And the worst blogger award goes to... ME!

       Considering I haven't posted since August, I feel like I kind of let my blog die this year... oops! Life has kinda been kicking our butts lately, to be honest!  But I'm hoping that things are starting to calm down a little for us... we seem to finally be getting our lives in order again here in the Romney house!
       Speaking of the Romney house, part of what caused the chaos in our lives the past few months is that we bought a house!  We love it, and it has been SO fantastic to live in  our very own house for the first time.  We love not having neighbors under us, so I no longer have to worry when I get out of the shower to find that Naomi has been practicing her "tap-dancing" on the kitchen floor for the past 30 minutes.  We love living in a cute, safe neighborhood.  We love having a big garage and flat driveway for the kids to ride their bikes on and color with sidewalk chalk.  And we LOVE having a yard for the first time ever... and it's fenced!  Extra bonus.
       Sadly, although we moved in close to 3 months ago, we still haven't been able to take the obligatory "family in front of newly-bought-home" photo.  Our move-in day was insane, due to the fact that we had to move up our move with less than 24 hours' notice... we were supposed to get a crazy snowstorm on the Saturday morning we had planned to move, so we moved on Friday night instead, which was made possible by our awesome packing skills (we had pretty much finished our packing four days early) and the amazing people who helped us from church!  While I didn't get to do all the deep cleaning I had wanted to and we had to move all of the basement boxes and furniture into the garage instead of the house since the basement carpets were still soaking wet from the carpet cleaner, we did get everything moved in time.  And as crazy as everything was, we were so grateful we made the decision to move a day early!  The snowstorm on Saturday came, and it was as bad as we'd been warned... but it came hours earlier than they had expected.  We were too tired on Friday night to drop the moving truck off when we finally finished moving everything, so we decided to get up early and drop it off first thing in the morning, before the snow started.  But since the snow started at like 6:30 instead of after 9, we ended up taking the truck back in the thick of the storm, and I got into my very first accident on the way home!  Thankfully, it was a minor accident, and it only involved our car and the curb, but it did enough damage to hurt our wallet quite a bit!
      Another cause of the craziness of our past few months is that I got horribly sick less than 24 hours after we moved in with what we later found out was Mono!  Mono sucks, you guys.  Like really, seriously sucks.  I had a good 10 days of fevers and nausea and body aches, and then a few weeks of one of the worst sore throats I've ever had, and I'm honestly not sure whether the fatigue has finished with me yet, even though it's been more than 2 1/2 months.  I'll think I'm feeling good, and then I'll have a day where I push myself maybe a little too much, and then I'm totally exhausted for the next week.  I still have days where I take crazy long naps (I'm talking like 3 or 4 hours...) and then still go to bed before Jacob because I'm just that tired.  But most of the time I'm feeling pretty good, and we've finally been able to get some unpacking done this month!  Yay!  So hopefully we'll be ready to take some pictures of our cute new house soon.
       One big change coming up for our family is that I am opening a home preschool this fall!  That was actually the biggest factor in our decision to buy a house this year... teaching preschool classes has been something that I've been thinking about and wanting to do for a couple years now, but my largest obstacle was always that we didn't own a home.  So Jacob & I decided to go for it and buy a house so I can teach preschool!  I'm super excited and also completely terrified!  I've been working hard the past couple months getting my website up & running, getting the house ready for all of the inspections, and trying to get the word out so parents know I'm here.  It has been a little hard not to get discouraged lately--it has been harder than I anticipated to advertise and get the word out to people who might be interested, and there have been quite a few costly changes that we need to have done to the house in order to pass the necessary inspections, so that has been frustrating.  But we are trying to stay positive and have faith that we can make it work out!
       Naomi turned 6 last week, and she had her first "real" birthday party where she invited friends from school.  She wanted the theme to be Jake and the Neverland Pirates so we had lots of fun pirate decor and accessories, pirate-themed food, a treasure hunt, and a pinata... although the pinata did not match the theme. I found a treasure chest pinata, which would have been perfect, but Naomi insisted she wanted the brightly-colored donkey pinata.  So we had a pirate party with a donkey pinata, and Naomi loved it!
     

