilemma: the white shield chairs are covered in a royal blue pleather that doesn't go in this room at all, but it is easy to clean and wipe off.  I could recover it in a different sad beige pleather.  However, I have in  my possession a piece of fabric that would perfectly complement this room:

Gold honeybees on a rusty red background. It is a beautiful piece of fabric, heavy and silky.  I bought it ten years ago for our very first condo for a window treatment that I never got around to making.  I have enough to cover both chair seats....but its a really nice piece of fabric and my children destroy everything. I guarantee it will be stained and gross in under six months.  On the other hand, I haven't used this piece of fabric in ten years and it is free.

I know you can iron on an oil-cloth like protector fabric--has anyone used that? Did it work? Or ruin the fabric?