Balboa Park family day

 Fully obsessed with these babies and the bump pictures that I've actually DONE regularly with this pregnancy! Way to go, us!

This last Sunday we seriously needed a concentrated family day. Staying home didn't sound too appealing, but hitting up all of our regular routes and destinations didn't sound too great either. Navigating through traffic to Orange County? Nah. ANYTHING traffic? NO. So Chad, king of the great ideas lately (read: drive in  movie theater genius), suggested we surprise the kids with a mini road trip down to SD to walk around Balboa Park. We could hit up a few museums if we wanted to or just mozy around and BE! It sounded glorious.

We saw turtles, skipped around fountains, walked through the natural history museum and just RELAXED. Well, I say "relaxed," but doing so actually took me over half the day. I've been so wound up lately! Like I can't just chill out. It's either my brain is working on overdrive, not allowing me to sleep, or my body is giving me issues. RIGHT THIS MINUTE I'm pretty sure I'm the most tired I've ever been in my entire life, but I can't sleep. CANNOT. The kids are at Grandma Cheryl's for a summer sleepover so I made a concerted effort to get some day time shut eye. After literally TWO HOURS of lying there, eyes shut and all (!!!), I gave up. But my eyeballs are on fire! My brain is mush! Everything in me needs to go to sleep! I've been letting go of stress because it's not good for bambina, so that's been kind of nice. Next step: sleep training myself so that way actual relaxation can occur more easily.

But anyhoo, I really did chill out about half way through the day. It was a fun time with my babies! It's going to be so weird NOT being JUST the four of us anymore, come October. It makes me a little emotional! I have a feeling I'll be really teary-eyed leaving for the hospital to have Baby Grace. Like we are the Original 4! Who knows how many more of these strictly Cisneros family days we'll have left before things change FOOOORRREEEEVVVEEERRR. Obvi thrilled for what's ahead, but I'm kind of sad! I had these same feelings thinking of going into the hospital with Kota, but it seems like we've been THE FOUR OF US for so long that this will be a bit different. Anyway, can't wait for baby girl and very thankful for days like these where we get to simply enjoy each other's company.

Yay Balboa Park!

Our "big kids'" room

This post was broken off of this otha' post.

Nothing makes me happier than this calming, relaxing, DIY-gone-right, end result for the two older babes of the household. As mentioned, it went from a depressing green and sickeningly light grey, to the shiplap whiteness and same-chill-Behr-Rhino-color-as-our-master-bedroom. I just love every bit of it! Sure the room is very short on space, but hey, what can ya do? At least it's an enjoyable area now! This was our first go at shiplap. Chad and I were both shocked on how much we liked the finished product. You know - not all DIY's come out the way ya like! Glad this one did.

I joined the party with these ladies, Nifty Thrifty Things, this amazing group o' broads, and Making It in the Mountains.

If you're one of the 12 readers up in here...

So I feel a bit douchey even putting this post up there, but if you're one of the 3 people who reads this ol' space, I'm sorry in advanced for the extreme repetitiveness that's 'bout to occur. I got asked SUPER sweetly if I wouldn't mind breaking up the DIY projects we've had going on around here, which, if you read a few posts ago, gave me that blog itch again. I was like, "Hey man! Someone saw a blog post of mine and now I want to write more blog posts about the house and family adventures we've had up in here!" But then I felt (again) douchey for even wanting to get back into that space of "growing" my blog so I was like FORGET ABOUT IT, not gon' try to become a "mommy blogger" because if you TRY, it ain't gon' happen. But then today I was like hey, why not.

SO ANYWAY, I'm going to rattle off a few posts about things I've pretty much already blogged about but just in smaller sections, like one project at a time. Okay, I'm going to go hide under a rock for being such a major wiener in the world of blogging. (I just don't like thinking too much about this space! Last time I did that I damn near stopped blogging about my precious family altogether! I don't want that to happen. Ain't nothin' good comes from taking anything TOO seriously, so that's what I shan't be doing. Also, did I mention I feel like a douche for even saying any of this? Okay.)

Bathing suits, bathing suits, bathing suits

Oh summer, how I love thee when going through pictures of the season - and we're only half way through! School is starting in just a few weeks (19 days to be exact), but we still have lots of bathing suit fun ahead: Bass Lake next week with the Paplia clan, Newport Beach timeshare with the Cisneros group and then a few beach play dates peppered in throughout.

I even went and got myself my first 1 piece since I was probably Kota's age! So I wasn't sure if that purchase was actually going to go down - yes 1 pieces are very in right now, but I sure as heck didn't want to feel old and yucky given the fact that this bod ain't exactly the usual one inhabited. It's one thing if you're in shape and feeling sexy while rockin' a very trendy 1 piece - it's quite another to feel like you're wearing a body suit to hide largeness. But anyhoo! Thinking of how many hours I'll be in the sun during our Bass Lake days, I decided that strictly for sun exposure purposes, a 1 piece would probably be best. DEATH would happen if my bump got burnt - could you imagine the misery that would produce? So anyway, I got myself a 1 piece that I actually like! Then I drove on down to Target after that success and tried a few others on with a lot less luck. But yay! First 1 piece ever! Kind of stoked on how comfortable the thing is. Wooooooo! So yes, win!

