Does this look like a potty to you?

Does this look like a potty to you?

How about now, with the lid up?

I guess Ava thinks it does look like a potty because she totally peed in it today! I was changing them all before nap time and I guess she couldn't wait for me to open the bathroom door or something. I noticed she had something wet on her leg and I asked her where she peed at. She smiled and lifted the lid on the turtle. Oh, well at least it wasn't on the floor. And at least it wasn't poop.

By the way that is a Radio Flyer Turtle. I love it and I wish they made them in adult size. It has casters on it like an office chair, ya know the wheels turn all around so you can fly around all over and spin. Logan goes like a maniac on it all around the living room and up and down the hallway on the wood floors. I remember the riding toys we had as kids where the wheels didn't even turn, you ride up into a corner or something and had to stand up and carry it between your legs.

Kolcraft is a Wonderful Company!

Here is a copy of a letter I emailed to the Customer Service Department of Kolcraft Enterprises Inc. about one of our baby bed mattresses:

Hi,
I am wondering if there is anything you can do to help me. We have 3 baby mattresses made by your company. The oldest one was made in 2004, purchased for our now 5 year old and is still going strong for one of our triplets. Another was made in 2008 and is in perfect condition. The last one is where we have a problem. It has no tag on it so I don't know when it was made it was given to us in great condition, but it has ripped and torn to the point where one side has no vinyl left on it (or whatever that material is). The baby who sleeps in that bed feels the tears and now has begun to pull up the sheet and pick at the inside stuffing material.

We have used duct tape on some of the rips but it's beyond repair now. First I would like to know what the content of the "insides" is, it's fluffy like cotton candy, it sticks to everything. Is it safe for babies to touch?? Is there any way to repair it or would this be covered under any warranty? Having triplets and a 5 yr old makes for a tight budget so we are not able to just go out and purchase a new mattress. Do you make a mattress replacement cover? Anything? Can you give me any suggestions?

I have included some pictures of the mattress to see if you could help us figure out how old it is or if it's under warranty. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you,
Amy

I received an email from an awesome lady named Lynn and she asked for a number and told me where it was located on the sticker. By the end of the week she told me to tear off the sticker and mail it to her, she would put in an order to replace the mattress! Well it's had been so crazy/busy around here watching my oldest son go off to boot camp and losing my mind and then going out to California and all that business I kinda forgot all about it. I found the papers last weekend when I cleaned the desk and Gary put the stamp on it and mailed it off. I honestly thought it had been too long (since the end of April) and that they might say forget it. But today the UPS guy came and brought a brand new mattress! You can buy one here http://www.sears.com/shc/s/ProductDisplay?partNumber=04988521000P&storeId=10153&sName=All&psid=FROOGLE01&vName=Gifts&cName=Baby&catalogId=12605&sid=IDx20070921x00003a

I'm really happy about it too because yesterday the girls were watching me change the sheets and thought they'd try it at nap time (they ripped off the sheets) so it will be nice to get that old fuzzy thing out of there for Piper. This picture of the old one looks really bad, Piper had really destroyed it more in the last few months. I swear when we started using it it looked decent, it just had a couple little tears in it. I was praying that they would send me a mattress cover/pad, like the kind the whole thing slides into and you zip it up. That was all I was hoping for and I just want to show everybody that there really are some great companies out there that really do care. Most Sealy/Kolcraft mattresses have a 10 year warranty and I know that the old one wasn't that old. ** Just a note for safety: The firmness of the mattress was never compromised or we would have immediately taken it out of the bed. Please remember that firm mattresses are safer for babies to sleep on and always put your baby to sleep on their back.

The Golden Tooth??