       Naomi had part of this week off from school for Spring Break, so the girls and I had a fun couple days together at home!  We dyed Easter eggs with one of Naomi's friends, had an Easter egg hunt in the house, painted our nails for Easter, had a movie day with popcorn and The Good Dinosaur, and today we spent a couple hours curling their hair and taking fun pictures in their Easter dresses.

     
       Jacob has been working super hard lately at both of his jobs, which has been exhausting for him but helpful for us financially, especially since the costs of getting the house ready for preschool have been quite a bit more expensive than we expected.  I've never had to hire plumbers, or contractors, or electricians before since we have always rented, so I've been having fun figuring all of that out!  It's been kind of exciting, making me feel like a real homeowner and all... but I'm guessing that excitement will end as soon as I start getting the bills in the mail. :)
       Well, I think I've covered all the major changes and updates in our lives!  As we slowly get the house unpacked and decorated and looking pretty, I'll get some pictures posted!  We're planning on painting the basement in the next few weeks so I can finally get all of the wall decor hung and get it looking pretty for the preschool.  I'll definitely post some photos when we finish with that!

Reading Nook

I have been working like crazy lately to try to get our house cleaned and better organized.  Organization is NOT one of my strengths... and that's putting it mildly.  I've never been a tidy person.  I'm terrible, TERRIBLE with clutter.  I have no idea how to organize the house and then keep it clean and organized and pretty.  But I have been trying so hard lately to turn that around!

This weekend I tried to tackle the playroom, but it was quite frustrating.  It's a pretty small room, and we just have too much stuff.  We also have this weird little open space in our hallway where our laundry room door is, and I've been trying to figure out how we could use that space to our advantage, instead of either having it empty and wasting it completely, or just using it to store stuff that doesn't have anywhere else to go, which is what we've been doing.  And that of course looks horrible, but like I said, I'm so bad with organization and clutter! 

I finally decided last night that I wanted to turn the little hall alcove space into a reading nook for the girls!  This would free up room in the playroom since it would get the bookcase and a couple other things out of there, and it would force me to stop using that hall space to store things. 

I think I'd like to get the girls some better chairs, probably for Christmas.  Something cushy and comfy that I can plop on the floor in that corner, like bean bag chairs or something.  And someday I'd like to frame my mural poster thing that's above the bookcase, but it's a funny size (like 29 inches by 10 inches) so I haven't been able to do it yet.  But for now, the reading nook is done! 

Our Kitchen

I finally have one room completely unpacked and decorated and organized! Yay!  So here is our kitchen:

It says "Kitchens are made for Families to Gather"

Our fridge is incredibly crowded, because Naomi loves to hang everything she does on the fridge.  But I love it!  She's so cute.  Right now we've got some of our preschool art activities on there and some Halloween coloring pages Naomi was really proud of.  And my grocery list, which I think it written on the back of a receipt, because it's the only paper I could find!  (Somehow we still haven't found any of our paper in any of the boxes we've unpacked! haha)

I'm ridiculously excited about the polka-dot chalkboard thing.  I love it.  I can write our dinner menu on it, or leave Jacob messages, or leave reminders for myself, or a thousand other things.  And it's super cute!  My mother-in-law came to visit, and we went shopping and bought the chalkboard because the wall behind the kitchen sink needed something, but then we decided it would be too hard to change the message on the board if it was hanging above the sink.  So I hung it on the little wall behind the table, instead.  On the shelf underneath, I'm going to put some pieces of chalk and an eraser.  But I haven't bought the chalk or eraser yet, so the shelf is empty for now!  I had to use a huge piece of sidewalk chalk to write our menu.

They finished painting our house!

They finally finished painting the outside of our house.  I definitely wouldn't have chosen these colors, but anything is better than the way it used to look.  Here is the before & after:

Before--Super ugly.

After--Not as bad!

Our New Place

Here is a picture of our new place!

