resting up

This is my second day of feeling not-so-great. But I feel better than yesterday when after giving the girls each their bath and shower, I couldn't face taking one myself. Lifting them and drying their hair felt like I was lifting heavy weights. So I just changed into fresh pajamas and told myself I would have a bath after supper when Shane would be home to manage the household. Today the symptoms are just a slight sore throat and a thick head, my headache from earlier this morning clearing off thankfully. I have been drinking multiple cups of my peppermint tea and honey, but I did add in a cup of regular Lipton this morning to give my head some caffeine. I'm just puttering around letting the kids play and writing up Seth's assignments for the day including figuring out the fingering on his latest music piece.

 In addition to a new dishwasher, we finally upgraded our living room media storage to something nicer than the too colorful dresser that we had been using for years. This is from the Hemnes line at Ikea and I had been eyeing it up for a while. I really like the Hemnes line which is why we bought the queen bedframe, also in white, sometime last year for our room, meaning our bed no longer rolls on its wheels. It stays where we put it. So modern of us. Anyways back to the media dresser. The space between the two door ways does not allow for the more typical media storage furniture, so this suits the space well. And if we don't need it in the next house for our television, we can finally use it for a real dresser. You know, for clothes and unmentionables.
Our old-school dvd collection is housed in the first two drawers and the girls' dolly stuff resides with pull-ups and diapers in the more accessible and deeper bottom drawer. The drawers slide so easily and are lined with elegant paper straight from the Ikea factory.

The girls have a new, very small kitchen to use for whatever kind of play they want. I added some fresh linens because every kitchen needs pretty hand and dish cloths to work with. The red cloths are made with love from our thoughtful friend Kathleen and hang just nicely on the handle, ready to wipe any small hands or major spill. The other striped hanging linen come from where else, but Ikea. I used three of them last year to make a runner for a table at my parents' fiftieth anniversary party.  I bought three more last week so the girls and I could share them.
Splashes of red apparently are recommended by interior design decorators. I like them because they complete the Scandinavian look that my sister-in-law is sure that I'm striving for. I always laugh and say, it's just because most of our stuff has come from Ikea, I'm not really that clever to design my own Scandinavian look, I have to import it from a catalog or showroom.

The Christmas decorations were put away early this year, but the wintery ones stay. Not because I needed to be reminded that it's winter, but because it helps me remember that winter is beautiful too. It also helps that my seed catalog just arrived in the mail this week.

And this one is because Laura seeing me with the camera, asked for me to take picture of  Little Red Riding Hood hanging out in her kitchen.  I assume she was there to cook something for her granny. Little does she know that her granny has already been taken by the wolf. He is nicely dressed with suspenders, but in the end, his felt teeth were too scary for Laura, so he was left with the granny in his arms in the wire bin at Ikea and a cute tame mouse with a scarf was brought home instead. Possible nightmare-producing material avoided and a delightful cape-wearing girl was welcomed on Christmas day instead. All is well.