I was talking to Logan this morning while brushing his teeth. He is 5 years old so he does brush on his own but when we are in a hurry like this morning for school I always brush for him to hurry the process along. When the girls brush it takes almost 10 minutes of brushing time before I can wrangle the tooth brushes away from them and Logan is usually brushing right along with them. I don't mind most of the time because it helps to erase some of the guilt that I have for ruining Logan's teeth. What kind of horrible mother would ruin her child's teeth you ask? Not Supermom, that's who. He had what most people call "bottle rot" on his front teeth. He never took a bottle-ever. None of my kids ever had a bottle past 12 months in fact. Logan nursed until he was 22 months and no that didn't cause it either silly. Somehow he got started taking a sippy cup to bed. It wasn't every night at first and I really think it had a lot to do with the fact that we had a 4 year old foster son at the time that routinely had screaming fits for up to 2 hours at a time, even at bedtime. He shared a room with Logan, yea. This child took a LOT of my time and energy and it was right at the time when I weaned Logan. Enter major "mommy guilt". By the time I realized it had became a habit it was too late, he was completely addicted. We tried switching to water and all the tricks and nothing worked. I cannot believe how fast it happened either, he got a black spot right between his 2 front teeth! The dentist used a grinder and ground away the black spot so now his 2 front teeth are shorter. I bet everybody up until now thought it was just natural but no it isn't. I can't wait for the day when his baby teeth come out and he can have some new shiny pearly whites! Which brings me to the conversation we had this morning. i was telling him about the Tooth Fairy Pillow that I will be making for him and we discussed the procedure of hanging it on the doorknob outside his room so she wouldn't have to wake him when she exchanges the tooth for money. I told him he would have to do a great job brushing those "new" teeth because they are going to have to last forever. Logan looked at me and said "yea, and they will be GOLD!" Um, what? "No, they will be white." "But xxxx's new tooth is gold." he said with a look of disappointment. Ok so some kid in his class got a new gold tooth. Why I'm not sure but I'm going to let myself think that the kid had bottle rot, it just makes me feel better. Here is a link to a site that has a FREE pattern for a Ballerina tooth fairy pillow as well as a monster one if you look around. http://mmmcrafts.blogspot.com/2009/02/tooth-pillow-revisited.html

The triplets are restless today. We all have colds and are not feeling the greatest. I think we will head downstairs to the playroom after they eat their pancakes. The playroom isn't quite ready yet but they will still have fun and I can do some laundry and watch them at the same time, that's the idea behind the basement playroom. Hey do you hate giving pancakes with syrup to your kids? I used to, I hated the sticky mess and they always needed a bath when they were done, especially with girls because they get it in their hair somehow. I started making pancakes and putting about a Tablespoon of powdered sugar on top of them instead of syrup and it's great. No mess, so they can eat them at the little table instead of the highchairs and they love them. By now you all know to cut up everything for kids with your pizza cutter right? Oh yea, they taste like funnel cakes and have half the calories of regular maple syrup and less carbs too so they are good for mommies and daddies too. I just use a store brand complete mix that you add water to and I find it's faster than scrambled eggs and you can add fresh fruit right into the batter if you want to. We like blueberry, strawberry and apple pancakes. If you add the fruit you don't need the powdered sugar. Pancakes are also a great place to hide some Flax oil. I'm not always super health conscious, sometimes I like to make some fresh whipped cream to add to the top of our pancakes-yet another reason to get a cow lol.

This is Logan last week, right as he got off the school bus. Evidently he got to pick a prize from the prize box. I opened the door and this is what I saw!

Dora Upcycle, Skirt and Organization Issues

First is the Dora jacket remake before and afters. The skirt has no elastic yet because I can't decide who will wear it yet. It only takes a couple minutes to string some elastic in there so I will do it at the last minute I'm sure. Now all we need is some brown boots to complete the outfit. The little jacket was too short for anybody so adding the ruffle made it about an 1 1/2 inches longer. The top of the skirt is a light denim fabric that came from a pair of my old fat pants, I still have fat pants...they are just smaller. Then I added a couple of ruffles to match the jacket. I thought about going with tans and browns but the brown fabric I had on hand looked too old lady-ish so I took it in another direction. I had the lavender Dora fabric anyway. Oh, if you saw the guitar tee from yesterday's post it was just a black tee that was too short for Logan and I added a couple inches of red and blue striped tee shirt knit on the bottom.

So here is what's frustrating me today,any ideas are welcome and can be left in the comments section following this post. I have a whole storage tote filled with photographs from before we had our digital camera, school pictures and some are even my baby pictures. I don't know what to do with them. They are not organized or sorted in any fashion and it makes me crazy. I seriously cannot afford to go out and by 100 photo albums. I bought 2 and nobody (including me) wants to sort and put them in. I tried scanning a bunch to the computer so I could put them on a disc, it took half a day to scan a small pile of them! Besides the fact that I have so many pictures on my laptop that it's bogging down already and I need to clear them out and put those onto a disc too. I attempted to do it last week and I had too many pictures to fit on one disc so with my short attention span I ended up not continuing and now I have lost the blank discs in some clutter, hey don't judge. I have 8 people living in a 3 bedroom 1 bathroom house, you'd have clutter too.

My other frustration at the moment is that the basement is so filled with...well...garage sale stuff and stuff for storage. I wanted to clean it out and make a childproof area so the girls can come down with me and Levi's unfinished room is going to be converted to a sewing/craft room so that we can have our dining room back. We haven't had a table to eat on since the girls babies. The dining room table can come back upstairs and I can set up 2 long tables in the "new" sewing room for cutting out patterns etc...The basement currently has 2 unfinished rooms and an unfinished bathroom. When Austin moved out of his corner of the basement, Levi decided to drag all his stuff over there and take over. I finally got him to clear out the room he had been sleeping in so I need to start cleaning and moving down there. I'm keeping the bed in that room so that when Austin comes back to visit he has a place to sleep. "so I get to sleep in the sweatshop?" he asked. Yes. I hope that this weekend I get a chance to get down there and make some headway because there are so many other things to get done and this is the biggest obstacle in my plan to get organized. The picture of me with shelves of sewing stuff behind me is actually in our dining room and there is a full size dresser in there with girls clothes in it too! Aaahh the madness!

