March Shout-Out

I have a perpetual calendar that my sister gave me for Christmas a few years back. I admit, I was very bad about changing it each month--look, one thing that improved when I became a stay at home mom! I'm now never more than a day or two behind (instead of three or four months...), and usually I'm right on the ball changing the calendar for the new month.

March was fun because I got to use so many of the little pictures.

Deborah (1) and Charyl (5) lucked out and got the official birthday markers.

Lisa and Christian (20) lucked out and got the real anniversary marker (3 years!).

My birthday (17--ten days!) was obvious with the shamrock, right?

And Chris and I are celebrating our joint birthdays on the 18th, hence the ribbon and confetti. Old Spaghetti Factory and Anniversary Inn, here we come.

I had to get a little more creative with the other ones...

My parents' anniversary--34 years!!!--was on the fourth. They got the "Mom" flowers.

Chris's birthday is the 19th--he gets the "Dad" hat.

We find out the gender of our baby (assuming baby cooperation) on Friday the 11th. Hence the basket of eggs--get it?

P.S. Have you voted on the poll yet?

And last but not least, Michael and Amanda have their first anniversary coming up on Wednesday. Check the picture again. Yeah, they get the jack-o-lantern. Why? Both of their birthdays are in October. That's as close as I could get!

Happy Everything to all involved!

And a side note on life...

One of our family's recent stresses has been our children's clothing. Oh, man. Jane got into the habit of pulling ALL of the clothes out of their dresser and making an ENORMOUS mess every time she was supposed to be sleeping. Solution attempt #1: Move the dresser out of the bedroom and into the playroom. Well, that helped with naptimes, but mostly it just meant that all of the clothes were mixed in with all of the toys instead of being the only mess on the floor.

Not really better.

We contemplated, discussed, thought, considered, and further attempted ways of child-proofing the dresser. Pretty much wasn't happening. The dresser is fairly old and, well, crappy, so the drawers hardly stay in as it is. There was no good way to secure the drawers firmly into the dresser without basically rebuilding the whole thing, and even that with no guarantee that we would be able to keep Jane out.

Sigh.

But! I am happy to report that we have finally reached success! Instead of child-proofing the dresser, we child-proofed the closet and moved the dresser in there.

Door #1:


The board on the floor is simply pushed up against the dresser and is long enough to fill the entire door gap, preventing sliding in any direction. To open that side of the closet, you just have to lift up that board. As long as you have already opened the other door.

Door #2:


This was more complicated. Chris mounted a small board within the door frame that you can see on the far end of the picture. He then drilled a hole through the metal frame of the door itself and put in a screw. The board you see across the (mirrored) door rests on top of each of those, preventing the door from being opened.

Yes, it is 100% Jane-proof. Hooray!

Let's enjoy the small successes.