Mayday Mayday!

Hello! ...and welcome to May!! 
I can't believe it's already May! My calendar is getting dizzy from flipping pages so fast! So, I feel it is my duty to update my blog, and therefore all of my readers on what's been going on in the lives of the Lines Fam. :) (Lucky you, right?)
                As many of you know, we are due with baby number five May 4th, and that is THIS Friday!!!! I am so excited, and impatient, and antsy, and...uncomfortable! hahaha Anyone who's had a baby or is currently this far along knows exactly what I mean. Heck, anyone who has had to live with a woman this far along knows what I mean!  Freezer meals are made and stored away, baby's clothes are washed, folded, and stacked neatly on the nursery shelves, and all the birth center bags are packed and waiting in the van alongside  baby's car seat- don't ask me how this has made grocery shopping the last two weeks, or the other four kids that have had to ride the forty five minute drive home from town with gallons of milk in their laps for that matter! I think we are ALL waiting for the tell tale signs of labor to show up! Which isn't easy when you're body is so ready and prepped for having babies having done it many times before that it is almost always in some state of prodromal labor the last four weeks. I keep telling my husband that this would be so much more tolerable if I could just go into hard labor and have the baby, or quit with all of these teasing symptoms so that I could get rest and be pleasantly surprised when I finally went into labor. Ha! The laws of nature say otherwise. Baby needs to be in the right position, milk has to be just on the brink of production and full operation, muscles, tendons, joints need to all be loosened in preparation for delivery, and last but definitely not least when you're calculating biggest discomforts, cervix has to be at it's prime for a smooth delivery. I suppose some women can glide on through this stage of their pregnancy, ignoring all these signs and symptoms knowing they'll recognize the true blue labor contractions when they arrive. Some women I've talked to  have the same onset signs before labor, or deliver (like my sister) exactly one week before their due date each pregnancy. I truly envy these women! I delivered my first baby in four hours two weeks early after an induction due to low fluids, then came my twins four weeks early after multiple stays in the hospital to stop preterm labor previous to that with an eight hour labor that was stopped and restarted in the middle, then my first home birth baby who is currently twenty months old arrived one day overdue after two hours of total labor, but only thirty minutes of active labor! None of these labors or their symptoms had much commonality. The biggest issue with this pregnancy is timing- my husband works forty five minutes away from home, the midwife lives twenty five minutes away from us, and we have four small children to contend with at home. So needless to say we do a lot of praying that baby will choose to arrive in the late evening or middle of the night so that at least my husband can be home to catch!
            With the worry about when baby will choose to arrive, comes connected the overreaction to each little symptom: "Ooo, that was a stronger than normal braxton hick, start timing them!" "My lower back is feeling crampy and I've been more moody than normal, maybe it's the hormonal surge before labor!"
My poor midwife has probably gotten more irritating phone calls from me in the last two weeks than she's ever gotten from her average soon to be mother of five. Although she's a great sport, and since she was the catcher at my last birth she knows that there isn't room to be too skeptical about me having a baby quickly when it finally happens!
             Speaking of other babies, I've been doing a little bit of worrying about how Griffin will react to a new baby. This is the closest together we've ever had babies and each previous time the older siblings were more at an age of reason and understanding, and definitely at least out of the crib! Griffin is still very much the babe of the family- still sleeps in his crib, sits in the highchair, takes nice long naps and early bed times, and is just now starting to really do any talking other than saying Mommy and Daddy. We've just now gotten him to start patting my belly and saying "baby", but we do that for our own amusement, he has no clue what's about to happen. The twins were simple when Griffin was born, they were born with company so they didn't feel any displacement! They even handed over their pacifiers to him and never stuck them back in their mouths! I pray that things are that smooth this time around. Griff is our cuddle bean, our little snuggle love, and he is not happy when Mommy or Daddy's laps are even occupied by a book, much less another baby! Usually after we have a new addition to the family I move in to the master bedroom for the first postpartum week to work on getting a good breastfeeding/sleeping pattern going and to bond with the new baby(s). My wonderful husband takes a week off of work and brings me food, drink, and entertainment, and brings the other kids in to say hello to the baby and I for a quick little minute and to receive bedtime hugs, kisses, and prayers, and then scoots them on back out. This time around I think I'll have to have Griffin live in the bedroom with new baby and I for larger parts of the day to avoid major emotional calamity and possible hostility toward the new guy. It's so important to me that Griffin not feel replaced or forgotten, he's such a lover I think I'd be pretty wounded if he shifted his affections elsewhere too.
             So! This is the end of my family update for today (mostly because I'm ready for a nap before the kids wake up) but you can count on another update soon!! With new baby pictures!! Woohoo, wish us luck!