The big black rectangles are not part of the picture... I added them to cover up the numbers!

It looks awesome, right?  hahaha... Don't worry... the outside appearance is deceiving--it looks much better inside.  And on Monday, they are painting the outside so that it looks prettier, too.  Our next-door neighbors also rent from the same guy, and their house looks pretty outside, so I think ours will look nice when it's all done!

I love our new place, but I also seriously hate it.  As with every place we've lived, there are pros and cons, but this place seems to have much more extreme pros and cons.  For example, a major pro--the place is huge... easily twice the size of our last place.  The playroom alone is twice as big as our living room at our last house, which functioned as living room, playroom, and computer room.  So the girls' playroom here is gigantic.  I LOVE it.

Now for a major con... and I mean MAJOR--the bathrooms.  Just everything about them.  They are so terrible.  I'd rather have the bathrooms from our old place, complete with the roaches (Both live and dead!  When we moved into our last place, there were layers of dead roaches & other bugs in the bathroom cabinets.  It was extremely disgusting.).  I thought I couldn't hate a bathroom more than I hated our old bathroom, but I was wrong.  These bathrooms are seriously terrible.  Here are some photos to show you what I mean:

See the toilet hiding back there in the corner?

Notice that the sink is turned the wrong way.

So ridiculously cramped.

They actually had to cut a hole in the wall to get the toilet to fit.

Idiots.

Those pictures are of the master bathroom, which is the worst of the two bathrooms.  It's basically unusable.  And by the way, because it's so bad, we haven't been using it at all, so I didn't bother to clean it when we moved in.  So all the mess & dirt is from the construction... they don't always do a very good job of cleaning up.  Anyway, what they should have done with the master bath was make it into a bathroom with a shower instead of a tub.  The owner wanted it to be a full bathroom since it was the "master bathroom", but instead, he has basically made it just a tub.  Because that's really the only part of the bathroom that we can use.  I can barely, just barely, fit into the space to get back to the toilet.  But once you're back there, you can't move.  And your left side is being smashed against the wall.  The sink is turned the wrong way, so you can't look in the mirror and use the sink unless you stand in front of the toilet and use the sink sideways.  It's completely idiotic and ridiculous, and I wish the person who designed it could be forced to use it for even just one day to show them how stupid they are.  Did you notice in the picture that they actually had to CUT A HOLE IN THE WALL to make the toilet fit into the space?!  Oh, and to top it all off, there is NO storage.  Not a single cabinet.  Not a single shelf.  Nothing.  In either bathroom.  And there's no space to put anything in.  So. Freakin. Stupid.

The other bathroom is a TINY bit better.  But it's still pretty bad.  You're at least not being smashed against a wall when you sit, and the sink is turned the correct way.  And the toilet fit without the need for any holes in the walls.  But poor Naomi hunches over when she is trying to get to the toilet, because she has hit her head numerous times on the sink as she was trying to get to the potty.  It makes me so sad!  And so very angry.

Anyway, so that's the biggest negative.  It's bad enough that we never would have rented this place if we had seen what the bathrooms would be like.  But at least none of the other cons for the place are so bad.  They are more like annoyances that we'll just get over or get used to.  Or they are minor issues that I can fix by spending a few dollars at Walmart on a helpful gadget.

Well now that I've gone on and on about the terrible bathrooms, I will tell you about more of the pros for the place, before you feel too bad for us!  I already mentioned the space, but seriously, it deserves being mentioned again.  It's HUGE.  We were used to a teeny, tiny little townhouse with absolutely no storage.  We have 4 bedrooms here, a nice-sized living room and kitchen, and tons of closets.  There's a closet in the living room, and in that closet is another closet.  There's a closet in the big hallway/open middle area of the house.  Then there's another closet in the hallway, and that closet is super big.  There's a pantry/closet in the kitchen.  There's a closet in each bedroom, and the girls' closet is almost a double closet.  There are two closets in the master bedroom--one is just a single closet, and the other one is super big.  So there is tons of storage space, which is SO nice after having almost no storage in the last place we lived!

