Winnie had a birthday. Shout Hooray!

I can't believe that Winnie's first birthday has come and gone already! Isn't she supposed to still be a newborn? Our first year with Winnie has gone too fast! We had a party with all of our family in Utah. Our little house was bulging at the seams! I made Winnie a cake that was supposed to look like a cupcake. (I figured I better tell you what it's supposed to be, though, because some people couldn't tell).

Eating her birthday ice cream cone cupcake.

Winnie's new popper. Now if only we could teach her to vacuum.

Some Easter Photos

Chair Dye

I found the fabric I want to make slip covers for my new chairs. It's a Sunbrella fabric called "Jazz". This color is mushroom, and I think it would look great with cream piping.

Unfortunately, the cheapest I could find this fabric was $25.00 per yard on Ebay. I need 4 yards per chair and didn't want to pay that much right now, so I decided to try dying the existing slip covers. In the background of my new favorite picture of Winnie, you can see the slipcovers "before"--white with pink roses. (You can also see a better before image here: http://morrisefamily.blogspot.com/2008/02/oh-my-impulse-buy.html)

And here they are "after". I'm surprised by how little you can see the flowers on them. They did shrink quite a bit, but I could still get them on the chairs and the fabric seems like it has relaxed already. I wish the color was a little less red, but what do you expect for $4.00 worth of RIT dye?

Creative Walking

Wearing a dress and crawling don't always go hand-in-hand. Winnie kept crawling onto her dress and getting stuck, so she came up with a creative solution. Of course, Harrison wanted to get in on the action, too.

Winnie's Walker

Not so "Jiffy" Lube

A couple of weeks ago Matt took our Tercel into Jiffy Lube for an oil change. As part of the routine maintenance they drained and filled our transmission. Shortly after that, the transmission started making a strange noise, so Saturday I took it back to Jiffy Lube, suspecting that they’d done something wrong when they’d serviced the car. It turns out that they had over-tightened the plug and cracked the transmission case. I had Winnie with me and wasn’t expecting to be there more than an hour, but we were there nearly 4 hours while they were trying various temporary fixes (pipe tape and JB Weld) and telling me that it would just be a few more minutes! The good news is that they admit it was their mistake and they’re going to replace the transmission. Matt and I really hope that we won’t have to buy a new car until he’s done with law school so we have our fingers crossed that everything will turn out alright.

Brian and Kattie came down last weekend for a baptism and an ordination and I roped Brian into teaching me a few things about working on the electrical wiring in my house. We replaced one long Hollywood strip of lights in my bathroom with separate fixtures over each sink. I’d replaced fixtures before, but never added boxes, so I was a little scared to do it myself. We ran into a few snags but Brian easily sorted them all out and the new lights look great. As soon as I get the wall patched and painted I’ll post some before and after pictures. I definitely need to add an electrical how-to book to my library. A project I thought would be really hard was surprisingly easy. I always appreciate Brian showing me how to do things—he’s a great teacher.