Literally 30 minutes post talking my mom out of spending $85 on a beautiful table and chairs set from Babies ‘R Us, I found this sucker at a thrift store. After chasing away some men examining some strange totem on it (seriously, do people really think oddly cut, fake wood eagle and bear totems are a cool thing to have in your home if you’re not, I don’t know, some sort of Appalachian bear hunter?), I checked the price tag. $5. FIVE DOLLARS! Are you impressed yet? Wait! There’s more!

Upon taking it to the cashier, and squeeling talking about what an amazing price that was, she said, “You do know that furniture is half off today, right?”
To which I screeched, “SERIOUSLY?! I’M GOING TO GET THIS THING FOR $2.50?!” thereby officially terrifying the teenage girl behind the counter and solidifying myself as a raging dork. Again.

The table did have quite a few scratches and cracks on the top but, for $2.50, who can complain? I decided to paint it and cover it with contact paper when I got home. We began with a car idea that, regrettably, turned into a stripe idea. Which I hate, but more about that later and onto the “how to stripey paint a $2.50 thrift store find so that it, hopefully, looks less like hell and will last your nearly 2 year old toddler longer than a week” semi-tute.

I began by washing down the table with soap and water. Then I used masking tape to mark off the areas for the light blue.

I painted the light blue lines, then removed the tape and re-taped for the darker blues.

After painting the darker blues and removing that tape, I hand painted the yellows. It was too much of a pain in the patooty to re-tape and, at this point, I’d begun to decide that I hated the stripes and was giving up.

The table and chair, painted and dry. Next step is to cover with clear contact paper so, despite what the toddler may drop, draw, paint or purposely spill all over it, it shouldn’t take much time to clean up.

Measure how much contact paper you need and then some. The contact paper has many nifty little squares that make it darn near impossible to cut unevenly. Make sure to mark the end of the line you are cutting. thinking, “I’ll cut to the line the number 2 direction is on” is great until you forget if it’s the 3rd repetition of that #2 direction or the 4th. Cut the contact paper about 1-2 squares over exact size as the paper occasionally shrinks and overhang is ridiculously easy to cut off.

Then peel back one corner of the contact paper backing and, beginning from one corner of the table, align the contact paper as squarely as you can muster. Then slowly, slowly, slowly peel the backing as you lay the contact down. if you see an air bubble, gently lift and re-press. Be careful, however, lifting will generally tear up a bit of your paint.

Once completed, take a hard, rounded edge and workout all the tiny bubbles. I used a photo album because every single item in my house is some form of multi-tasker. I know that they have items specifically for this purpose, so if you happen to have and/or find one, it’ll probably work quite a bit better than my method.

Now to work with the overhang.

Pull out your trusty craft knife and slowly cut around the edges. Use a ruler if your table has no obvious indentations to cut into.

And, voila! It is done.

Unfortunately, as I mentioned earlier, I hate it. If I’d had any additional time, I’d have repainted it. My son was over me fawning over his table and was ready to get to working on it, so I left it as is. The great thing about contact paper, is that it’ll probably pull up most, if not all, the paint when I go to remove it. Which should make the process of redoing the whole thing a bit easier when I’m able to.

For now, at least it looks slightly less like a $2.50 thrift store item. I’m shooting for $5. At least.

This poor woman went through so many facial expressions, it was ridiculous. The beginning face was very…well…stank.

As a friend put it, “Husband said something asinine” face

Then she managed to morph into a robot with no emotion, whatsoever

I think I finally got her to the point where she may not be perfect (smug, my mother says), but she’s as close as she’s going to get. At least she doesn’t look like she’s moments away from knocking her husband out for suggesting they name the new baby “Chaka Khan”.*

* Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
While my mom did nearly kill my dad after he made that same suggestion the day I was born, I think it’d be pretty awesome to be named Chaka. I’d wear giant fabric crowns everywhere.

Painting for my kitchen

I haven’t painted since well before Ben was born. The moment I found out I was pregnant, I stopped painting. I didn’t want to deal with the fumes. After that, I just didn’t have any time or energy.

