Saturday, March 31, 2012

I... Can... Blog... Again. (Snowless Sledding)

Hello family, friends, and anyone else out there! This is Adam and I believe my first return to the blog since the fall of last year! Last year the challenges of work really had myself checking out of certain parts of my life, and spending time on the home PC was one of them! Sorry! Although, Life with the Z's was not idle the entire time! My wonderful wife, who I had bugged and encouraged on many, many, MANY, occasions to try a few blog posts... did just that! Nice work Hun! 

I'm feeling up to some sharing again, but let's start slow and ease in to this thing again. How about a video?

One of the other things I gave up over the last 6+ months was much of my social interaction with friends and their families or at very least severely slowed the frequency of visits. I received an invite a few short weeks ago to join my friend Bob in his "Man Cave" or garage or both to watch some March Madness and grill out. Yes, grill out! :) While I was there, something of a peculiar nature occurred. Peculiar first because it was occurring without snow, peculiar second because there was no snow and it was March, and third because there was no snow, it was March, and we live in Wisconsin! Check it out...


This was going on repeatedly for about a half hour. The best ones where he and his little brother both sat on the sled together and went down the hill. Besides the hilariousness of it being March in Wisconsin and above 70 that day... I just appreciated the determination and decision of these boys to just go for it. Somehow I feel like they had been waiting for another opportunity to go sledding and just got sick and tired of waiting. Good for them. :)

Thursday, March 15, 2012

Vacation for Daddy!

The last time Adam was on vacation was after Levi was born!  He did take an extra week of vacation right after his paternity leave because all of our family was visiting some even flying in for the blessing that was Levi's baptism. Yea, so it's been a while since we have had any quality time with Daddy....

Funny enough I didn't know he was taking vacation until about 2 weeks before he took it, but hey.... Whatever.  I don't really care when it is.  I was just happy to spend some extra time with him and I know two other little rugrats that were very happy too!

Levi who is increasingly fascinated by buttons was on cloud nine when Daddy finally let him get a hold of that controller.


"Here Dad, I'll help you kill the bad guy!"


"No, NOooo, you're gonna kill our guy Dad!  Let me do it."


Hmm, wonder what these two will be bonding over next?


Then there was this little girl...


She was so happy to have Daddy fix her hair.


I was a little bit frightened to hand over the blow dryer....   Can you blame me?  Look at how much hair that little girls has!?!  But I was shooed away so I let him handle it.

Maybe I was being shooed away because I had a camera in my hand.... Nah, that can't be it! ;)


Well, everything turned out A-OK!


We were getting ready to leave for Walmart that day, while I ran around getting last minute stuff together these guys enjoyed a little Max & Ruby.  


I wish I had someone around all the time to occupy the kids while I get ready and pack up the diaper bag/ car!  Well, I say everyday but I think you all know how it is...

Me:  When do you go back to work honey?

Adam: Not soon enough.....

Ahahahahahahaha!

Really though, we all enjoyed having him around for the week!

Wednesday, March 7, 2012

Looking to Name My Blog....

As I have made some fun updates to the look of the blog, I realized that I sort of want my own space with in this blog for my crafty side.  

First, I looked into how I could possibly add tabs under our header, and that would lead you there.  But I can't figure out how to kind of make it a blog with in a blog.  I guess that would probably be more of a website, which I am not going to do.

My solution is to make a new blog for myself, and then link it to the a tab in the top of our families blog and link this blog to mine.

Any thoughts....

See if I had my way, I would make our blog pink, glittered, and covered in ribbon, I just can't do that to Adam. ;)  So I kind of like this idea, heres where I need some help....

A NAME!!!

This is what I came up with.

Kathleen's Krafty Korner

Hairbrained Ideas, The Good, Bad and Ugly
(This one makes me think of my hubby, he say's I have a lot of "hairbrained" ideas!)

That's all I got. 

And I don't really like the first one at all the more I look at it typed out.

Suggestions welcome, I kind of like the play on hairbrained ideas just not sure...

