Bathrooms, Hot Dogs and Mother's Day

If we do end up selling our house, one of the main "ick" points was our master bathroom. Compared to most East Nashville historic homes it's a great size (seriously), but that white tile just always looked SO nasty, and in a home with little to no storage/closets that horrible pedestal sink has ALWAYS been something I hated. But, we've never had a major vision for the bathroom or wanted to tackle busting it all out so besides painting and completely changing out the lights we've left it alone. Finally, to help get max value, we're making some potty upgrades.

Here's the before:
We always had to have a little shelving system to hold my makeup, hair dryer, all our toiletries, etc because there's no linen closet or storage in there. Always an eye sore! And see how "dirty" the grout look? It's always looked horrible and I've tried a million products on it.

Pulling the old sink out was really easy (besides some old pipes that wanted to crack). A guy at Home Depot recommended a product a home renovator in the neighborhood had recommended - see the difference in the top right section - um yeah - MIRACLE stuff.
Here's what the spray bottle looks like - and you can see in close up detail the difference between the clean tile and dirty tile. It's really AMAZING. A world of difference!
That evening we met some friends for dinner at Cori's Dog House. Just casual hot dogs and deep conversation between Lilli and Audrey. Lilli is about 9 months older than Audrey but they're right about the same height and hair!
Me and the Kiddos....Audrey wanted to watch Lilli play games...

The next day was Mother's Day. Lilli made me this card - it's pretty amazing. She completely wrote "Momy" by herself with zero help. She loves spelling my name and "writing my letters". And that's a picture of a monster.
On the inside, Brent only told her what letters to write but did not help her write them at all, just spelled it out verbally for her. "I Love You Lilli". She is really a genius. We have a parent-teacher conference in about a week and getting her into an advanced program is one thing we're going to discuss. I already talked about it with her school's director and she agreed Lilli is a good candidate for it. Yeah for future scholarships!On Mother's Day it rained buckets but us girlie's in our polka dots were prepared. And yes, my umbrella has Boston Terriers on it. An amazing Zulily find.
She wanted to take me to Shoney's, her favorite place. It was terrible. So packed and the service was bad and the food even worse. Crazy because our previous experience had been so good. So I think it's back to waiting 10 more years before we eat there.This is what Lilli got me for Mother's Day. She picked it out herself.

Look at that proud face! How could you not love it? It's the current centerpiece on our dining room table.

She was sleeping deeeeep that afternoon. We couldn't help ourselves. She saw it later and thought it was pretty hilarious.
Did I mention we wore polka dots for Mother's Day?
Yeah, Blogger is a pain tonight and throwing things out of order.

And that was our Mother's Day! Stay tuned for the big potty reveal!!!

Around the House

Hello internets! All is well here, we've just been busy and haven't had a chance to even download pictures at all lately. And a post without pictures is pretty much pointless.

We've done some house shopping and looked at five houses so far. Nothing has really jumped out at us yet. We're going to look at some more tomorrow night, too. The first two times we took Lilli with us, tomorrow night we have a sitter!

Her peas are growing like crazy.Our potatoes are too!
I can not wait for the day she can actually mow the yard for us! When it happens we will probably celebrate by buying her something like this!
And lastly, when I asked Brent to buy me some large tabs to pack some junk away, he most certainly came through. They're so big you could just pack us and leave the junk.

Randoms...

This is really just an Iphone dump of last week....

Things that scare me when I come across them:If we do move (which there isn't anything on the market we like right now) then living next door to our own private playground will be a top thing we miss!!! Since few people know the "secret code" to getting in back behind the elementary school it's so nice and private.
And so easy for one of us to walk over with her before dinner while the other is cooking.
Just a cute outfit (babyGap) I had to share. I love all things babyGap! It's beyond crazy how many dog themed clothes she has but she loves them all.
She chose Rapunzel to take for Show n Tell day last week.
Just us being cute one night on the porch swing.
That gets us all the way up to last Thursday when our house hunting adventures began!

