A heart check and house update

Hey. How's your heart? Mine is a little sad. But a little happy too. 

This week has been a little rough. This time of the year is always hard. It's both the anniversary of my father's death and my birthday. If you are new to my blog or do not know the story of what happened to my dad, you can read the post I did a year ago here. 

He has been gone three years now.  

My heart hurts. 

When the weather begins to change as fall creeps in, I start to feel the sadness deep in my bones. Sometimes I don't even realize what it is until I glance at the calendar and notice the approaching of September 17th (the day he went in to the hospital.) Then I remember to take it easy, allow plenty of grace for myself, and just allow it to come in waves. Each year it gets easier. Time really does heal.

My heart is happy too.

I have been keeping busy doing things that I love and making my house pretty. We painted the first floor back in the spring but we never really "finished". I feel like it;s almost done. I got some frames hung up in the dining room finally, and now I just need to figure out what to put IN the frames. 

First I traced the frames and cut out pieces of paper that represented them. Then I had a friend come over, and did lots of texting with other friends for second and third opinions. Everyone agreed that this was the layout. 

Then I moved on to Max's room. I wanted to do a little gallery wall near his bed. I kept it simple. I found the lanterns at Target this summer for $3. I got the "M" at JoAnne's Fabric yesterday for $1.49 (they were on sale) and I spray painted it. I already had the black frame with my grandfather's photo in it, and I also already had the white and red frames that I bought this summer from Ikea. The green frame is from Gordman's and I got it a couple of weeks ago for only $4 (it was waaaaay on sale). Lighting wasn't the greatest when I took the pictures, but, you get the idea.

We''l probably change out the picture of Max once I get another 5x7 print. 

I'm a sucker for vintage kid's books and it was perfect when I found
this page had fallen out of one of our books. 

Max had a pretty good day at school yesterday (with minimal tears!) so he earned some Ipod time.
He really loves the new layout. (Yes my son has an Amish heater and yes that door is screwed shut so that
he can't chill out on the tiny little death-trap old deck that is on the back of our house, just FYI)

Next up was Gabriel and Eli's room. I painted their room a light gray last year, and made bright red curtains with vintage dogs on them. I hadn't really hung anything on their walls, and so I decided to go ahead and do their gallery wall too.

The "G" could stand for "grateful", "good", "gratitude", "gross", and, of course, "G-UNIT"...
But mostly it stand for "Gabriel".

This little circus mouse print I got from etsy. I love that it looks like a page from a French vintage children's book.  The E is for our little Eli, and that dangerous weapon gold cross with the praying child is an addition that I had to hang up mostly because I have tried to get rid of it a dozen times and I just can't. I feel bad throwing it in the garbage. Mostly because it's a cross, and also because it is dangerously heavy and sharp and could severely hurt the nice garbage man. My children use it as a sword whenever they find it and dig it out of the Goodwill bag. So for now, there it shall hang.

It's not quite finished yet, but we got a good start. I got the "G" and "E" at JoAnne's this last summer. I finally spray painted them. Gabe loves his big G.

This is not new, but I thought I would show this too. It's hanging above Eli's crib. Just a piece of twine, a couple of nails and some little clothe's pins. Easy. I got the prints online. They are Instagrams. 

And that's all I got.

I'm looking forward to birthday celebrations beginning tomorrow night with a group of friends. Next week comes more fun outings  I'm so thankful for friends and family who embrace me and love me through this bittersweet time of the year. 

I just made a facebook page for my blog, so make sure to like it here! I will post more bloggy stuff there rather than mucking up the feeds of old high school acquaintances and people who don't care about kids and houses and pintrest projects:)

Happy Thursday y'all. 
Peace.