         

Potty training...or...

     Sometimes our need to control our lives and our surroundings makes things get so out of control that we stop to wonder, was there ever any control there to be had? Most of the time, no. At least that's my own experience with the world, after I had kids, amplify that no times ten. My desire to write this blogacle (blog article, tee hee)  was sparked today after reading a link to a little article off of the Cafe Mom webiste that a friend of mine posted to facebook. You can read the article yourself here:
 http://thestir.cafemom.com/toddler/135107/potty_training_is_not_a?fb_ref=post_bottom&fb_source=home_oneline 
   My article is primarily about my son Steven. He just turned four this month, and the only thing consistent about his potty training is that he consistently progresses and then regresses over and over. I have mostly just given up, and let him decide what to do. We just try and make good consequences when he chooses to go in the toilet...or bad consequences when he goes elsewhere. I'd like to say that he is still in diapers, heaven knows that would actually be easier, but he has been out of diapers since he was a little over eighteen months. In fact, I was just looking in his baby memories book the other day and remembered about having to cut the feet out of all his footie pajamas so that we could turn them around backwards, that way he couldn't take them off to get to his poopy diapers. Unfortunately even that didn't stop our little Houdini for long, he figured a way out of the pajamas and got to the diapers anyway, always ending in a "poo-tastrophe". So, we thought maybe he was ready for potty training. Makes sense right? The kid takes off his diaper after it has any poop in it at all and smears it around, so he must want it off his body, and what better place to put it than the toilet!? Uh, wrong. He apparently just really enjoyed smearing poo. We did what lots of parents do, and what we were given plenty of advice to try- worked on introducing him to the toilet by letting him run naked and rewarding him with candies or stickers every time he actually went in the toilet or the training potty. Which worked, kind of. He'd go pee in the toilet quite often (we were pumping him with fluids to try and get lots of positive affirmation in during the day) We tried putting him back in diapers at night, but he'd already gotten the idea in his head that he was a big boy now, so he didn't need them. I just washed lots and lots and LOTS of sheets and pajamas...and carpets, and sofas, and stuffed animals... When we made him wear pull-ups he regressed even further and started to get really destructive with his pooing, smearing it all over windows, toys, furniture, all the clothes in his dresser, down air vents...yes, it is as gross as it sounds. He'd never eat it fortunately, but had no problems whatsoever with touching it. SO, obviously, it was hurting his mental psyche, self worth, or whatever you want to label it that we would dare put him back in diapers or even pull-ups, and since washing some wet sheets was exponentially easier than scrubbing whole rooms, we caved. (Ask me how MY psyche was doing!!)
     After riding this merry-go-round for over a year, he had made some serious progress- he no longer pooped his pants in public, he'd tell you most of the time when he had to go pee in public, mostly I think because he wanted to play in a variety of toilets, and he was no longer wetting the bed at night or nap times as long as you were there the instant his eyes opened to whisk him to the bathroom. As previously mentioned at the beginning of this article, he only consistently progressed as often as he regressed. Every time he was sent to his room for a time out or a mandatory nap, he'd smear poo. Yes, yes I know, this is the part where you say "Ohhh, he's reaching out for control of his own. Give him control of other things and he'd stop that." I really wish it would have been that simple. We read parenting books, and absorbed all the advice we could get. We followed Love and Logic's advice of giving him choices in everything, giving him control over every little thing we could think of. We followed To Train up a child's advice of taking away sugar or some other thing that he loves saying that he needed to quit going potty in his room and we'd give it back. We followed so many other people, and so many other online info sites, and so so many parenting books advice that I think mostly my husband and I wound up dizzy and dazed in the corner...cleaning up poop. We even went so far as to take him to the pediatrician when he turned three and was still doing this to see what we could do. She said that he was ADHD and said we might try some trial variations of medication to help him out. Now, I am majorly against medications, but my oldest son who was in the same year also diagnosed ADHD and had struggled so severely in school that he was not able to function publicly was given some brand new medications, not at all like the scary ones that are stereotyped for ADHD, and he was doing beautifully in school and was a new kid altogether. So, we gave the meds a whorl. Oh dear. THAT only lasted a few weeks before we decided that it was the dumbest thing we'd ever tried. He'd go from manically happy to a puddle of tears in five minute spans. Clearly, this was not the medication for this kiddo. Instead of trying other medications as the pediatrician recommended, we decided that whatever we did would be medication free,  since we were trying to potty train, and not teach math or reading to this kid, we just felt that medication couldn't be justified.