After my computer opted to go explode on me again, I decided to sit down and paint something for our kitchen, since it has nothing hanging in it but a calendar. The husband’s calendar that he calls mine so that he can have an excuse for having n+1 calendars flying around the house. So, during the boy’s occasional moments of “Hey, I guess I can live without nursing for the next 10 minutes”, I sat down and painted.

This picture does not do the painting any justice. At all. I took it with my blackberry then spent countless frustrating minutes on Eric’s computer trying to make it look somewhat non-6 year old got into mommy’s paints-ish. It didn’t work. Hopefully, I can get a better shot uploaded soon. A shot with my amazing garlic. The rest of the painting is eh, but my garlic? Best freaking 1/8th inch garlic ever painted. Ever. I dare you to prove me wrong.

I’m proud of myself for finishing this and, now that I’m back into it, I’ve caught the bug again. I may not be very good at it, but I enjoy it and it makes me feel a little more like me. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with being the boy’s mama. That’s the best title I could ever have. Still, once in a while, I’d like something to just be Jess. Is it strange that saying that out loud makes me feel like a selfish hag?

If you’re at all familiar with Starfall the title of this post should be familiar. Especially if your kid is anything like mine and likes to see Starfall fifty.times.a.day. And then, even when he’s not watching it, he’s walking around going, “BUH! I EH GO GETCHU BEE! BUH!”

The Boy posting a bird on his learning poster.

This week’s theme according to Letter of the Week was supposed to be the jungle. I couldn’t bring myself, in this weather, to talk about the warmth that is the jungle. So, we changed things up a bit and went with penguins and the color blue. The Boy loves this because penguins means we get to watch Happy Feet! And Happy Feet just happens to be the most potent form of toddler crack that this house has to offer. Only being rivaled byFinding Nemo, Elmo, and (collective parental shiver here) Barney.

That big, purple dinosaur that is responsible for such horrifyingly catchy (and stupid) tunes as, “Hey Mr. Knickerbocker boppity bop, I like-a the way that you boppity bop” (Did I just get that stuck in your head? Good, because misery loves needs requires company and there is nothing more miserable than a mom with a kid who loves Barney, but I digress). That big, purple kill-me-sort-of-annoying dinosaur is a regular in our house this week. Why? Because I made the mistake of letting Ben choose a DVD beginning with B. Before I got the flash of “OMG, HE MIGHT CHOOSE THAT BARNEY DVD RIGHT THERE! HIDE IT!”, he had already grabbed it and was running down the Children’s Library hallway hollering, “BARNEYYYYYYYYYYY!”

Learning poster – B Version.

See that ice? The ball? And bear? And bird? And bicycle…ish…thing? I made those and the rest. I can’t tell you how cool it is when my kid can look at those construction paper monstrosities and actually know what they’re supposed to represent. He does, however, continue calling the bicycle a motorcycle, which I blame entirely on his father for putting it in his head with a, “THAT’s a bicycle?! It looks like a motorcycle…sort of…thing.” Thank you, Mr. Helpful.

Just as last week, he’s flying through this full speed. B says Buh. 2 is…well…2. He’s got square down, penguin in Spanish, ice is cold and ball, bear, bird and bicycle (-ish thing) begins with B. The only thing he doesn’t quite have yet is color. It’s such an abstract thing that I can’t think of anything other than, “this is blue, that is blue, this is red” to help teach him what it is. The mere fact that he knows that blue is a color is awesome but I can’t say that I don’t worry a little. He picks everything else up so quickly, I wonder why not this.

With his vocabulary, it’s often hard to remember that he’s only a year and a half. He acts so much older and speaks so much older, it’s easy to forget that he’s still got quite a long time to learn these things and, sincerely, it’s not that big of a worry. He will pick it up, one way or the other.

Weather Wheel Done
Originally uploaded by jessiscubed

This is a great project for a cold day. If you eat frozen pizza, you should have all the necessary objects on hand to create this weather wheel. It gives Ben and I a reason to stare at the sky for a few minutes every day. It may not be nearly the most professional, but my kid is a fan anyway!

Weather Wheel Tutorial