One Room Challenge: the Costa Rica version

Supposedly I am working on my dining room, putting up a project a week to show you all my progress.  Except this week I unexpectedly find myself with three kids in Costa Rica, where my internet connection is spotty at best, and I'm writing this post on a computer that does not have a right-click mousepad (why do they make this?) and so I can't even figure out how to put up a picture of the paradise I'm in. 

And I didn't do a darn thing in my dining room.

Lest ye crazy robbers want to attack my house, rest assured that the Mister had to work and is still at home.  As are the rats. 

That's right, I took three children under six on a five hour plane ride by myself.

That's a mistake I won't be making again.

Actually, it wasn't that bad. Except for the landing, which was of the variety where you ask the pilot "were we shot down?" as you get off the plane.  Princess and Peter were screaming "LET ME OUT LET ME OUT LET ME OUUUUUUTTTTT!!!!" at the top of their lungs, in between dry heaves.  One child had a death grip on my arm, while my other arm was busy holding a barf bag under the other child's chin.  Normally I would feel all "omg, people must hate us", but this time I think the majority of the other passengers were looking at me with pity and thanking their lucky stars they weren't me. 

In any event, we are here for a week, and get back the day before the next One Room Challenge post....so don't have high expectations for that one either. 

There is no right click on this computer (seriously, wth), so my ability to make links and pictures is severly compromised.and thus I don't have the giant blog list.  Peruse one of my old blog posts for the list of other participants, or see the button on the side bar.  (I know, I am totally getting voted off the island this time.)

The decision to be a SAHM

Inspired by this post and link up party over at I Pick Pretty, where Mrs. Pretty discussed her decision to quit her job as an attorney and stay home with her son, I will tell you how I made (or didn't make) the decision to stay home with my kids.

After law school, I worked in a personal injury law firm for about 8 months.  I knew about halfway through law school I was going to hate being an attorney.  And I was right.  Working at that firm was not the worst work experience of my life (close, but not the actual worst), but I knew that I was never going to be happy doing that sort of work.  I dreamed of getting pregnant so I could quit and stay home with my kid.

Then one day, a gift from the gods fell into my lap.  My mentor from law school called me and said "there's a one-semester opening for a legal writing professor at a school in Georgia. You should apply."

I applied, never thinking that I would get the job.  Unbelievably, I did.  And I LOVED it.  I loved teaching. Grading, not so much. But teaching? Teaching is the awesomest job in the world. All of a sudden, I KNEW what I wanted to do with my life.

And then at the end of that first semester of teaching, I got pregnant. (On purpose. Dude, I was thirty, the world was ending if I didn't get pregnant rightthissecond.)

My old firm had extended an offer for me to come back in the spring when I was finished teaching.  When I came home, however, they decided that no, they didn't have room for me after all. So, there I was, pregnant and unemployed.  And then my alma mater law school called, asking if I would be be interested in teaching one class as an adjunct.  Why, yes, indeed I would! It was a pittance of paycheck, but it was experience on my resume, finished before the baby was due, and that was fine.

After that I finagled my way into a 2 year contract at my alma mater.  I got pregnant again in the first year of my contract and had Peter.  As the second year of my contract was starting, the Mister was offered a job in NYC.  We were living in South Jersey at the time, outside of any reasonable commuting distance, and thus we would have to move to northern NJ.

At that time, every single penny of my take-home pay went to pay for childcare. If you took into account gas getting back and forth to work and dry cleaning my suits, it was actually costing me money to go to work.  However, it was a job with really flexible hours for the most part, which allowed me to spend more time with the kids, and although I was making no money at the end of the day, it had excellent, cheap health insurance.  The Mister's law firm had the world's most expensive, crappiest insurance, so by insuring myself and the kids on my insurance, that put an extra thousand dollars in the Mister's paycheck every month. (Yes, the Mister's super-crappy insurance cost us over $1000 a month. The NYC job had much better and much cheaper health insurance, thank goodness.)

Also, I will admit that I was very much feeling pulled in two directions.  I loved my job, but I loved my kids more.  I wanted to spend more time with them.  I also sometimes felt like I was working so that someone else could take care of my kids, since my entire salary went to a nanny.  I would have really liked to work part time, but it wasn't financially feasible: either I taught full time for a reasonable salary, or I took a half load as an adjunct for less than 10% of my regular salary.

Since law school hiring generally takes place a year in advance, I needed to let my school know whether or not I wanted to participate in the permanent position search (I had been hired as a temporary visitor).  Had we been staying in the south Jersey area, I probably would have stayed with teaching, because I loved it.  However, since we planned on leaving the area, my decision was essentially made for me.  I told my school that I would not be returning when the school year was up.  I was not unhappy about it. I looked forward to spending some time with the kids.

To be honest, in my head, I wasn't quitting to be a SAHM permamently.  My plan was to sell our house, move to the NYC area, and find a job in NYC for the following school year.  So I looked at it as more of a yearlong sabbatical, rather than a conscious decision to stay home for years.

