The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

So this is our living room. Have I mentioned I LOVE the bookshelves?? Well, I do. However, having a living room would be a lot sweeter if I could actually put in really neat furniture and nice decor. (Okay, so I've been in a grumpy mood today, please read all this with that in mind.)

This is the good part though. These are the curtains from Ikea that we hung up in our room. Love it. And they hide all this:

My sewing niche. This is the very, very BEST part of this post. It's so incredibly awesome and happy and wonderful that I can leave my sewing machine out and sew whenever I want. And just as a side note, that desk is what I got for Christmas when I was twelve. It was all I asked for that year--a desk to do all my crafts and art projects on. Oh, how little life has changed. I am so happy about my sewing niche. :)
This is the other part of my sewing niche. Food storage, yeah baby. Almost a year's supply.
And the other side of the room, Leo's work out equipment, and more food storage. We could live on beans for months. Anyway, that's all my house pictures for now. But here's some of the other good, bad, and ugly bits.

• Isabel: "I went to lay down, but then the wall hit me on my head."
• Elena's covered in nasty spider bites.
• Today I went to Ikea to return a bunch of stuff and finish buying a few pieces of hardware for the curtains, and I had talked up the play place to Elena and Isabel, and they were all excited to go. Then when we got there, they couldn't let Elena and Isabel in the play place because they had reached their maximum capacity of kids. Yeah, 6 kids were in there. I wanted to scream. Ikea is not a fun place with three toddlers in tow. I actually was so disgusted that I even wrote a comment on their computer feedback thing. 6 kids, really???? That's so pathetic. Why even bother offering the service.
• Before Ikea, I went to register our cars. I think Texas is backwards. Seriously. Come on people, get with the digital age. Anyway, Leo went twice to register the cars, and once he didn't have all the right paperwork, and the second time he read the little sign on the glass window stating payment would only be accepted in cash or check and since he had neither, he left halfway through an hour long wait. Anyway, the offices are grungy and dirty and so not helpful. So I went today, Leo had all the right paperwork, but because the shop who inspected our little yellow car didn't write down the vin number on the form like he was supposed to, I still couldn't register that car. Errrr.....and of course the lady wouldn't let me just write down the vin number from the other three forms it was already on in the same stack of papers. So frustrating.
• I am so tired of making kids redo their chores because they don't do it right. Seriously, wouldn't it be so much nicer not to have to spend double the amount of time doing the work, by just doing it right the first time???? Wouldn't it be nicer to just have me say "Good job, thanks, go play on the computer," instead of being chewed out for 10 minutes and then having to redo it all????!?? It certainly would be nicer for me.
• I miss Natalie and her kids. Natalie, please, please, please move to Houston. Our one neighbor from across the street warned us about our next door neighbor. He told us that they have loud fights all the time (already witnessed one) and that once when our landlords, who lived here before us, called the cops because they were sick of it, their car was keyed that night. And that once, our landlady came home and found the woman in her kitchen. I've met her, she's very....vacant. Of course, our landlords never mentioned any of this to us. And they have kids that our kids love to play with and have already picked up lovely phrases from.
• Our landlords are very French and have very thick accents. He's so French, that his name is Jacques and he's a chef. No joke.
• Leo just found a flea in our living room. Really, a flea? Leo says the bites on Elena aren't spider bites, they're flea bites. What the heck??!?!?!?
• The ants in the pantry have yet to die off from the Terro we're putting out.
• Our water heater has been broken for almost a week now. I am so tired of warming up water on the stove for baths and washing dishes. Errr.........
• Our tiny double ovens do fit my cookie sheets. However they only fit three of my bread pans. And one of them broke on Friday. The landlord doesn't really seem to care. But I care. A LOT.
• Natalie, our kitchen sink is only 6 inches deep.
