Ship ahoy!

Tomorrow brings our maiden voyage in Thanksgiving dinner preparation! We tried inviting some friends over and considered going to a friend’s house, but due to travel, colds and Luke’s naptime,  none of those scenarios quite worked out, so I’m planning dinner for three. While I still need several items from the grocery store and have yet to start cooking, we’re set to sail on the tablescape front. In fact, I had the table set so far in advance that tonight Luke was delighted to host dinner for the three of us at his play table.

I was inspired by a little pilgrim craft (instructions here) I saw in the Thanksgiving issue of Martha Stewart Living. I added a few sea creatures to our ship scene since Luke loves his ocean books, and then marked the boat with three special initials and a pilgrim hat. Don’t worry, the candles are lit by LEDs so the risk of ship fires is low.

Of course my beloved turkeys needed a little limelight too. And who knows how we would beat out all the competition for our seats without namecards!

Next time, especially if guests are coming, I’ll be sure to have the food prep started a little sooner. But since it’s just the three of us we’re having a very simplified Thanksgiving spread. We’re also hoping to continue Luke’s dress-up tradition – bringing out his homemade ‘indian’ costume from last year (below) and adding a pilgrim one. Happy Thanksgiving says our little brave!

[PS: there are new photos in our most recent Luke gallery plus new videos, hopefully we’ll have cute T-giving shots up soon!]

Website mini-makeover

“We made lots of great changes on our website this weekend!” I reported excitedly.

“Fabulous! I’ve visited it twice already today and didn’t see them, when will they show up?”

Actually, they’d been up all day, but I guess the improvements weren’t quite as dramatic as I’d thought. Nevertheless, we’d love for you to visit our website homepage to see its sleeker look and try out the new links in the header. We also added a navigation bar to our photo galleries page. It allows you to easily access some of our favorite photos and to view photo galleries by topic. On the blog, we updated aesthetics, labeled posts with keywords, and added a sidebar that sorts posts by topic.

As I write out these changes, I can see how my sister missed them. And I wonder if the time it took to make the tiny font, color, or alignment customizations was a little inordinate. Perhaps, but Erik and I enjoyed working on it together, and it’s satisfying to see many of those pesky imperfections resolved. Luke looks pretty impressed with his new publicity platform, doesn’t he?!

PS: Here’s a ‘before’ pic of the blog for comparison…

Don’t honk at cattle

Twenty miles of washboard after a long empty paved road, we arrived. For miles the road had seemed to be slowly petering out and it completely disappeared after this house. Several cattleguards previous, any signs or road names had ceased, which explained the seller’s lack of address. We noticed several solar panels and a ring of rain barrels, and as I wondered about their purification system I made a mental note to avoid accepting a glass of water.

“You thought I grew up in the middle of nowhere, honey, what do you say now?'” Erik asked. I didn’t need to say anything to concede his point. We took Luke out of his car seat and I wondered once again what we would do if they demanded our money, our camera equipment, or worse. Would our precious boy be safer if I just stayed with him in the car, keys at the ready, or would he ensure our protection with his irresistible cuteness? I assured myself that they seemed nice on the phone, and we walked toward the house.

We were met by an older couple with friendly smiles and very tanned skin. They were very thoughtful and solicitous in asking about our drive, and their kindness put me at ease. When we entered their home, I was relieved to see the camera equipment set out for us, and typical kitchen and dining furnishings. The couple explained that they no longer used these types of lenses for their landscape artwork, which Luke and I enjoyed viewing while Erik inspected the equipment. They offered us terrific prices. It seemed their location may have somehow discouraged other Craigslist trollers from snapping up the deals.

We left with several upgraded lenses for hardly more than we would earn selling our current models on ebay. Erik was elated, and my patient and indulgent wife status was secured for many months to come. We also came away with some tips on humanure and this solemnly given advice – don’t honk your horn if a crowd of cattle collects in front of you on a dirt road. Evidently, the ranchers honk when they drive out to the cattle with truckloads of feed, so honking will cause the animals to mob your vehicle and significantly delay you. Instead, roll down your window, bang on the side of your car, and yell loudly. Getting to try out this tactic would have added to the story, but I didn’t mind that our journey back to civilization proceeded without incident.

Since this mid-October trip, it’s been fun to see the nicer pictures that our camera can produce. One of these was the winning shot for the (very small) Kiwi Industries photo competition. Wasn’t it worth the adventure to capture such cuteness!?

Perfect autumn days

Around the Rio Grande, fall foliage seemed to peak this past weekend and we took advantage of it with a trip to the zoo and another to the botanic gardens. Albuquerque autumns get prettier and prettier to me each year we’re here. They don’t offer the range of reds and oranges that you find on the east coast, but there is plenty of beautiful yellow from cottonwoods and aspens as well as other spotlight specimens of rusty red and the occasional orange. We spent Sunday afternoon at the Japanese garden (in the ABQ biopark) and soaked up the exquisite fall foliage colors on display there.

