Spring!

Spring spring! We celebrated St. Patrick's Day with the traditional color, good friends, a lesson on St. Patrick the missionary, and green eggs and cornbread! I have a lifelong goal to make good pie crusts. A person just isn't an accomplished baker until she masters pie. Jason encourages me to practice often! I made a superb lemon meringue pie with a flawless crust which was fun! (My record for good crusts is generally 1 out of 2)

It is time for the spring warm weather teasing. One beautiful day last week we got out the sun hats and played in the driveway-it was wonderful! Then today we got snow, sleet, rain, and hail.

Jonas loves to feed Elsie. Elsie loves to eat. It is a mutually beneficial relationship-like many parasites. :-) Happy Spring!

A Tale of a Couch

After a year of scouring craigslist daily, we finally we found a couch for our family room! $125 looked mighty good so we called immediately. The phone number didn't work, so Jason drove across town only to find it was a veterans' warehouse that had just closed.

I was not to give up so easily. Monday morning they were to open at 9:00. Caedmon had the flu and had fallen asleep downstairs on a flop-out in his pj's. I had decided I was going to get there when they opened, or not at all, so I hurridly woke up my sick son, dressed him, gave him a puke bowl to carry, and packed up. 3 kids in tow we arrived at this place at 9:05 where I sat in the comfortable couch, dashed to the front desk, and plopped down my money! Bless Caedmon's heart, he didn't throw up, but he didn't make it to the bathroom on the way back... They delivered it by noon and we were tickled!

THEN we smelled it. Like a sleazy motel, the couch was saturated with smoke and dog odor. Hmm. Not quite as good of a deal as we thought. However it fit well in the space and looked good. Then I took off the sheet covering the chaise lounge. The sheet was hiding a huge basketball-sized black gunky tar stain. Hmm. We took to cleaning it.

We vacuumed it.

We washed all the cushion covers.

We shampoo-vacuumed it.

We dusted it with baking soda.

We revacuumed it.

We rewashed the cushion covers.

We saturated it in vinegar and vacuumed it. Twice.

We shampooed it once more.

And VOILA! The smell is all but vanished! I am not so sure we came out ahead after all that electricity though, but we are very pleased, and the huge nasty stain came completely out!
It is a great couch for the boys' cars. :-)

Grandma approves!

Ta-DA! If you come to our house you don't have to sit on the floor anymore!!!