Lately

Last Saturday morning Lilli spent some time drawing in Photoshop. Most of the time she really would rather use the computer than watch TV.Then she applied her artistic skills to getting into my lipstick and having quite the time.
From there we drove down to Hohenwald to visit with Brent's parents. They wanted to treat Lilli to a new toy from Wally-world. She had no objections to that suggestion and ended up picking out a Rapunzel doll she's asked me for numerous times.
She was rather proud of her popsicle, and the old heavy cotton PJs of her cousins' that she found. It was probably 80+ degrees outside but she had to have them on.
Posing with Grandma.
On Sunday she chose this dress to wear (I usually let her have three options.) She was insistent that she looked **exactly** like Princess Tiana. I really don't think anyone would confuse the two of them. She was all about the twirl factor in this dress.
In fact, at church there was so much twirling she slide right on down on the asphalt and skinned her rear end (you can see it in the below pic). It was really a pretty major scrape. Luckily she made sure to show her teacher first thing Monday am so there was no confusion as to why she just couldn't stay in her seat.
This dress rated so high for her she slept in it for her afternoon nap, and then wore it again Sunday night.
I think I paid $5 for it at a consignment sale. Certainly I've already made my money back on it!

We've had a great weekend so far! We're considering putting our house on the market while this area is trending really red hot and getting something a little larger (but cheaper) in a different part of East Nashville. We've looked at several houses so far but really haven't seen "the one" yet, but we're also not in a huge rush either. I would love a playroom and some decent closets, and maybe a larger yard. Really weren't not looking for more square footage, just a different layout. We also have several fairly small projects to do before we list our house to make it hit its potential. Our plans for today were for me to repaint the front fence and Brent to finish the pathway in the alley between us and our garage/neighbors house but it rained most of the day. Instead we ripped the sink out of our bathroom and are working on installing a new one. The old one was horrible and provided no storage, and the new one is SO pretty and has several drawers to really help declutter our bathroom. The grout in there also has always looked so nasty, and we finally found a product to help clean it and it looks pretty much amazing in there. This is the only fairly large project we need to do, other things are minor like some ceiling re-painting and touchups, so hopefully in a couple of weeks we will be ready to act if we see something more suitable for us!

All Good Things Must Come to an End...

On Tuesday morning (May 1) we loaded up the car after breakfast and started the long, long way home. At this point Lilli actually was ready to go to her "real" home and see Pippin, her toys, her school. She was concerned her teachers and friends were missing her - ha!! That's some self esteem. Of course I had to put her in a Pippin outfit (courtesy BabyGap) for the ride home!We stopped at a McDonalds near the portion of the drive right before you finally get back on the interstate for lunch. Food photography runs in the family.
Our garden is growing SO well!! We made a cool potato planter out of tires we found in the alley (Brent had seen this on YouTube.) When the potatoes are ready you just cut the tires and don't have to do all the digging. We also spray painted the tires these fun colors. I'm in a real outdoorsy living mood lately and we've spray painted most of my outdoor pots bright colors!
One Wed night at church both Lilli and Madisyn were wearing Ariel outfits. These are two princess loving three year olds. Of course my girl would not calmly pose for a picture.
I found her some Batman PJs on Zulily for cheap. She LOVES them.
That's some of the latest goings on around here!

Florida Adventures - Part 5

For most of the trip we just used our Iphones to take pictures, but on Sunday night and Monday night we walked down to the beach for some "nicer" pics with Brent's professional camera. Sunday night we got there just a hair late for sunset, so we didn't end up with a lot.

I thought this silhouette one of me was different...Lil and I running down the beach...she was impossible to capture - way too busy to stop for any kind of picture taking.
Monday night we got there right before sunset and Brent got some beautiful shots of the sun setting on the horizon. Just a sampling here....
We wanted some of her playing in the surf but she wouldn't get near the water because she didn't want to get her dress wet. Oh brother!
Gorgeous sunset...

Found a sandcastle hole....will jump in, on and through it...

Showing us her freckle face - so stinking cute!
I have to admit - jumping off stuff is a lot of fun!
We found this little guy walking around the beach before we left. This trip really was a giant science lesson!
And that should pretty much wrap up our Florida trip! There may be a couple of pictures from the ride back worth sharing, but no more ocean pictures to make you wish you were on vacation. We had a great trip and the end of April may be our new time to head down for some great relaxation.