And then it took us two years to sell our house (hello, financial crash of 2008 and our house being worth much less than what we had just paid for it!), so the Mister commuted 5+ hours a day for two years, and then I found out I was pregnant with our third child...and so my grand plans to keep working didn't quite work out as planned.  We finally sold our house and moved to northern NJ in the summer of 2009.  I could have entered the fall hiring season for the NYC law schools but...Princess was one month old, and since I had 3 kids under the age 4, I was feeling a little overwhelmed.

I will admit that when I first stayed home with the kids, it was challenging.  After years of working on mental puzzles every day at work, my day was now defined by other people's bowel movements.  I also discovered that while I love babies (nom, nom, looooove babies).....babies turn into one year olds.  And I find the 1 yr + crowd to be much more work than babies.  Interact with me! LOOK AT ME!! Play with me! Attend to my every whim!  With babies (my babies, anyways) I could just say here, have a boob and a snuggle while I read the internets.

I guess the upshot here is not that I decided to be a SAHM, but that it just sort of happened.

Since my original decision to stay home was supposed to be a short, temporary one, precipitated by the easily explained "my husband's job took us to a new city", I didn't worry that much about finding a new job. But now, after years at home during a recession, I have thought quite a bit about how and when I will re-enter the job market.

Here is where this post breaks down--my thoughts about me going back to work are a post in themselves.  I don't think that there is a clear winner in the stay-at-home or go-to-work arena.  What works for me may not work for you, and what works for me today may not work for me tomorrow.  Neither is better than the other.  I could end with a rant about our patriarchal society that talks about how being a mom is the greatest job in the world, but acts as if a job without a paycheck is worthless....but that's also a post in itself.

At the end of the day, what I am at the moment is a SAHM.  And for now, I love it.

Bandaids, chickpea desserts, pictures

A few days ago I woke up at four am to find someone rifling through my nightstand.  Totally freaked out for a moment, I realized it was Princess.  Skipping the fact that she was wandering around the house in the middle of the night, I told her it was bedtime and put her back to bed.

In the morning I discovered that she had taken the bandaids out of the nightstand and adorned herself with them.  This was terrible because I had put these extra-strength, cement-like, impossible-to-remove bandaids in the drawer so that they wouldn't get used (why didn't I just throw them out, you ask? Hmph.).  Lets just say Princess was mighty peeved when we finally took them off.  "Mah skin hurts! You stop that!"

***********

Today I meandered on over to the Weight Watchers site for the first time in quite a while, and was met with the unpleasant news that due to some newfangled way of doing things, the miniscule amount of points I am allowed to eat has shrunk even further. Boo, hiss.

Perusing the dessert menu on the WW site (oh what, like I'm the only one, take your irony elsewere), I came across a recipe for chocolate chickpea...stuff, for lack of a better term.  I think they called it "dip".  This is at least the fourth recipe I've seen in the last few weeks using chickpeas in a dessert.

Is it just me, or does this sound disgusting?  I agree that copious amounts of chocolate and sugar will make just about anything taste better, but it doesn't mean that you SHOULD.

My curiosity piqued, I decided that I would make one of these recipes.  The WW recipe called for condensed milk, so that was out. (I can't eat most milk products.)  I recalled having seen a chocolate chip cookie dough dip recipe recently, so I googled around and found a bunch of recipes.

A few of the recipes called for straining a can of chickpeas and then de-skinning the chickpeas individually by hand, which sounded time-consuming and beyond the amount of effort I am willing to put in, so I went with a recipe that skipped that step.  Most recipes called for peanut butter or nut butter, and since Peter is allergic to peanuts, we stick with sunflower butter, so that's what I used. I also added vanilla, salt, a hell of a lot of brown sugar, oatmeal, and chocolate chips.

The result: about as delicious as it looks.

Eh.  I will be honest, it was not terrible.  It was not very good, either.  Pros:  somewhat sweet, lactose and nut free, lower calories than eating forty-seven cookies.  Cons: tasted strongly of sunflower butter yet had a bland, funky undertone to it. It might be better with peanut butter but I will never know.  It also had the consistency of thick, dense paste.  Yet for some reason I stood at the counter and continued to taste it.  Just checking for the fortieth time that it was still gross?  I don't know, I couldn't stop eating it, even though I didn't like it.  

I fed it to the Mister without telling him what it was.  He said "yuck, what is this? Its gross."

Verdict: chickpeas should not be in a dessert.


***********
I haven't posted pics of the kids lately.  Sorry, Grandma.

Princess cracks me up.

She's wearing the leg of a Buzz Lightyear costume on her head.

Apparently I've neglected the middle child, I have no pictures of him to share today.

One Room Challenge: pelmet fail

In last week's moodboard, I had plans for putting up a pelmet with a greek key detail.  I love the greek key detailing on these window treatments below, and figured I could easily do something similar.

Source: marcusdesigninc.blogspot.com via Lisa on Pinterest

via Little Green Notebook

I thought that a simple white pelmet with some colorful ribbon would be the right idea, especially since I felt that the prior window treatments were too busy and competed with the gallery of picture ledges.  I used this tutorial to make the pelmet, which is fairly easy and cheap, seeing as it is foam board duct-taped together with fabric stapled to the back.