Luke loved throwing leaves to the fish in the pond. He was also generous with his kisses for the baby. For some reason he gives the baby sweet perfect kisses but all his parents usually get are head butts on the cheek. At least he softens the tough guy act for his sister!

Then we lured him away from the pond by watching the biopark train pass by

And Daddy taught him how to drive a tractor -- basically it’s the same techniques Luke’s already perfected on the cozy coupe. (:

On Friday we spent another gorgeous afternoon at the zoo. Luke wore his ‘circle sweater’ because the manufacturer (kiwi industries) is having a photo contest and I wanted to submit a pic or two of our little munchkin. Does my certainty that he should win destine me to be overly concerned about my child’s achievement? 

Here we are watching the mountain lion exhibit. The cats paced magnificently along the front of their cage, but the fact that they are native to our area combined with the way their eyes seemed to track Luke’s every movement made us both a little nervous…

This week the weather is turning cooler and soon those leaves will be on the ground. We’ll miss you perfect autumn days!

A tale of four faucets

It seems that the nesting stage of this pregnancy has hit a little early as we’ve been flying through home projects these past few weeks. The thought of two little troublemakers goads us on, and Erik’s talent and patience for all sorts of projects makes it easy to cross items off my list!

I’ll start with the most dramatic transformation, our two bathrooms. We painted the oak cabinets (using the same paint we’d already applied to the kitchen ones) and installed new faucets (in hopes of solving a recurring leak). Then we added a few decorative touches. Here is the master bath when we first moved in – we hadn’t yet replaced the carpet (around the toilet!) or taken down the wallpaper:

This is it today, after tiling, wallpaper removal, updated door & cabinet hardware, wall & cabinet painting, and new faucets. In a dream world, I would replace the big mirror and light fixture with two more interesting ones of each, one pair over each sink. But I’m pretty certain those projects are beyond the scope of our plans for this house.

Here is the guest/kids’ bath before, with more busy wallpaper and less than lovely linoleum.

And this is the guest/kids’ bath after. Of course our biggest improvement is the precious little marshmallow man! But I also like my alligator towels and the new tile… (:

Another sink in our house saw a smaller spruce-up recently. When I saw this in Home Depot, I decided that the time had come to upgrade our kitchen faucet too.

Then I made a valence for the sink window since the old one hadn’t matched as well since we repainted the walls. Don’t look too closely, I’m still learning to sew and it came out rather crooked. 

We’ve also made big strides in the master and guest bedrooms, but they are still awaiting finishing touches. I’ll be back to post on them once we put a few more pieces into place. In the meantime, I’ll leave you with a photo of how Luke has been preparing for the new addition to our family. Watch out for fire trucks, baby!

More pumpkins…

This will be my last pumpkin post of the season, I promise! A few days ago I found these Halloween luminaries discounted at Target and I love them so much that I can’t pack them away quite yet.

In fact, I thought they were such a find that I had to buy some for my mom since her local Tar-jay was out of stock. I still do most of my non-food shopping with my mom despite the 1700 miles that separate us. Lately our venues of choice have been ebay (we’ll both have our computers on and send auction links back and forth) and the Target clearance areas (we each go to our respective stores and discuss the inventory, sending photos as needed). She and my sister are still my primary authorities on all style questions. Sorry, Erik! But anyway, here are the luminaries on the bookcase behind our table:

They combine well with Luke’s gourd collection to make a pretty autumnal arrangement, but in reality these gourds can’t display long before Luke manages to whine them off the platter and into his trucks.

Tomorrow I’ll post about our recent bathroom facelift. Now that we’re in November and ‘little princess’ is due next month, the pressure to finish things off is really on!

Halloween weekend!

This year Luke had two more admirers for his Halloween costume. Grandma and Grandpa Nielsen came out to visit for the weekend! Luke has developed into such a pumpkin enthusiast that we decided to spend Sunday afternoon at another pumpkin patch. The combination of autumn gourds and child-size tractors made for a Lukan paradise which could only be enhanced by Grandpa’s willingness to push the little boy around on the tractor.

Later that evening our wholesome little farmer morphed into a fearsome tiger! Watch out below!

Despite his stealthy prowling and wild roars, this tiger did have a soft spot for the paparazzi…

Notice the three candy bowls on the sideboard in the pic below? We were visited by about 175 trick-or-treaters and then had to turn off our lights at 7:45 because we were out of treats!

While the grandparents did candy duty, Erik and I took the little wildcat around to a few neighbors' houses. He picked up the technique of holding out his bag and was fairly reliable about saying ‘thank you’. But he never quite managed to deliver the ‘trick or treat’ line. Too much to distract him at the crucial moment! Maybe next year he’ll master that one. In the meantime, he’ll leave you with a ‘So Long, Cowboys!’

For more Halloween weekend pics, click here.