elsa + bangs

rainy day puppet show.

weekend with grandma.

My mom had to be in Philadelphia again for work last week (and my dad was in Amsterdam for work!) so she took the train down Friday evening and spent the weekend with us before flying home. The girls were absolutely giddy on the way to the train station to pick her up.

We had a babysitter Friday night so we went out to eat at Zaytinya in D.C. (Greek, Lebanese, and Turkish cuisine, tapas style). It was sooooo delicious. We ordered something like 10 different things (the beauty of tapas) plus we got 3 spreads for free because it took them almost an hour to seat us and we had a reservation. The endless supply of warm, fresh, puffed pita bread was amazing. All the spreads were wonderful. And we loved pretty much every dish we ordered. So many bright, different flavors. We completely stuffed ourselves.

The rest of the weekend was pretty low key. The girls spent as much time as possible playing ponies and polly pockets with Grandma and we got to have a birthday celebration for her. She also made the rounds for hair cuts. And we took a stroll through a mosquito-infested Huntley Meadows.

Amelia was excited to make a welcome sign on her new table.

faces i love.

bedroom update. or, how one thing lead to another...

Several months ago we realized we needed to put some shelves up by Amelia's bed so she could store her books for reading at night. And somehow hanging shelves took a few months.

Before we could hang shelves, I had to repaint the whole wall. When we moved the bunk beds there a year ago, we removed some big shelves from the wall and there was some serious paint damage that we never fixed. So I painted the wall.

Then it took a few weeks to decide on shelves. We thought about making some out of an old pallet since I had seen several tutorials for that. But that didn't really fit the style of the room. Then I saw a quick IKEA solution on Pinterest a few months ago and immediately ran to IKEA and picked up $4 spice racks to use as book shelves.

Then the spice racks sat in our house for several weeks. I finally decided to paint them white, but that meant I should probably paint the bed white too (something I had always meant to do). So, multiple coats of paint later, the bed and shelves were white. (See the before here, although I photoshopped out the yucky wall.)

And I figured as long as I was painting things, I would repaint the table and chairs since they had been destroyed by marker and crayon (see the before here). Ben suggested making the top of the table a chalkboard since the kids write on it anyway. And I already had chalkboard spray paint laying around. And I figured as long as I had the chalkboard paint out, I would use it to add "labels" to some mini drawers that we finally hung up.

And I updated Elsa's bedding.

And that is how a project as simple as hanging shelves can take me months.