A Winter Sunday

Happy Superbowl Sunday! Go Cubs! Hahaha, just kidding. I know the Cubs are a hockey team.

We more than survived the snowstorm. We were right on the edge of the blizzard (north) and the ice storm (south) and so we received a good layering of something like sno-cone. Interesting! Yesterday it was all covered by a few more inches of snow. Winter is a good season. We began the snowstorm by making a blueberry coffee cake. It was SO GOOD! A recipe from my all-time favorite cookbook, Simply in Season.

Blizzard warnings are good times for getting some knitting done.

So yesterday I got this great idea to rearrange the house. Not the entire house... just the completely over-cluttered dining room. The little table that once was a nice place to set a vase of flowers became the table for my sewing machine, resulting in the slow deterioration of that entire wall of the room. The place was a wreck... and it's February now, which means I've been looking at this wreck of a room for MONTHS. Time for a change. Enter: The Landing.

You might remember our first arrangement of the Landing when we first moved in; it was our Book Nook. A marvelous little space, my very favorite part of our house by far. But then we started having children and the amount of stuff that comes with having babies kind of squeezed the books out of the way. Since then the landing has been the space where all our dressers live. And then they were joined by a box of fabric. And now? Now it's my craft space. Sounds great, right? WRONG. The landing is tiny. Waaaay tinier than my dining room. So a craft space that was cluttered and messy just got more cluttered and about 500% messier. We have nowhere else to put our dressers, so they are still there. I covered one with fabric and am using it as a sewing table. So every day when we need something to wear, we'll have to basically dig it out from under my sewing table.

Another really awesome thing about this decision is that my sewing machine is at least 7 years old, and probably more like 17 years old. I know it's at least 7 years old because that's how long I've had it. No wait... more like 8 years now. Anyway.... I know for a fact that my mom didn't buy it new, so it's got at least a few extra years on it. My point is, it isn't silent. Which is fine! Great! Be as loud as you want, sewing machine..... when you're placed anywhere in the house EXCEPT NEXT TO THE ROOM WHERE MY CHILDREN ARE SLEEPING. Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!

And of course, there's also the issue of getting my ginormous trunk full of fabric up the stairs. Ha. I guess that's why I married Martin.

I don't have any "before" pictures handy, but it went something like (beginning at far left) kiddie piano, long table with sewing machine, ginormous trunk. This is what it looks like today:

Notice the cup of tea sitting on the ginormous trunk that's just been shoved out of the way and almost immediately became the set-up surface for a bunch of little tin soldiers that came out of hiding with that canoe shaped shelf behind Anja in the picture. The chair and crate table used to be upstairs on the landing.

And this is the only part of the upstairs sewing/crafting area that I'm happy with so far:

Something along the lines of organization.

Anyway. Frustration reigns today, but I'm hoping to get the place in order eventually and make myself be happy with the setup because if that trunk gets moved upstairs, I can't imagine Martin volunteering to bring it back down again anytime in this century.

And here's Anja and her favorite horse (as well as a sort of "before" picture of the landing):

Now that things are scrambled in the dining room and weird little things are emerging from hiding places, we were able to be entertained by our fine young musicians!

They've taken to decorating themselves with markers lately. I think they might have futures as tattoo artist musicians.

So at this point we've been living without a computer for seven months. That's a good part of a pregnancy (no I am not!). And for a good part of that time it was really awesome and I almost never thought of the computer or the internet and I came up to my parents' house many many times without even thinking about sitting down at the computer. Well, maybe it's just the longness of winter finally getting to me, but I am missing the internet. I'm missing the blogs I used to read. I'm missing my own blog and being able to quickly post about some funny little family happening. I really like my little life and miss sharing it with my blog readers. *sigh* Also, without being able to hop online and search for recipes with specific ingredients that I have, our dinners are getting a little monotonous. Oh well. Winter is a good time to sit and knit mindlessly without distraction. And I still believe that my days are richer without having the magnetic pull of the computer on my kitchen countertop. And I still would like to make it a whole year without having a computer at our house. BUT. For the past week or two, I've been actively missing it.

That's all for today. I hope you all are having a cozy winter. Also, for any of you who have the Simply in Season cookbook, the girls and I made the Cinnamon Bread yesterday and it turned out REALLY YUMMY! It was great for the girls too because the recipe yields 2 loaves, so they each got to put the cinnamon and sugar on a loaf and roll it up themselves. Fun for all, and a tasty Sunday morning breakfast too.