Regular ol' life

I just got that itch that was very much alive and well around these blog parts a few years ago: wanting to link my little blogular up to a ton of other larger blogulars and "grow" because I've been having so much fun with all of our DIY'in around the house. The thought was "hey, why not? May as well post our hard work and taste out there on the internets and chat with others who enjoy hard work and similar tastes! YOLO baby!" I even looked up a few link parties! But then as soon as the appropriate parties were found, I remembered that the last time I thought it would be cool to "grow" I basically stopped recording the life of us C's all together due to overthinking the whole thing (read: "editing" pictures - ha (maybe if I had the patience)! Trying to write about things you think people want to read about - that never works! Spending way too long staring at the computer instead of your kids - totally happened! Participating in giveaways to gain followers - yeeeeeeeeeeah, no). So no way to that, jose!

Anyhoo, life lately (outside of DIY'in the heck out of everything) has been...

...us hitting up a drive in movie theater for the first time! OH MY GOSH - we are all obsessed with it. We saw The Secret Life of Pets and basically died over how cool the experience was.

...Kota having her first gymnastics recital of her life! Honestly, the love this child has for gymnastics versus dance... this dance mama may need to hang up her high hopes for triple pirouettes in lieu of back hand springs...

...Carter participating in his second roller hockey tournament! Funny story: so the players were going to be playing 3 half hour games and then a 4th if they won. They tied the first game, creating a weird point spread to where they were going to have to play the 4th game. By the time their final half hour of hockey rolled around, these 5 and 6 year olds were OVER IT. They were SO TIRED! One of the poor kids was literally crying during his last go! Chad and our friend Joe (their coaches) felt so bad that they got everyone slushies which, duh, made everything better. I just couldn't believe how tired they all were though! Carter was skating in circles by the end. Two of the boys just stopped playing and hung out by our goalie! It was actually very hilarious because who could blame 'em? Hahaha!

...I took the babies to see the huge Palm Springs dinosaur road exhibit and they loved every second.

 ...our regal, 73 pound beast upon our (his) bed. Bow down!

 ...Corky's! We love it there, yes we do.

...sweetie pie makin' eggs. She's actually gotten so good at cracking, adding a bit of milk, mixing, pouring in the pan and then stirring that I can actually relax while watching her! Pretty dang cool for a fo' year old.

Love these babies. Right now Kota has a low grade fever and has mysteriously thrown up in the middle of the night twice this week. Wah! I've had to cancel two sets of plans and now we're going stir crazy! It's so weird that as soon as I'm rarin' to go with energy to spare, someone gets sick. Such is life, I guess!

Home improvement on steroids

(Obnoxious amount of pictures here. Sorry.)

NESTING. Holy cow, the nesting with this pregnancy! It is OUT OF CONTROL. In pregnancies past, this faucet of baby prep consisted of some light dusting, maybe a bit of reorganizing and possibly an extensive day of laundry. THIS pregnancy though (!!!) - Home Depot has become our actual residence. In baby Grace's second trimester alone we've brought home a miter saw, this huge air compressor nail gun thing, a jig saw and several (SEVERAL) boards of various types of wood. From about 15 weeks until now, 28 weeks today, I've painted more walls than should be humanly allowed in such a short time frame and without the help of professional workers. IT HAS BEEN NUTS.

So what have we done????!!!!!! I shall start at the beginning of our extreme adventures in nesting, when the "Baby List" was fresh in my mind (and not driving me crazy). First up, Carter and Kota's room!

1. "Big kids'" room

^^^It went from depressing green and sickeningly light grey, to the shiplap whiteness and same-relaxing-grey-as-our-master-bedroom. I just love every bit of it! Sure the room is very short on space, but hey, what can ya do? At least it's an enjoyable area now! This was our first go at shiplap. Chad and I were both shocked on how much we liked the end result. You know - not all DIY's come out the way ya like! Glad this one did.

2. Fireplace/entertainment center

^^^The reason we even DID this project was kind of a funny story (not so funny at the time): When we went to get the shiplap for the kids' room project, Chad had told the Home Depot guy the wrong measurement - so that meant we had 14 boards that were 6"'s too short. We tried to make it work in the kids room by just nailing it all to the wall and smoothing the awkwardness over with wood filler, but after spending 1.5 hours on just the top board alone, we knew that we were just going to have to bite the bullet and go buy 14 MORE boards with the correct measurement. So anyhoo, the 14 wrongly-cut-boards were just lying in our garage, so Chad and I decided to tackle this "small" project one night when the kids went to spend the night at my parents' house for some summer fun. WELL. Duh, it took over our lives. Chad had to take off the weird molding that surrounded the original TV hole thing, then move all of the electrical. Next came building a frame of 2x4's in the TV hole (my idea! I felt so cool!), and then came the shiplap. Next it was filling in the nail holes, painting, mounting the TV, new lighting and Chad's "dad gift" to himself: a sound bar. All was GREAT until we went to test the finished product: If you flipped the switch Chad had wired for the lights, one lighting sconce went on, the other went off! Flip it again, THEY SWITCHED! At the end of a very long project, this was NOT what he wanted. Thank goodness though, because the next day at work Chad talked to an electrician friend who told him what was up and all was fixed. Bahahaha - DIY AMIRIGHT?!