Monday, March 5, 2012

In the trenches of your Iron Curtain

When we moved into our home almost 3 years ago, there were so many things that were perfect.... the yard, being near country fields, the open floor plan, the 150yr old original wood....  there were a lot of things we fell in love with.  One thing we did not love was the smelly water.

We have a well first off, so hard water is a serious understatement.  Besides that, the iron content in our water is riDONKulous.  So when we turned on the water it smelled like rotten eggs.  Can you imagine trying to take a shower and feel clean and all you can smell is rotten eggs!?!  Yeah, doesn't make you feel that clean.

We were fortunate to have purchased during a time where new home owners received a tax credit, and we knew just what to do with it.  

Get and IRON CURTAIN!
No, it's not a giant chain mail type curtain made out of iron.  It is a water filtration system.  The mac daddy, the big cheese, okay, I'm getting carried away but to us, it was amazing.  No more smelly water, and now our water wouldn't turn our brand new appliances orange from our water.
(I've even heard that some peoples dishes started to turn orange in their dishwaher from having high amounts of iron in their water, eek!)

La la deet de da, dum dum do de daa.....  fast forward 2 years.....

Oh yeah, maybe we have no water pressure because the iron curtain needs to be cleaned.  Forgot to mention, this thing as wonderful as it is, needs to be cleaned about every 2 years....um a little over due for it.  Well, my hubby decided to tackle the job himself, give it the ol' college try.
(In his defense, I was pushing him to do it too.  Me push Adam, I know it's shocking!)

Well... this is what happened.... 
(Am I a horrible wife, that as I post these pic's I just can't help laughing a bit?)


No!! That is not war paint for his battle with the iron curtain, and YES!! all that red/ orange IS iron goo! 
Apparently he thought he had released the pressure before detaching the tank, I guess not.
Let's get a closer look, shall we?


Yep, he was ecstatic about it!  And the band-aid on his chin, that was also a battle wound, from wrestling with the tank.  I wish I could say that the tank won the battle, and Adam won the war.... but unfortunately his hard work still resulted in a call.

"Hey Culligan Man!"

Turns out they take the tank back to be pressure washed with so many hundred pounds of pressure.....
I'm sure Adam thinks it was a total waste of an afternoon, but I think it was all worth it for these snap shots.  Sorry babe, but I'm pretty sure you know it's true.

Sunday, March 4, 2012

Eureka!

With some brain power I finally figured it out.  I think my image is still cut off a bit on the sides but I just tweaked it from previewing it in blogger, about fifty times


Here it is!

Anyone else want to know how I did it?

Here is a link that I followed.


The only thing I did differently use a 12x12 page in MDS, and make my base punch 10x6 instead.  That was the only was I could get it so blogger didn't tile my image.

Hope you like Part 1 of the new look.

I have some other ideas to give our blog a face lift, but let's be real here....
a.) I already tackled one part of the make over tonight, which took me a fair amount of time.
b.) My kids are sleeping and the new episode of Desperate Housewives is on my DVR waiting for me.

New Look for the BLOG!


Well for those of you who don't know....  Here is the official news.

I signed on to be a Stampin' Up! Demonstrator! 

So I wanted to announce it with a bang, and give the blog a new look.  This is still our families blog, but I will also be sharing this new adventure here too!  No surprise to me, I'm no 100% happy with how the new look turned out.  I used My Digital Studio, that part I am completely happy with!  I mean how can you not love, the Dotted Striped designer paper, and of course Wild Wasabi punch with Very Vanilla Stamps!?!

My problem comes in that I am not a techie, and I can't figure out for the life of me how to re-size.  How can you ask the creative juices of my mind to fit in a file that is no more then 300k and 1800x1600 pixels?  REALLY? 

Well, at least I'm taking MDS (My Digital Studio) out on the open road, and giving it a real test drive.  It more than passed, my computer knowledge however, did not.

I look forward to sharing more Stampin' Up! creations with you!