    Onward went our journey- Whew! We started relaxing about the whole thing the longer time marched on. We'd just have him help us clean up when he made horrible messes, and then at mealtimes or treat times say 'Sorry, boys that poop in their rooms and smear it don't get ......' fill in the blank with whatever special treat we were having. Don't get me wrong, I'd definitely still have meltdowns of my own. Day seven in a row of scraping poop off walls and furniture happens and it's bed time and you just discovered another pile hidden under the bed ...with your foot...see if you can keep your cool! He'd cry and I'd cry and he'd say he'd try harder tomorrow (to make Mommy not cry I think, not to make it to the toilet) Anyway, by the time he was three and a half he'd made some more major progressions, like not peeing or pooing his pants or people's potted plants when we were out and about for starters, making it to the toilet 98% of the time during the day at home and during nap times. Mostly he was only still peeing in every bleeding thing in his room during the night and ugly hours of the morning. So, life was dramatically better for us- we just had what we called the "pit of doom" (the boys room) to contend with. I think the biggest thing that made this major progression occur was that we discovered we were expecting another baby so we moved Steven into our oldest son Samuel's room to make room for a nursery- and primarily to see if older brother could play watchman to younger brother. This almost completely stopped the room pooping, which was fantastic, since it took excessive sanding, four coats of paint, two boxes of baking soda, three bleach water moppings, and still about three months of sitting empty with just air fresheners hung sporadically to repair the room Steven was previously in. Samuel complains about the peeing, but he's a great big brother that puts up with a lot and he's pretty awesome about telling us all the time when Steven has peed. Their room smells, but I can at least fix it with a good mopping, soaking the toys in baking soda water, and opening up windows on nice sunny days. It sounds crazy that getting to this point is my definition of living the good life, but delve back into the terror years and you would understand.
     Steven now at four years old still has his regressive moments, peeing his seat in the car the other day for instance, pooping in his underpants and then wiping his hind end with his brothers blanket a week ago, and getting caught peeing out the windows down the screens a time or two just to name a few, but overall he is on the path to success. I still don't consider him "potty trained", but I have learned not to be bothered by that. I think when it comes time to potty train baby brothers Griffin and Cohen I am going to be the worlds most chillax mama. Maybe it was Steven's purpose in life to beat me into submission and give up my stubborn controlling urges on the world. Goodness knows I'd be in a mental institute if I hadn't learned to let go! Now the questions are, what about preschool? How long exactly is it going to take this kid to be really and completely potty trained? I don't know the answer to that, but I do know that as long as he keeps trucking along so will I, and I'm no longer concerned about the answers or other peoples' opinions on the matter. Which brings me to my last fiat: leave the poor potty training mamas alone for pete sakes! This is NOT a competition! I'm sure that after reading my page you can say that you've heard of the worst case, and you can find more articles online in bulk telling the tale of the five minute potty training wonders, all of which should tell you that each child is so different and in need of different time spans to complete the same tasks. This doesn't make them dumb or smart, slow or quick, it makes them human. Have lots of good advice? Fantastic, share it when it's asked for- with humility please, just because you were successful doesn't make you wonder mom, it makes your child wonder kiddo. You really weren't in control no matter how badly you'd like to think so. Okay! Soap box is put away now! :)
     Finally- no matter how many miserable moments he's made for me, this little guy is my love, my hero, my little buggin', and every time I look at his face I know he deserves my patience and endurance. Don't you think so?