We have granite counter tops and marble floors in the kitchen, and we also have marble floors in the bathroom.  They're super pretty.  And I love the windows--they're all huge.  So the place is sunny and bright and happy.

The street we live on & the surrounding streets are pretty nice, and everyone around has been super friendly.  There's a really cute playground 3 blocks away which was just redone.  There's a huge park just a mile away, which is so pretty.  I love it.  And the houses on the streets around the park are GORGEOUS.  I'm trying to convince Jacob to take us all for a walk around the park tomorrow after church!

Oh, the air conditioning!  I love it so much.  To compare, at our crappy townhouse in Columbia, our air conditioning was so bad.  It would run all day and all night, and if it turned off at all, it wasn't until maybe 4 or 5 in the morning when it would FINALLY get down to the temperature we set it to.  For most of our summer days, the temperature in our house would be between 75 and 78 by mid-afternoon.  And the downstairs was always at least 5 degrees cooler than upstairs.  So if you wanted to be comfortable at all when sleeping, you had to let the air conditioning run until the main floor was down in the 60s.  Our utility bills in the summer were insanely high since the air conditioner would run all day and all night just to keep the place somewhat cool.  I'm talking like we could rent another apartment for the amount we paid the utility company every month.  But our air conditioner here is AMAZING!  I love it so much.  It turns on, and runs for a few minutes, and then turns off.  And if I set it to 72, it gets the temperature to 72, and it stays there!  And for the majority of the time, it's not even running.  Amazing!

Our beautiful thermostat!

I wasn't going to post any photos until all of the construction was done and everything was unpacked and organized and looking awesome... but that could be a while.  Maybe a long while.  So I'm giving in to the people who have asked for pictures--Here are a few photos of our place looking kinda terrible!  This way, when you see it all finished, you'll appreciate it more... right? :)

Here are the kitchen counters and floor... I just took a picture of the corner of the counter, because all of our counters are still covered with boxes/things that I have to put away.  And I haven't bothered sweeping or mopping yet since construction guys have been coming in and out all day every day, so the floor is a mess.  But it's pretty, huh?

Marble floors!

Pretty counter tops!

The last room I tried to take pictures of was the playroom.  I have been cleaning that room twice a day, but it is still a disaster area.  We have nothing to organize toys, so they all get thrown into a bin, which just gets dumped again 20 minutes after I clean it.  I plan on getting something to organize the toys as soon as I can.

I hung my PLAY signs, but they are bugging me.  One, they look so small.  They're each 10-inch squares, which seemed so big when I was making them, but on the huge wall, they look kinda silly.  And I think I need a 5th square, to make it more even.  Oh well!

Anyway, there you go!  Give me another week or two, and we'll have the place looking awesome.  I hope. :)

Our latest moving adventure!

We are finally moved into our new place in St. Louis!  I'm so glad that this move is basically over.  It was so terrible.  It seemed like nothing could go right!  I was a wreck the entire week or so before the move... I had a to-do list 2 pages long, and I was so stressed out that I was having panic attacks, which I haven't had a problem with since graduating from college.  It was a crazy time.  But somehow we got everything (or the most important things, at least) done in time for our move on Saturday.

The first major complication hit on Friday, when I got a text confirming our noon pickup for our U-Haul the next day.  The only problem was that I had set up an 8 AM pickup.  We had church members coming at 8:30 to help load up the truck, church members meeting us at our new place in St. Louis to help unload the truck, and the Charter Internet guy coming to our new place at 3 to get us set up for internet.  So I called U-Haul, and the ever-so-helpful U-Haul rep explained that 8 AM was simply my preferred pickup time, but the actual pickup time depends on when the trucks are returned and when one can be available for me.  I explained our situation and said that we had to be at our new place by 2, and I asked how anyone was expected to plan a move if they can't tell you when you can pick up your moving truck until the night before, but he just repeated the same stupid thing.  He was so helpful.  And super understanding.  (That's called sarcasm.)

