A Three Hour Tour, and other stuff

It's been a day.

Josh is flying nights this week, which means that he goes into work around 1pm or so, and then will get home late.
Or early.
However you want to look at it; it will be sometime around 2am.

Generally speaking, night weeks stink.
There's no hope of any assistance with the whole dinner-bath-bed rigmarole, we don't get to spend time together in the evenings, and then I have the impossible job of trying to keep the urchins quiet in the morning so Josh can get some rest.
The only bright spot in a rough week is that Monday morning we get some family time together. Today we took the kids swimming and just hung around the house.

But the afternoon seemed to drag by, and so after dinner I broke my newly-implemented rule of never taking the children shopping with me and ran over to JC Penney.
I don't particularly care for that store, but I had received a coupon for $10 off any purchase of $10 or more.
And as it turned out, they sent me two of those handy little things.

So I perused the store for anything that cost just over ten bucks, so that I'd basically get something for free.
Nothing really caught my eye, so I ended up buying two new beach towels.
(At different registers of course, since I don't think they would have let me use both coupons together.
I'm tricky like that.)

Here are the two newest members of our towel family, each of which cost me $2.14.

Side note: The towels were on clearance for $11.49. They were originally almost $40.
Who buys a forty dollar towel? It's not even two-sided.
I stand by my conviction that said store likes to mark prices up just so they can mark them down and make you feel like you're getting a deal.

Boy did I get off topic.

So the kids did okay at the store, if I were judging them by the same standards you would use for a puppy.
That had been kept in a kennel all day.
And fed Red Bull.

But we survived.

And then came the never ending bedtime routine.
It turns out that Derek likes to talk a lot these days.
And yet he can't actually move and talk at the same time.
And he talks slow.
And Alex never stops talking either.
And it's impossible to brush the teeth of people who are talking.
And it's just a good thing that they are both still alive.
And it's only Monday.

Whew.

Moving on. As I mentioned before, we were hosting a Bible study group in our house on Sunday evening, and so it marked the first time since moving in that my house was actually clean.
And because you never know when that might happen again, I took pictures so that I could proudly present:
The Three Hour (rented) home tour---

Here you have the front door entryway

To your left when you walk in is the office.
Only we don't have office furniture, so all of Josh's Air Force "stuff" got to move out of the garage for the first time in 9 years.

I didn't have much to contribute to the room. But one of those diplomas is mine.
All the knowledge it took to get it is gone, but the paper is still there.

We bought this chaise lounger because the room was too empty. It's our reading chair.
But in the store it didn't seem quite as...big. Nor did it look as much like a dentist's chair.

See?

 But it's really comfy.
So if you ever want to curl up with a good book, or have a filling placed, just come to our office.

Opposite the office is the dining room. We didn't change any of the paint colors in the house because
1) We're lazy
and
2) ... Well I guess there's only one reason

But the red works out fine since we have so many red accents.
The door leads through to the kitchen.

The door you see on the right goes to the master bed & bath.
Only I can't show you any pictures of that because as you might have heard, we don't have a bedroom set.
So clothes and things are just strewn about the floor.
It isn't pretty.

The view from the other side of the kitchen. The door on the left goes to the garage, and you can see the laundry room next to the dining room.

Eat-in kitchen area. I accept no personal responsibility for the valances.

The living room from the kitchen, along with half of Josh and not-dressed Derek.

They were wrestling.

This is the hallway that leads to the other bedrooms.
That blue room pretty much decided for us where Derek's bedroom would be.

The rest of the rooms are this way.

First the guests/kids' bathroom.
I like our guests to feel at home with un-flushed toilets and toothpaste decorations around the sink.

Then Alex's room.
When we walked into the house for the first time, she ran to this room and declared it to be hers. It was the pink stripe, I think.

Her headboard/footboard are the crib converted into a full-sized bed.

And the guest room.
That has our old bedroom furniture.
While we have none.

And this, my friends, is the sun room. Or the playroom, whatever you want to call it.

You can get to it from the long hallway, or the master bedroom, or from the main living room.

I like it. And it will probably never be clean.
But that's okay.
Because, in theory, all the toys will stay in one place. And I wont have to step on them. And I can just close the doors and ignore it.

Here is the view of the backyard from the sunroom.

So there you have it, our cozy home.
We love the space and we're really happy with the neighborhood.
Come visit us!

Hopefully one day I can show you our master bedroom-- with furniture.