Spring Decor Mini Tutorials

Welcome to Spring!

Today let's do some mini tutorials on how to get your house looking Springy- with stuff you probably already have laying around!

Tutorial A: Floral boot hanging

This piece is both fun and sentimental because all of my kiddos have worn these bright red boots. It was perfect too because I already had scads of silk flowers hanging around from other projects, and of course apple tree clippings are in abundance this time of year. 

Materials:

• Boots- preferably the kind with loops sewn onto the backs, or double sided pull loops built into the sides (for hanging purposes) 
• Silk flowers of your choice
• Springy looking tree clippings
• Ribbon

Okay- this is called my spring mini tutorials because these are quick and easy projects! So pay close attention because this one should be the shortest tutorial of them all.

1. String your ribbon through the loops of the boots wherever they may be, and adjust the length with enough slack to tie a nice bow on top and still retain the length you're looking for. 
2. Tie a bow, and cut surplus ribbon. Make sure the bow is tight so it doesn't slip loose when you hang the arrangement.
3. Arrange your silk flowers until it has an aesthetically pleasing appearance to you and then place tree clippings behind in a scattered fashion. 
4. Hang it up!!!! No really, you're done already. Told you it was simple!  :)

Tutorial B: Spring hanging sign

 
 This piece is slightly more involved as I did quite a bit of free hand painting on it. However, I think someone who wants the same effect and isn't artistically inclined could get the same outcome by decoupaging printed flowers, or tracing over printed flowers and then painting over that.


Materials:

• wood piece- mine is about 10X3 inches, but your can change that up to your fancy
• Drill & small drill bit (just to make holes big enough to string jewelers wire through)
• Bendy wire- I bought mine at Walmart in the jewelry crafting section
• Pencil
• Printed text (and or flowers according to if you are painting your own flowers like me or tracing some instead) 
• Fine grit sand paper- unless your wood piece is already smooth enough to your taste
• Acrylic sealer- OPTIONAL
• decoupage glue- ONLY IF YOU'RE GOING TO BE DECOUPAGING PRINTED FLOWERS INSTEAD OF PAINTING OR TRACING

Directions:

1. Sand your wood piece until smooth enough to be able to trace over and paint and not be too disturbed by excess bumpiness. 
2.  Drill a hole on both top corners where you want the hanging wire to come out of. 

  

     3. Take your printed text and cut it roughly out- just like in the above pic- so that there's not too much excess paper to work around and then use a sharp pencil to trace the lettering around all the edges. It should look something like this when you're done: 

    4. Add your own flowers/details as you wish at this point to the piece to make it pretty. 

    5. Paint in the text and embellishments. I used acrylic paint for this.

   6. Since I am hanging my sign outdoors I chose to add acrylic sealer to make it a littler more weather resilient. This is an optional step that you can skip if you don't think you'll need it. 

   7. String the wire through the holes leaving a tail on each end for wrapping and making a cute little spring.
   8.  Wrap the tails of the wire around the pencil to create a uniform coil on each side. Then loop the coiled wire around the wire coming out the back of the hole once so that it's got a good attachment and won't come loose when hanging.

    9. Hang it up!!! :) I hung mine above my floral boot arrangement for a sweet little bit of spring emphasis.

Tutorial C: Felt flower wreath

 Materials:

• Felt sheets in your desired colors, including felt for leaves if you want them
• Wreath base of some sort- these felt flowers are hot glued, so you can use anything (including even just a cut out and felt covered ring of cardboard) that hot glue would stick to. 
• Hot glue gun and plenty of glue sticks- I went through about 8 small glue sticks in my gun making this. 
• Scissors

Directions:

1. Basically all you need to know to make this wreath is how to make felt flowers & leaves- so we'll start with that. 

 

Flowers

• Cut your felt sheets into round to semi-round circles according to the sizes of flowers you want to make. I made all different sizes to fill in the wreath nicely. 
• Start on an edge and cut spirally into the circle creating a little coil. Cut off the last little circlet on the inner part of the circle. 
• Start on the outer edge of the coil and start rolling for a broader flatter flower, or start rolling from the center of the coil outward for a taller skinnier flower. 
• Hot glue the tail end back onto the flower roll. 