Anyway, three calls and three U-Haul reps later, I spoke to someone who actually was helpful, and she located a truck for me to pick up in Fulton, which is a 40 minute drive from Columbia.  SO not ideal.  But definitely better than not getting a truck until noon and not having anyone available to help load and then unload our things.  So we all woke up at 6:45 on Saturday (the kids were super happy about that one), hopped in the car, and drove 40 minutes to pick up our U-Haul.  We almost lost our way, but thanks to the handy GPS my parents sent me, we got there right on time at 8!  And the place was closed.  So we sat in the parking lot until 8:10, when we finally called the guy, who said he was just getting ready to leave his house.  Frustrating, especially when I had even called the place on Friday after U-Haul changed my reservation to make sure that they had received the info and knew we were coming.  So they had even spoken to me and confirmed our 8 AM pickup.  But we did eventually get our truck, and we made it home by 9, which was WAY better than noon.  But we will not be using U-Haul in the future it we can avoid it!

Only 2 guys showed up to help Jacob load the truck, so that was disappointing.  I had expected that we'd have more help than that.  But they knew what they were doing, and they got all of our stuff to fit!  (Although we used every single nook and cranny in that 20-foot truck!)

For the kids, Saturday morning was rough.  They were super tired, they had no toys, and we had to shut them in their room so that they were out of the way.  Naomi really wanted to help, which means she was running around after the men, trying to carry things, or look at things, or run into the truck, and I was so scared she was going to get clobbered by heavy furniture.  Which is probably what was going to happen.  So we played in their room, but everything was boxed up.  For a while, they jumped on Aleta's crib mattress.  Then Naomi found Easter baskets & a box of Christmas bows in her closet, so they were entertained with those for a while.  Both girls hit a point where they decided they were done with being shut up in their room, and things got really bad until I realized they were starving and I got them bowls of Fruit Loops.  Also during this time, I was trying to help carry boxes out, and vacuum all of the rooms once the guys emptied them, and sweep the floors.  It was really really hard.  The next time we move, I will beg, plead, and maybe even offer money to any wonderfully kind souls who are willing to watch the kids while we are packing up & cleaning.  My friend Jess even offered that morning, but she had already done so much to help me, so I didn't take her up on the offer.  Plus, I really thought I'd be fine.  Silly me!  Now I know better.

playing with bows

With all of the snags in our plan, we didn't get out of Columbia until two hours later than we had hoped.  But as it turned out, that didn't even matter.  Because when we arrived at our new house in St. Louis, it wasn't finished!  And by "not finished", I mean there weren't any carpets, or tile floor in the kitchen, or cabinets, or a fridge, or an oven, or a million other things that should have been done.  And our landlord apparently didn't think we needed a heads-up because he never called to tell us that our place wasn't ready, even though our contract said we would be moving in August 10.  I maybe had a bit of an emotional breakdown, I am not proud to say.

So we weren't able to move in on Saturday, but our wonderful next-door neighbors and friends let us stay with them, so we weren't completely homeless.  And then a ton of people from church helped us unload the truck on Sunday so we got everything into the house pretty quickly.  We don't usually do that type of thing on the Sabbath, but this was a unique situation.

So we're moved in!  Finally.  Our house is still a major work-in-progress.  We didn't get any window blinds until Monday morning, and we still have 3 windows without.  We didn't get a fridge or oven until Monday.  We still have gaping holes in the ground where vent covers are supposed to be, and two of our sinks are leaking, and one sink isn't attached to the wall, and we have no closet rods to hang anything, and almost none of our doors close, and some don't even have doorknobs.  But we are moved in!  And the workers are here, working super hard, so things will hopefully be done soon!  I have a major love-hate relationship with our place right now, but more on that in another post!

Our Place-- the living room

When we moved into our current place here in Columbia, we lost quite a bit of room and a TON of storage space.  I didn't love our last place, and it was way too expensive, but it did have tons of storage, which was awesome.  It had a big coat & storage closet under the stairs, a large pantry, a large storage closet beside the pantry, cabinet space under the sink in the downstairs bathroom, double cabinet space under the sinks in the upstairs bathroom, a linen closet, a closet along an entire wall in our bedroom, and a decent-sized closet in Naomi's bedroom.  For a little townhouse, it had awesome storage.