• And best of all, yesterday, Isabel asked to go get the mail, so I let her, and then she came back in, and I started looking through it. Meanwhile, Isabel and Sebastian wanted to go out and play in the rain puddles, so I told them to put on their rain boots. They did and went out into the front yard. I was almost done looking through the mail and was gathering it up to put some in the trash, when ding-dong. Guess who was at my door? In the five minutes since the kids had put on their on their boots, there was three, yes, THREE police cars parked outside. And I was royally chewed out for not properly supervising my children. According to them, they were both all the way down the street and Sebastian was IN the street. Terrible mother that I am, I was just disgusted at the over reaction. Isabel was NEXT DOOR, getting the neighbor's mail to take to her. She had done that the day before and the neighbor's response was, "Oh, she's just so sweet!" I think she was used to running to the Taylor's mailbox with Josh. Anyway, that's expressly forbidden now. And Sebastian was playing in the puddles in the gutter. He rarely if ever goes out into the street. And I doubted the police officer entirely about him being in the street until I remembered about the water in the gutters. And he was in front of our driveway, or so Isabel told me. Umm, yeah, so the police officer said the kids weren't allowed to come out even onto the front porch without a parent with them. So I want to know, is that a law or something??? What age exactly can they play out front without parents? 5, 8 or is it 16? Just wondering, so I don't get in trouble again. I so, so, so miss Provo. And yeah, I don't let those two play outside in the front without supervision, and I was heading that way, but it literally was five minutes. I'm sure I have a lovely CPS file on me now. Ruff. Leo thinks a neighbor called, because he doesn't think 3 police cars would have arrived that fast otherwise. Joy.
• I need to move to the country, where my kids can get trampled by long-horn steers with no nosey neighbors watching.
• Good news, Leo will probably get to go to Colombia in May for his job. That's really cool, maybe in ten more years we can afford to have me go with him on those business trips, and I can spend the whole time at the Archivo General de la Nación looking at census and military records. Sah-weet!
• Leo loves his job. That is wonderful.
• Elena gets tested this Friday to see if she is English proficient enough to go into the Two-way immersion program at her school.
• My glasses arrived in the mail today, only an hour after one of my trial contacts ripped in half. Perfect timing.
• I get to go to Relief Society because I'm not in primary or YW's for the first time in 10 yrs. I love Relief Society. Hopefully they take a long time to decide what calling to give me.
• I finished my class at BYU on Sunday. The entire English-version Wiki FamilySearch site on Colombia was created by yours truly. The professor let me count that as research time, since I ran out of relevant microfilm.
• I'm not going to BYU anymore. Sad. But there's just no good way for me to finish my degree there. So that ends my 6th college career (USU, WSU, ASU, Mesa and Glendale CC being the others.)
• The Ecco's I bought off Ebay for $40 because I can't afford a new $130 pair hurts my right foot. I am so sad. My mom gave me here old pair last summer (she had had them for several years), and I loved them. I wore them everyday. And I wore them out. And I wanted a new pair to wear everyday this summer. The best laid plans of mice and men, eh?
• I called the garbage company to schedule a special pickup because of all our moving boxes and whatnot. But when I spoke to the person, after dialing the number LISTED beside the special pickup scheduling, they said they couldn't schedule me and they would have someone call me back. That's never happened.
• Sebastian took the cutest pictures ever last week. I think I might have to break copyrights and post a few on here. So adorable.
• Ana had an orthodontist appt. yesterday. The doctor wants to take her braces off and have her wear a Herbst appliance for a year to bring her lower jaw forward before putting back on her braces. Sigh. Sounds expensive. But then I think of me and my sisters with TMJ, and I can't see us not doing it.
• Leo called his parents and told them not to come visit this weekend, like they wanted to. I am so glad. I still feel like I barely have my head above water with everything that's going on.
• Elena, Isabel, and Sebastian have dentist appts on Thursday. Leo has one on Friday. Ana has an eye appt. tomorrow. And I have an OBGYN appt tomorrow in downtown Houston at a high-risk ob place. It's an hour's drive. Joy.
• My bathroom is so disgustingly dirty that I avoid it. I keep flushing the toilet thinking someone forgot to, only to realize it's just the toilet is turning yellow. I really, really get tense when the house is dirty I've found.
• Elena and Isabel are banned from the computer for the rest of the week because they came in every fifteen minutes this afternoon while I was trying to take a desperately needed nap because they were fighting over it. Nap time rules need to be re-ingrained in my children's heads if they and I are going to survive the rest of this pregnancy. (The ONE and ONLY Rule:Do not disturb Mom on pain of death.)
• The end. I need to go heat water to take a bath. Chao.