You just made a felt flower!! Now the cool part is, you can change these up in almost limitless ways- scallop, fringe, wedge, slice or do what you may to the edges of the coil once it's been cut out to change the overall look of the flower once rolled up. Play with it until you find some designs you love! Or stick with the simple to get the traditional rose look. Then you can use these versatile little things to adorn everything from gift wrapping to little girls headbands!   

Leaves

• Cut out rectangles in the sizes and colors desired to make your leaves. 
• Just cut in a rounded arc from one corner to another on farthest sides of the rectangle, and then repeat, cutting with an opposite angled arc the other direction. Wala! Leaves.

    2. Prep your wreath base. I used a wire wreath base, so mine required hot gluing a ribbon to the bottom so that there was more for the hot glued flowers to cling to. If you're using something else, it might not require that step.
   3. Start making your felt flowers and leaves in bulk and arrange them to your fancy along your wreath! This is all to taste as to how you want your end product to look, so just have some fun! For the best result I recommend gluing down leaves first, then flowers, or tucking and gluing some leaves to the underside of the wreath in addition to under flowers.
Well, that's all folks! If you have any questions, or if you feel I didn't describe something well enough for you to replicate it, please leave me comments and I'll try to help you in any way I can!

Birds of a feather...or silhouette ;)

It's tutorial time again! 

Today I wanted to share how to make some fun mod art for those with bare walls and low budgets! Or just a bird fetish. :) The finished product will look like this:

Materials you will need: 

• Canvas, canvas board, poster board or even thick poster paper would work.
• Decoupage glue- I used Modge Podge
• Paint brush- for decoupage glue
• Scissors- for trimming 
• Black permanent marker
• Old book or papers that you don't mind tearing up 
• Ribbon (for hanging it up) 
• Printed bird pictures (see pictures posted later in tutorial) unless you'd like to free hand the birds like I did in the blue background picture.
• Any little final touch accessories you may want, i.e. buttons

Step 1- Tear up some of the paper you'll be using and get the decoupage glue ready to stick the papers down to the base you've chosen to work with. You can choose to align the page edges with your base like I did in the two piece bird art picture, or you can lay your pages randomly to get a more scattered effect and then trim around the edges like I did in the three piece blue background pic.
Step 2- Once you have your pages glued down, decoupage over the entire surface- thick isn't necessary thin works great. Just make sure you get the whole surface leaving no blank spots because the marker will absorb and reflect funny in any bare spots. Let it dry completely.

While you're waiting for that to dry go print some birds! I just Googled "birds" under the images tab and got all I needed by copying and pasting to a word document and then resizing them to fit my project.

Step 3- Cut out the birds excluding their feet- those are easier to draw on after you position them on their branches.
Step 4- Draw out the basic sketch of your tree branches starting in a corner and stretching out across the canvases leading from one to the other so it appears to be one branch broken between two or three (or however many) canvases. Don't worry about details yet, those are easiest to add last after the branches are all there and colored in.

Step 5- Color in all your branches and add more details. I added leaves in my three piece project, and left the branches bare in my two piece. So, once again, it's up to your own personal taste here.

Branches all filled in- no details yet

Already looks so cool when you separate the pieces!

 Step 6- Decoupage your birds into place where you want them on the branches, and then decoupage over the top of them as well so they have a uniform gloss to the branches. Let dry completely.

Step 7- Color over top of the birds with the marker making sure to get all the edges.

You're done! Sign it, you're an artist! Now you can hot glue some ribbon to the back for hanging them like I did, put them in frames, or add hanging embellishments to your fancy!
Hope you had as much fun making yours as I did mine!

Recycled jean aprons!

Reduce, reuse, recycle junk in your house for craft supplies!!

Today I'm sharing my own version of an idea I stole off pinterest: recycled jeans aprons :) Don't worry, I didn't steal someone else's instructions or pictures, these are all my own, I just stole and modified an idea....much better, right?
Okay, so it's spring here- if you ignore the six inches of snow anyway, and if you're anything like me you've already started spring cleaning and day dreaming of summer and barbequed food. When cleaning closets I found stacks of old jeans that no one wears, or that have been worn to their limit. So, here are the instructions to turn that into a pile of jean aprons for your kiddos to help in the kitchen, barbeques, and great gifts for all the cooks in the family!