Here, however, there is practically nothing.  We have a decent-sized closet in our room, and the girls' closets have a little space for some storage, and there is a small closet under the stairs, but that's it.  No pantry.  No linen closet.  No cabinets for storage in the bathrooms (the sinks are those pedestal sinks, so there aren't any cabinets under them).  No extra storage closets.  So I have had a really hard time unpacking our stuff.  We've been here for 7 months now, and until this week, our living room still had quite a few unpacked boxes & bins lining the walls & stacked in corners.  So you can get an idea of how bad the room looked before and how much stuff we had to move, here are two pictures (both were taken by Naomi... she likes to play with the camera):

You can see some of the storage I stacked under the computer table and some of the junk that was sitting on the treadmill. 

Another view of the stuff stacked on the treadmill.  There was probably the same amount of junk & bins & boxes stacked in the corner of the room, too, but I don't have a picture of that.

I finally decided I couldn't stand it anymore (and I needed our house to look nice because I am going to start doing a little babysitting here--more on that later), so I went on a cleaning frenzy.  I basically organized and tidied and deep cleaned for 3 days straight.  (I am exhausted!)  And when Jacob was off on Wednesday for the 4th, I made him help me move all the heavy stuff out of the room & rearrange a few pieces of furniture into a better arrangement.  I also made him put up the curtains that I bought way back in February.  I was so excited--this is the first time we've ever had curtains in our living room, and I love it!  I think curtains make any room look 10 times better.  Someday, we will have curtains in our bedroom, too.  Not any day soon, but someday!  :)

Before I decided I wanted to rearrange furniture, I made Jacob finally help me hang some pictures.  But then we moved the furniture around, and the pictures aren't in the right spots anymore.  So please ignore the off-center wall arrangements... I'll have to move them around a bit to get them where I want them.

Because of the lack of storage space here, I have had to get creative and utilize space that I wouldn't normally use... like under the computer table.  I used the space under the computer table to stack boxes of food storage and some file boxes.  Then, because I hated how trashy it looked with all the stacked boxes/bins underneath, I made a table skirt for it.  I used one of the same red sheets that I used to cover our couch & chair because I had a couple extras, so it even matches.  I used industrial strength Velcro to attach it to the edge of the table, and I cut a separate piece for the space in front of the computer screen so when we are sitting at the computer, we can just take that piece off.  That way, we can scoot the chair in without having the sheet in the way or in our lap.  The one thing I haven't done yet is hem the bottom & edges.  It doesn't look amazing, but it is definitely better than seeing all the boxes!

I also took a ton of toys & moved them to Naomi's room.  We used to not have very many toys, but through gifts from family & friends, we now have a good selection of toys!  We were keeping them all in the living room because Naomi spends most of her time playing there, but that meant the living room looked like a disaster area all the time.  It was impossible to keep the room clean.  Naomi would dump everything and get out every toy so that the floor was covered, and it would take me an hour to clean it up every night.  So I chose enough toys to cover the bottom two shelves of the bookcase and put everything else in a bin in Naomi's room.  She can still play with the rest of the toys in her room, and I can change up the toys that are downstairs every week or so, but I don't have a huge mess to clean up downstairs anymore!  I am loving it!

Naomi's Room

I have a habit of starting a project and then never finishing it. I start out feeling all excited about it and working really hard, but if I'm not able to finish the project quickly, I lose my motivation and it never gets done. For example, when we moved into our second apartment in Provo and Naomi started sleeping in her own room, I got SO excited to decorate her nursery. I ordered lots of photo prints from Walmart of our family photos & Naomi's baby photos, I found cheap frames, my mom helped me figure out the best way to arrange all of her furniture, my mom helped me figure out a way to hang her crib comforter behind the crib, and I bought & painted wooden letters to spell her name on her wall. But we ended up moving to Missouri just 2 months after we moved into that apartment, so other than arranging her furniture and hanging just a few of the pictures, I never finished her room. After 6 months of living with Jacob's family, we moved into our own place in Columbia, but I never finished Naomi's room or made it look pretty. Considering we lived there for a year, I really should have done it, but I could never figure out the best set-up or the best way to hang the photos and wall decorations, and Jacob is no help in that department, so I basically just gave up.

