Posts Tagged ‘room’

Holiday and After Holiday Shopping

Sunday, January 11th, 2009

I had some great experiences shopping this year before and after the holidays.  Now, I am still not sure where there is a local TJ Maxx by me.  However, I did some shopping at the one in Wisconsin by my family after Christmas.  It is was just liked I remembered — great items for low prices.  With the economy the way it is, we all need to start shopping at places like this.  You get the same quality items — just at a way better price!

Now, the one of the best shopping experiences I had this holiday season was at Marshalls.  We had a holiday party to go to on December 20th.  Now, I personally hate shopping in the month of December, because well, it sucks.  However, my wonderful little girl outgrew her Christmas dress!  It fit at Thansgiving, and it looked like she grew 2 inches from then!  Instead of panicking, Madison and I headed over to Marshalls.  Now, this was high holiday shopping time, and I was impressed.  They had a great selection of kids clothes that were marked, so it was super easy to find what we needed.  The fitting rooms were clean and large enough for me to go in the room with Madison.  On the way to the fitting room, I found shoes.  I was able to try on about 20 different pairs that I liked.  I loved that they had the little foot stockings at the end of each aisle for you to use when you forgot to bring socks.   Being the weekend before Christmas, I was seriously concerned about checkout.  However, they had a great system going and every register was open.  (Nothing irritates me more when you go to a store that is really busy and they only have one or two registers open, and they don’t open any more).  We had a great experience on Marshalls, and I will definitely be going there for more presents and items for my kids.

What are your favorite places to shop and why?

Holiday Cleanup

Thursday, January 8th, 2009

How do you clean up after the holidays?  For us, it is a tad more interesting.  Madison’s birthday was yesterday (she turned 5!), so we always have the quick cleanup that needs to be done from the time we get back from visiting Wisconsin and her birthday party.  I usually get about a week if we are lucky.  Since we have the basement now, Bill let me keep up the Christmasy decorations, but we did pull down the Christmas tree.  I need as much room as we can get, and this is pretty much the only way I was going to get it.  I figure everybody will hang out downstairs for her party just like they did for Christmas Eve.  The sad thing is that we are the only one on the block who still has their outdoor lights up.  Now, we don’t leave them up till June or anything, but it seems that it is kinda odd that on 8th of January that everyone has packed up everything already.  Now, I’ve slacked this week, and I have to get all my cleaning done tomorrow with the kids underfoot.  This should be interesting.  My sister is arriving tomorrow, so its not quite the end of the world if she’s the only one who sees my non-clean house.

How do you clean up?  Do you have a set plan?  Do you just do a little bit each day?

The Audiologist

Monday, November 10th, 2008

As I said in my last post, Madison failed the preschool hearing test.  I never there was a chance of that, and I found myself a lot more upset about it than I thought it would be.  I ended up Twittering about it, and a lot of the awesome people on there made me feel a lot better about it.

We lucked out and were able to get her in today to get her hearing tested.  I was a little nervous, but she had a blast doing it.  They did several cool things.  First, they tested to see if she had fluid in her ears.  They put a thing in her ear, and we watched a screen.  If it looked like a pancake when the tone sounded, she had fluid in her ears.  If it looked like a mountain, she didn’t.  We saw two mountains (one for each ear).  Then they did a test to check her middle ear, and she passed that.  Lastly, they tested her manually.  They put in earplug looking things in her ears, and the audiologist went into a different room and talked to Madison over it.  She said words like carports, baseball, and ice cream, and Madison had to repeat the word.  The audiologist told her she did a good job to which she replied that “she practices a lot”.  I am not sure what she practices, but it was pretty funny.  After she repeated the words, they then did a test with tones.  If she heard the tone, she had to clap.  They then did the word test again.  Then they did a last test with some earphone looking thing.  When she heard the beep, she had to say Beep.

The good news is that she passed!  On a scale of 0 – 20 being normal, she scored 5s on most things.  She did get 15 on 800 mhz stuff (it could be 8,000 I don’t remember).  That is still in the normal range, but I could hear when she was missing words, so it is something I will keep an eye on.  Their recommendation was just to keep an eye on it, but she was completely normal.  Woohooo!!!!

Future Blogger

Monday, November 10th, 2008

I took this picture of Madison late last night. We had put her bed, and about an hour later, she came screaming out of her room. She was crying so hard that we had no idea what happened.  All I know is that I saw she had a mouth full of blood, and I ran her into the bathroom.  We still couldn’t figure out what had happened, but we had her rinse her mouth out with water and calmed her down a bit.  What we learned was that somehow she took her Pumpkin flashlight, and whacked herself in the face.  You can’t tell from this picture, but she actually somehow cut two little spots below her lip, and her entire lip is swollen.  She also had some black and blue marks show up instantly. After we calmed her down and found out what happened, she says to me “mommy, do you want to take a picture?”.  That’s my blogging girl!  LOL  She knew I was going to write about this.  LOL

The good news is that she is okay today.  The swelling went down, and she just has 2 little cuts below her lip.

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Showertime

Thursday, October 23rd, 2008

I have looked at more showers in the last year than I ever have wanted to.  We remodeled my upstairs bathroom and added a new shower last summer.  We also added a new tub and had to tear down all the tile that was there before (good times, let me tell you).  This summer we added a new bathroom to the basement downstairs.  I don’t miss living in a construction zone.  However, it is very nice to have two full bathrooms now.  However, both of my bathrooms spaces are small, so I could not go all out like I wanted to.

In the basement, we had very little space to work with due to the configuration of my basement.  We ended up putting up a shower enclosure (However, I had no idea that you could get a shower enclosures online.  If I would have known that, I would not have let my husband pick it out.  Somebody had to stay home with the kids, so I let him pick it out by himself.  He did do a good job, but I probably would have picked something different.)  However, if you only have a small space and want to add a full bath, I definitely recommend shower enclosures.  They offer a lot more room than they look, and it is nice having two showers when you are trying to get ready for parties and such.

Eventually, when we add on to upstairs, I am going to check out the shower store and look into getting discount steam shower.  We are going to add in a hot tub up there, so we need the shower to be seperate.  What would be better than a steam shower?  They look awesome and extremely relaxing.  If you are lacking on space, they even offer steam showers with minitubs attached!

I personally can’t wait to remodel again, so we can spruce up our house.  Even the economy is in the tank, houses still are a good value.  Even though houses prices have dropped for the time being, they will bounce back.  Remodeling also makes it more enjoyable for you to stay in the house you are in.  By building out our basement, we can definitely stay in this house a lot longer (my upstairs only has 980 square feet, so we were a little cramped up here).

What does your bathroom look like?  What kind of upgrades would you like to make?