•  Step 1- Cut the butt out. Don't you wish you could do that to yourself sometimes? For this I just used a sharp pair of sewing scissors and cut along the back where the crotch seam lined up to give as much length to the apron as possible. I've seen it cut shorter to make smaller cutesier aprons- so this part is up to your taste.

 

•  Step 2- Get your ruffle material ready to go. For this step many of you may want to take the cheaters way out like me, and use an old dress to cut the ruffles off of- or you can pick any material you like and just pin it into a gathered look before sewing to get your ruffles. Since this apron is for my daughter, and she also happened to have a favorite and very worn old dress that no longer fit and had a perfect ruffle edge for the taking, I just stole that. As you can see in the picture below I cut the dress apart and took the ruffled edge along with a small margin of fabric from above for attaching purposes.

 

  

It worked out perfect too, because since the jeans and dress were about the same size there was the perfect amount of ruffle material for the project!

• Step 3- Attach the ruffles. :) Once again, because of the of premade ruffles I used, this step was very easy.  I just used that little extra margin of material I left on when I cut the ruffles off the dress to tuck behind the jean material and began sewing down the side- jean side down on my sewing machine. When I got to the corner, I wanted it to have a rounded look so I then tucked the ruffle strip to the front side of the jeans folding the little margin over to keep only the ruffle, not the extra material showing. Then I flipped the project to ruffle side down on the machine and kept sewing along that line across the bottom of the jeans. If you are more exacting than I am, feel free to pin this all in place before beginning your sewing...I'm just more of a go by the seat of your pants kind of gal... (har har har) Continue by doing your corner the same on the other side and flipping the ruffling back around to go up the other side. To give it a more finished look when you're done, cut the ruffle to even with the top of the jeans and then fold over slightly and sew along it to give it a clean edge. 

These looked sloppy after pinning them but I readjusted them as I sewed and made them look neater. 

• Step 4- Make your apron ties. For this part I again salvaged material from the old dress to match the ruffles, but another cute idea would be to use the leftover jean leg material. I just cut the remaining seams and ruffles off of the dress to get to the flattest material and then rolled it over and over into about a 1.5 inch thickness strip. I then used my quilting mat and a rotary scissors to cut one of the edges off the roll, opening up to create about four 2ish inch wide strips. If you have enough material to make two equal length strips, I'd recommend that, my daughters dress just wasn't long enough. Then I took the strips and folded each outside edge into the center, with one edge overlapping just enough to sew a seam down and pinned them in place that way- I used two of the strips per apron tie tucking one into the other.  Finally sew down the center fold of each tie and if desired add a secondary embellishing stitch to add an extra touch and  extra strength to the ties. I used a fun flower stitch on mine. :) Lastly fold over and sew down a corner on one end to give it the angled ribbon look. All done!
• Step 5-  Attach the ties. This is the easiest step, just place the ties behind the ruffles against the jean material and sew them on! I went over it twice to make sure it was a good strong attachment. 
• Step 6- Clip all your loose threads, check it over to make sure everything is in place- and find a cute model to show off your finished apron!!!!

Here we are!

Hey there!
First off, have some patience with me as this is my first attempt at blogging. Secondly, I promise I won't be one of those blog pages that's filled with endless glorified facebook statuses and boring stories about each of my kids' favorite colors. No, this will be a blog documenting the real life for a Mother of five, and (as the title of my blog gives away) all the machinations I come up with. Insert evil laugh. Also, it will be a place to find craft projects that are family friendly, low budget decorating fun, and a whole list of other things I'll be posting pictures and tutorials of as I glean the meat from the bones of my creativity, and admittedly, Pinterest. ;) Hey, a girls' got to get her ideas from somewhere!
Lastly, my hopes for this blog are that it might be an outlet for me to share my hard learned life lessons, valuable tricks, and trials that I hope to never repeat- in addition to providing some support for those out there that are living this fun, hard, messy, beautiful, blessed life with me! You are not alone, and I'm glad I'm not either!