3. Chad's side table

^^^This was a slightly unnecessary project, but in my nesting mind at the time, it was EVERYTHING. So when we redid the kids' room, I wanted to move Chad's side table/white dresser out of our room (never liked the look it brought to our room anyway) and into the kids room for more storage in preparation for their play room turning into a nursery. Chad was kind of like "so... why are we doing this again?" about the whole project, so I took it on solely while he was at work. I felt so great cutting all of the wood for it with the newest garage-team-member, the miter saw, all by myself in just 7 minutes! Life changer! Next I screwed all those wood pieces together, half-heartedly sanded it (I loathe that part of wood working), then painted/stained the whole thing - all in one day! Felt pretty cool 'bout it.

4. Grace's nursery

 ^^^THIS TOOK SO DAMN LONG TO DO! After the extensiveness of the kids' room, fireplace and table projects, I decided to mozy on into another undertaking, but this time I vowed to just do it "in my spare time." HA! Let me tell ya something: if there's no sense of urgency to get a project done, it will simply TAKE TOO LONG TO DO. I should have just gone balls to the wall and busted it out in a day or so, that would have saved me a lot of annoyance. Anyway, first I primed below the chair rail where there was a darker pink, then I got started measuring out the stripes. We knew we were going to be putting in curtains with a horizontal stripe pattern to match the kids' curtains, so that's what I went off of. Next I waited for my MIL to come help me out, where she did all of the fine-tuning (work with the brush), I then started in with the grey (same grey as kids' room and master) under the chair rail, and waited for my two coats of white stripes to dry above the chair rail. Next there was meticulous taping that went down, where I had to RE-PAINT over the tape with the white so that way when I went to paint the grey, it wouldn't bleed underneath the tape onto the perfect white line. IT - WAS - MADNESS. Anyhoo, I just had to get that damn room done. Now I love it, but truly, these projects "in my spare time" need to not happen ever again.

5. Our bathroom

^^^SO! We still had shiplap left over from that accidental cut situation, so in order to rid our garage's floor of it, we just plowed ahead and prettied-up our master bathroom's tiny toilet room. The kids were on a multi-night sleepover with family, so I just decided to DGAF and bring the miter saw IN THE HOUSE to get my cuts - bahahaha. Seriously with that decision? I'm still finding sawdust everywhere, even after an extensive cleaning. But honestly, there was no way this pregnant woman was going to spend time in that hot garage cutting - nope, no way. So it started out with shiplapping behind the toilet, painting that THE grey and then hanging those shelves. Once it was done though, I felt like the rest of the teensy room needed to be grey as well, something I'm glad I did but man. This REALLY tired me out - more than the other projects seemed to. It was becoming clear that I seriously needed to calm down on all of this home stuff. Like CLEAR. My body was/is sort of mad at me for all of it. So glad this got done, but seriously exhausted. 

5. Minor things done while those other projects were happening: curtains, fans, lighting and shelves

^^^One of the things we learned to seriously loathe while living here is the curtains the previous owner had up - it's not that they were ugly, it's that they seemed to all break within the first 6 months of us being there! I have no idea why - they were relatively heavy duty! I don't know. But anyway, we've replace all of those blinds with curtains which seem to be easier for us. We have the final room's curtain's hardware and panels sitting on the kitchen counter right now. I think Chad and I are just a bit shell shocked from the rest of these projects to actually install them hahahaha!

One of the main things we needed to do in our house was to improve the lighting situation in all of the rooms. EVERYTHING was lit by the one fan that hung over the dining area, so we've been slowly adding lighting in the forms of sconces, chandeliers, fan-moving-arounds and installation of lights on existing fans. The only two rooms left are the front "white room" and the baby's nursery. Go Chad!

Those shelves we put up in the kids' room went tandem with the master bathroom throne's room make over. It's part of the solution to the old play room becoming the nursery. As trophy collections and book selections evolve, I may throw 2 more up in between those three in years to come. We'll see. I literally can't even with thoughts like that. 

One of the major things left on our Baby List is outdoor furniture, which we intended to make ourselves. However, I just don't know if I can hack that! If we make it ourselves, it's going to require engineering, putting-together, sanding, painting and staining. Literally.... not sure about that. But at the same time, I want that to get done! But after all of these projects I've learned one thing: CHILL OUT! Bahahaha! Glad they're done though, and glad we love our little home that much more.