When we moved into the place we are in now, I got all excited again about decorating and making our house pretty, but it has still been slow-going. I was especially excited about Naomi's room... she started sleeping in a twin bed shortly after we moved, so I got to buy a bedding set for her. I wanted something cute and girly with bright colors, and it had to be cheap. I ended up finding her bedding set on the Target website. It was PERFECT. It was exactly what I wanted, and it was on clearance for 30 bucks. And it gave me a cute theme for her room: butterflies! (The picture is old--it's the same one I posted a couple months ago when we first got her bedding.)In all of our moves, we somehow lost a few of Naomi's wall letters, so I had to buy new ones. I painted them bright pink & yellow, 2 of the colors in her comforter, and hung them above her bed. I love it!!! It's my favorite part of her room. The only thing I wish I could change is that I had to hang them pretty high, and I wish I could have hung them a little lower. But I can't have them in Naomi's reach, because she will rip them off the wall and ruin it.
I think some of the letters are a little crooked, so don't pay attention to that! I will fix it tomorrow. But other than that, it's cute, huh?? The letters cost me 99 cents each, the paint was about 2 dollars, and I splurged on the butterflies, which cost me $2.99. I got everything from Hobby Lobby... can I just say how much I love that place?

My second project was to tackle the problem of Naomi having no dresser, which means all of her clothes have been in piles & in boxes all over our bedroom & Aleta's bedroom, which has prevented me from being able to finish organizing either room. I've been trying to find a cute white dresser on craigslist, but I haven't been able to find anything that will work out. I was just about to give in and buy the only dresser we could afford, which was this hideous piece of junk from Walmart, but at the last second I backed out and decided there had to be something else I could do. The dresser would have cost us 65 bucks, which was way too much for something so ugly. So instead, I bought a 15 dollar white bookcase and 4 cube storage drawers to put her clothes in. It's not perfect, but it will hold her clothes, it was way less than the cost of the dresser, and it looks way cuter. I'm not finished with the bookcase, yet... I need to figure out what I'm going to do with the rest of the space on the shelves, but that will have to wait a little while.
Also, the colors look better in person... the picture makes the green look darker & uglier, and the other two drawers are purple... the picture makes them look a little blue-ish. And, I would like to add that I put the bookshelf together on my own! I got really frustrated partway through and wanted Jacob to take over, but when I got tired of waiting for him to finish it, I just finished it myself.

Next, I wanted something to hang on the wall above the head of her bed. All I really have to hang on her walls are picture frames, but I don't want anything heavy, especially something with glass, hanging above her head. So I googled and spent a couple hours browsing the internet for ideas! Then today, I went to Goodwill and found the perfect frame for my project!

Here is the before picture... ugly, I know, but it was only a dollar at Goodwill:And this is what I ended up with:

I'm not a creative or crafty person, so I was very pleased with my end result! The frame is incredibly lightweight, there is no glass in the front, and it cost me a total of $2.42 to make! The frame was a dollar, the white paint was on sale for 70 cents, I bought the background scrapbook paper at Hobby Lobby on sale for 36 cents, and the butterflies were cut out of another piece of scrapbook paper, which was also 36 cents. And I can still use the rest of the butterfly paper for another project if I want! Here's a close-up of the little saying (which I found on a few websites online):Also, I found this little guy at Hobby Lobby in their spring garden decorations, and I just couldn't pass him up since he was 40% off... he is definitely worth the $2.40 I paid for him! I think you're supposed to stick it in your garden, but I'm planning on just breaking the stick off and putting him somewhere in Naomi's room... just not sure where yet!