It appears I was wrong.  I am not happy with the way the pelmet came out.  It is too much white, and the ribbon trim is distracting.  Please forgive the dark pictures, I cannot figure out aperture and I find this room really hard to photograph in the afternoon.

The squares appear to be different sizes, but I assure you, I spent much time measuring them and they are the same size.  I will admit that one square is further in than the other.

My first mistake was using a ribbon that was too wide.  I originally planned to do a square in all four corners, but in laying out the ribbon I could tell that a twelve-inch pelmet was too small for the medium size grosgrain ribbon I had on hand.

My second mistake was using a plain white fabric.  The walls and trim are white, and the white pelmet is barely visible as a window treatment.

Are you getting the sense that I am already falling behind on the One Room Challenge of completing an entire room in six weeks?  I think I am about to be voted off the island.

See everyone else's progress:

Saved by Suzy
Dutch.British.Love
Trapped in North Jersey
Nicole Scott Designs
Kim Macumber Interiors
Rue de Emily
The Pink Pagoda
refresheddesigns
Nana Moon Shop
Taylor Morgan Design
Insideways
My Crafty Home Life
House Four
Living Savvy
(A Lifestyle Thing)

red and blue

This weekend the Mister and I went to Barnes and Noble by ourselves.  I read the February issue of House Beautiful cover to cover, and it was full of good stuff.  One house I loved was decorated by Lindsay Coral Harper, and two of the rooms centered around blue and red.

This bedroom looks so crisp and bold. How fantastic are those inlaid night tables?

via House Beautiful

This living room is lovely. I think the chairs are a bit on the boring side, but the rest of the room really hits it out of the park. I need a bamboo etagere and a blue velvet bench.  

via House Beautiful

But what really looks lovely are the curtains.  Look behind the chair and see the trim on the curtains--the blue banding with the red piping is just excellent.  According to the article the curtains are made from a Kathy Ireland fabric.

via House Beautiful

Also according to the article, the painting over the fireplace is made of wax, which seems like a poor choice of medium over a fireplace, but I suppose if you are rich you can afford to replace melted art.

mentally redecorating the downstairs bathroom

I'd love to redo (more accurately, "do" for the first time) my downstairs bathroom. Visually, this bathroom is nothing to write home about.  It has dark hunter green floor tiles, white square-tiled walls, and a matching green accent tile about halfway up the wall.  Everything in this bathroom is builder-grade and clearly meant for taking abuse in a rental house.  

When we moved in I put up the aqua trellis shower curtain from our old apartment and called it a day, thinking I would figure out how to deal with that green later. I had thoughts about putting this shower curtain up, but that curtain was out of stock for a long time.  Its back now, but I think we will move out of this house when our lease is up in a few months, so spending money on this bathroom doesn't make sense.

But that doesn't stop me from daydreaming, does it?

I think this Urban Outfitter rug, this Furbish ikat shower curtain (not available on the website, I took the picture from here), and this Etsy print would be fabulous. This combination would complement the green without having to actually find items that contain hunter green.

What room are  you daydreaming of redoing?

Decluttering: the basement workbench

As you've seen many times before, here is my basement workbench (in the far back, behind all the junk in the front).  Note the chandelier, the windshield wiper fluid, Ikea Ribba picture ledges, a suitcase and 400 other pounds of detritus.  

I have zero desire to spend any money on redoing this area, as we are moving in six months (hello, rats!), and this type of organizational stuff won't move with us.  My goal was to clear off the top of the bench, and get all the tools sorted and in one place.  

Slowly but surely I worked my way down the bench.  I made a scrap wood/Ikea Ribba picture ledge pile in the corner. I put the chandelier out on the front porch for donation; it gives a nice Tobacco Road feel to our curb appeal.  I put the suitcase back with the other suitcases.  

Then I went piece by piece, sorting all the tools, screws, nails, and odds and ends into different categories.  I used cardboard boxes and plastic bins we had on hand.  This took about 3 hours.  

There is shelving right behind that pole to the right, which is why there aren't any pictures of the bench head on.  Please forgive the flash photography, as my basement doesn't get much light, especially when I am taking pictures at 10:30 pm.

There are eleven bins, separated into a box of hammers, leftover Ikea screws, furniture casters, brackets, curtain paraphernalia,  a million boxes of screws in packs that you buy from Home Depot, a separate bin of loose screws (SO MANY SCREWS), various other junk, and two plastic thingamajigs that have little drawers, which contain tools separated by category.  

Below the workbench are a rubbermaid bin of cleaning supplies, a rubbermaid bin of tools like drills and saws, and a rubbermaid bin of home decor items not currently being used. Surprisingly, I threw out or donated very little; it was just a matter of organizing what was there.  It would be helpful if I could find my label maker so I could label all the bins.  For now I  will probably buy a pack of sticky-notes.  

Behold, my NINE hammers.  

I'm pretty sure there are two more hammers in the junk drawer in the kitchen.  

I am making headway.  I have cleaned at least 11 percent of the basement so far.  I will assert dominion over the other 89 percent eventually. 

Edited to add: I am linking this post to Pancakes and French Fries William Morris Project.