I will add the rest of the Dora pics after I take them-oops. I added a ruffle to this and made a matching skirt. I thought I had already taken the pictures but nope.

Today I'm sharing some of my favorite places on the web. The first is a great site for anybody with kids called http://storylineonline.net/ by the Screen Actors Guild. It's an online streaming video program featuring SAG members reading books aloud. You can have Al Gore read a book to your kid lol. James Earl Jones and Amanda Bynes are a couple more and the books are all great too. Stellaluna and A Bad Case of Stripes are just a couple. My trio of 2 year olds even sat still for a story on this site and usually they have no interest in the computer unless its spouting Barney songs. The actor reads the book and you get to see the pictures too. Check it out, it might buy you 10 minutes of quiet.

I also love a blog called "Confessions of a Sewing Dork" I'd love for you to go check her out, she has lots of awesome free tutorials and is full of great ideas and great give aways! I recently won an adorable outfit from her blog and I never win anything lol. You can see the outfit here: http://sewingdork.blogspot.com/search/label/giveaways really it's worth a peek! She also does mama clothes too. She is a sweet lady from Canada and she's funny too.

I was going to add some more but it's going to be another day because the dog is scratching at the front door to get in and the cat is scratching at the back door for food and the girls are jumping around shouting "eat eggies!" so I gotta run. I will tack on some pics of things I have been working on here at the end real quick though :-)

Slippers x6 plus a Free tutorial link

I finished 6 pair of slippers for the girls. I worked on them last night after the girls went to bed and again this morning while they ate breakfast. Not bad. I cut out everything and always sew in an assembly line fashion since I always make multiples of what I am sewing. Here are some pictures and if you want a FREE tutorial to make your own just hop on over to the Maked blog, like naked but craftier. 4 awesome ladies that do a little bit of everything crafty.http://baremaked.blogspot.com/2007/11/reversible-fabric-baby-shoes-tutorial.html

I made all of mine out of scraps including an old soft wooly sweater for some and the bottom was cut from an outgrown lavender suede top so they wouldn't slip and slide around the wood floors. Now the girls can have warm tootsies!

Getting ready for an Iowa Winter

Chloe on the slide.

Piper inspecting an acorn! "What's that?"

Look at those curls!

Ava

Sorry the pictures are not in the right place again. Blogger isn't liking me much today.

It's getting colder here, the forecast is calling for 50 degrees tomorrow. Wow! I have been doing the typical winter preparations around home. I have a list of things for the guys to do like clean the chimney and put up plastic over the door we don't use in the kitchen-it lets in a lot of cold air, there is a window in the girls' room that also needs plastic. We need to eventually budget for new windows but not this year. We use wood heat and that saves us a lot of money but with Austin gone we are a little behind on our supply. Levi needs to take a day for just going out and getting some more wood up. Last year we didn't use very much LP at all, we always leave the furnace off for as long as possible and then when we do give in and turn it on, it's mostly just for a back up for nights and when I can't get the wood stove started lol. I do pretty good but sometimes if we run out of fatwood I just can't get away long enough to sit there and mess with it(it's in the basement). I love to bake and the oven will heat the kitchen and living room pretty good so sometimes I just bake something in the morning and then when the girls lay down for nap I have time to go get the wood stove going. Normally this time of year we have a fully stocked pantry and freezer. Since having triplets though it's been rough getting ahead and this year I didn't even attempt a garden. In years past we have had huge gardens and shelves full of green beans, tomatoes, relish and lots of winter squash. Last year we had a freezer full of corn and apple slices but this year with a bunch of 2 yr olds running around it just didn't happen. We have some raspberry jam that Randy helped with but that's about it. I did get over to the Amish stores to get my winter supply of dry goods in bulk. I forgot about getting pictures until I was almost done putting it away so there is only one picture. I think I will dig out some of our older pictures of our big gardens and fun harvest pictures so I can post them in the next day or two just for fun (fun for me :-).

I'm sewing up some winter slippers for everybody and adding sleeves or lengthening some shirts to get some more wear out of them. Adding some ruffles to the bottom of some of the girls pants too, they are so cute and if I can get 6 more months out of them why not? I want to get these done so I can start on the Holiday outfits. I am also planning some adorable coats for the girls so I have a lot to do as usual.

I'm also adding a few park pictures from our last outing.