My Friend's Baby Shower

I really enjoy decorating for parties.  A month or two ago I helped my friend decorate for one of her daughter's birthday party.  Next I helped throw a baby shower and last week we had Evangelia's birthday party.  It gets a little tricky here since there is so much available in America but I have been figuring out how to make due with what we have. 

For my friend's baby shower I tried to think of a fun theme.  For her last shower a few days before we had it the doctor found out that she was having a boy after previously been told she was going to have a girl.  This threw our decor into a major overhaul so I just went with blue and black.  This time after looking online and not finding many options for boy showers I decided to do a  "Book" theme shower like what I had seen on Martha Stewart.com.  My friend loves books so it was prefect and I could decorate with books we have as well as use my READ letters to come up with some fun decorations.  I made books to hang from the ceiling like I had seen in a Pottery Barn Kids catalog out of colored construction paper, white paper and ribbon.  I collect/save any jelly jar, glass container we use so I used several of them like mason jars and tied fabric around them.  I painted chopsticks and cut out the words " once upon a time" and attached them to the chop stick.  I used some scrap fabric to made a garland and made mini books to attach to tooth picks and printed off book covers and glued them to the  books and stuck these books on top of cupcakes.  I loved how everything turned out and the best part was that I used materials I already had around the house!

Evangelia is 5 years old

We celebrated Ev's birthday on Saturday but today the 24th of October she turned 5 years old.  Where has the time gone?  When did my firstborn grow up? 

Evangelia enjoys drawing pictures, coloring them and cutting out pictures and making collages.  She enjoys playing with her princess dolls, dressing up and learning.  She loves to read, enjoys watching movies and loves to "pretend" she is a second mommy to her brothers.  Her favorite color right now is purple, she likes to have her hair french braided and loves to accessorize with headbands and jewelry.

We celebrated with a Tangled Rapunzel party.  When we were in America Ev decided she wanted a Rapunzel party.  I thought it was perfect since she loves to paint, draw and color just like Rapunzel.  I made a tower on our door out of some furniture boxes and made a tower cake.  We had a few games and decorated with purple.

We love you Evangelia, Happy 5th Birthday!

 

Our family likes to encourage each other and share in each other's victories. :)

We are Back!

We have the Internet back today.  It has been almost 2 weeks without it.  Thankfully last week when I was quickly booking plane tickets and spending all day on the computer we had the Internet.  Last week Todd was gone most of the week and we found out we needed to make a quick trip to another city to apply for Evangelia's passport to be renewed.  Yes it is that time.  She will no longer have a baby picture in her passport, she's all grown up now (as she turns 5 next Monday).  Todd got home on Saturday and Sunday we flew to another city for a week.  In the craziness of booking tickets on line, making sure I had a Consulate appointment for Ev I also was finding out that we could get our Post Placement Year report for Ian done since a social worker was going to be in the city we were going to.  So after sending some emails and waiting we got the okay to do that and got two things done while in the other city.  Needless to say when we took our small travel computer we couldn't use our VPN and therefore couldn't get on the Internet and email.  I couldn't get most blogs and such because this country blocks those things. 
Anyway we made our trip and enjoyed some Western food and saw some friends and got back to our home and found we didn't have the Internet.  And now after 3 days of haggling with several people in Chinese we finally got the problem fixed.  I am exhausted from spending most of the day trying to communicate with a worker  using computer terms that I don't understand.  Finally when the worker was a little tired of dealing with me he called another worker who could speak English to come and help.  My question was why didn't he think of that in the first place? 
At least we have the Internet now as we approach Evangelia's birthday party this weekend and the start of the World Series. 
I have a lot to post about.  I've been making things, rearranging again ( I got to go to IKEA last week so we have some new things around the house) and I helped throw a baby shower for a friend and have been getting ready for Ev's Rapunzel birthday party.

Master Bedroom and Bath

This is our bedroom.  It is a pretty decent size, part of it is our bedroom and part of it is our office.  We have a very nice balcony that we like to enjoy too.  And even though our room is the biggest it is the warmest room in the house.  We used to have the room arranged differently.  I like where are bed is now because if I am working on the computer little people often join me either by playing on our bed or on the floor beside me. 

 We are the only ones who use our balcony.  People think we are crazy for sitting out here!  Most people in our complex will use it as storage or they will hang their clothes out there. 

 This is the view from our balcony and bedroom.  It is amazing to see trees and grass.  Living in a city like ours you usually don't see grass and no one sees trees. 

 When you first walk into our room the bathroom is to the right. 

 We don't have any built in closets in our apartment.  So for storage we found this book case at our used furniture market and cut off the bottom part and fit it over the toilet.  Also our landlords didn't want us drilling ANY holes in the bathroom tiles so I had to have some place to hang a hanger for our hand towel and toilet paper holder.  We drilled into the book case. Since they wouldn't let us put up a medicine cabinet or anything due to holes we have to have extra storage like the wicker draws you see to the right of the sink. 

 We bought a bamboo ladder and had it cut to size so we could use it as a towel rack because we couldn't put a towel rack in either.  The kids towels are lighter so I use Command hooks for their towels and amazingly with all the condensation they haven't come off yet. 

 The sink is micro mini size.  And since the only light fixture is over the bathtub we had to put a lamp in by the sink.  We make things work. :)

 That is Todd's area if you can't tell.  I guess I can let him decorate a tiny part of our house!

 I made the small pillows as well as a few other large pillow cases.  The small ones are all made out of Todd's old button down shirts and one of his old blue t-shirts for the ruffles.  I love this way of making pillows since the buttons are already there. 

 I finally got one of Evangelia's masterpieces!

This is our closet.  It looks a lot bigger than it really is.  My side is to the left and in the top 1/3 of it I have all of the kids medicine, adult medicines, birthday presents and other random things.  One thing that is really hard is not having any closets, no hall closet for coats, no pantry for the kitchen, no closet for the kids clothes, no place to store our vaccum and other things,  and no linen closet. 

We really have to use storage under our beds and where ever else we can.  So not only is all of our clothing in our closet so is our coats and winter wear.  For the time being we really do have a second bathroom but it is just a tiled room right now.  We are using it to store all of our luggage (remember we brought 11 bags with us) and other random things like Todd's bike, our stroller, extra blankets and other things. 

Updated Kids Room

Update..... I rearranged rooms

This week has been a week long holiday so I haven't had a full week of class only a few days of class.  Todd has been in and out this week so that have given me some time to do some things I have been wanting to for a while.  I finally got around to sewing curtains for the kids bedroom and when I put them up I decided to rearrange their room.  If you know me you know that I am notorious for rearranging furniture when Todd is gone. :) The week before last we had a local visitor staying with us so we moved our twin futon into the playroom and so I moved the rocking chair from the playroom into their bedroom.  I also moved our bookshelf into their bedroom too and put their toy bins on the shelves.  Moving these two pieces of furniture freed up some space in the playroom/homeschool room.  Here are some pictures of the playroom/homeschool/guest bedroom. 
The last pictures are of the balcony.  The kids love to play airplane out there as well as hang out there together when the weather is nice.  The view is really nice too.  It is RARE to see green grass, trees, flowers and large waterfountains!