About Me
My name is Tami and I live in central Illinois with my husband, Larry and three children, Caleb (8), Camden (7) and Emma (4). I hope you'll enjoy reading about my life as a wife/mother and about our family's adventures. What I’m Reading
The Painting Continues
The painting continues in our house. I have been painting for almost 2 months now. That may seem like a long time until you realize I usually only paint one day a week (when my boys are at grandmas). I have completed the living room, dining room (next week) and the hallway. The stairwell is being contracted out as the ceiling is too high. I have contacted someone to come give a bid. Hopefully, it is in our budget range. He has painted for a friend of mine and he sounds like he is reasonable.
I just started on our family room and kitchen today. My husband and I picked a bold color for us. We usually do pretty muted colors. We picked American Tradition Prairie Grass. We wanted to paint the rooms in a green, this is just darker than we were initially going for.
Once this project is done, I will post pictures of the completed rooms.
Tags: 
painting, 
American Tradition paint
My September 11 Story
My husband and I had been married for almost 10 months. We were getting ready to move into our first home and preparing to celebrate our 1st wedding anniversary. We were extremely happy and then…
I was driving to work and listening to the radio. I remember hearing that a plane had crashed into the WTC. At the time they were reporting that it was a small aircraft. I didn’t think much of it and when I got to work, I did get on the internet to find our what was happening. A little while later a co-worker came in and said that another plane had crashed into the other tower.
From that moment on, we were glued to CNN. It was hard to concentrate on anything work related that day. We just sat around all day talking and trying to comprehend what was happening to our country. The thought of all of those people dying is still hard to get my mind around. That evening, our church participated with other churches and held a prayer vigil.
My most vivid memory is of a lady in our office (she was a client that was at our office for a meeting that day) that was on the phone most of the day. She was from Virginia and her husband worked in Washington D.C. She was frantically trying to get ahold of him most of the day. She finally did reach him and he was safe.
One year later, I was on a plane going to Tampa for a business trip and 7 weeks pregnant with our first child.
Tags: 
September 11
The Painting Project
I have a list on the refrigerator of the home improvement projects that my husband and I want to accomplish this year. It is now August and we have only started on two of them. One is getting undercabinet lighting for our kitchen, it still is not installed. We need to find a free weekend for this.
The other is a much bigger project. I am in the process of painting the entire first floor of our house. The color we have chosen for the living room, dining room, stairwell and upstairs hallway is toasted wheat. We have not decided on the color for the family room and kitchen. It will be some shade of green. I have discovered that I really enjoy painting. It is very relaxing. The boys go to grandma’s for the day and I get to paint with no distractions.
One of my new finds for this painting project is the Shur-Line paint edger. I’ve never found an edger that worked very well. This one is great. The other tool I still have to purchase is a paint buddy. It makes touch ups easier, so I won’t have to get the paint can out everytime there is a ding on the wall.
Tags: painting, 
home improvement
Found: Cool and Unusual Things For Kids
Via DaddyTypes, I found a link to some cool kids stuff from Sparkability. Perhaps I lead a sheltered life in the middle of nowhere, but I’ve not seen stuff like this anywhere else.
Tags: 
Sparkability
Rookie Moms
Check out Rookie Moms. I just discovered this site the other day, they left a comment on one of my posts. It is now one of my favorite sites.
It is written by two women and their experience being first time moms. They say, “this web site is inspired by our need to have at least one activity per day. We challenged ourselves to come up with one suggestion for something that we liked doing for each day of the first year.”
They have lots of different activities to entertain and keep your little one busy.
Tags: 
Rookie Moms
Bye Aunt Sara!
Caleb, Camden and I took Aunt Sara (my husband’s sister) to the airport this morning. She was flying back to New York City, where she moved to in January. She has been home for 5 days to visit family, friends and to attend a family reunion.
This morning, Caleb was playing with his Little People Airplane pretending it was Aunt Sara flying in the sky. He was so excited to pick her up last week and was equally excited today. She has been a part of his life since he was born, so the last few months have been a little hard for him with her not being around all of the time. He was pretty much attached to her the entire time she was home.
He loved watching the plane take off while Camden just sat in his stroller watching everything around him, as 1 year olds are prone to do…Bye, Aunt Sara.
Tags: 
airplanes
Great Sketches of Kids
via Dooce
Tags: 
sketches of kids
Free Stuff for Your Baby
There’s no shortage of companies willing to give you free stuff just for having a baby (and seriously, they’re expensive buggers so you can probably use all the help you can get!). Here’s a list for starters:
Ringling Brothers Circus Your babies first circus is on the house.
Whitehouse Greeting A personal greeting from the White House. Not terribly valuable, but a nice memento regardless.
Additionally, most baby-centric companies will give you either free product samples, or coupons just for signing up on their website:
Any others we missed?
Tags: 
free stuff
What’s in Our Favorites
Here’s a list of some of our favorite sites:
Babycenter: One of the best resources on parenting, period.
Flylady: An excellent resource for keeping your home running smoothly.
Parenthacks: Parenting hacks, tips and tricks.
Ask Dr. Sears: An A-Z compendium of medical information about children. One of my favorite sections is the Medicine Cabinet, which gives you detailed information on virtually every medicine for your child including dosage information.
The Lactivist: The lactivist is a somewhat irreverent blog and store devoted to nursing mothers. If you’re nursing (or planning on it), you need to check this site out.
What are your favorite sites? Post a comment below and let us know.
Tags: 
parenting
And so it begins
This is our home on the web. We are the parents of two fantastic kids who continue to find new and interesting ways of challenging us. We started this site to share what (little) we’ve learned in 2 1/2 years of parenting, including the tools and techniques of the parenting trade. We’ve tried a number of different things for dealing with the trials of parenting, and we’re going to share what has worked and what hasn’t. We’ve got some fun things planned, stay tuned.
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