EvY at HomE

I was gonna do a month by month recap of the year but decided to just go by category which I quickly realized a few dictate the others. Of course the first category dictated almost everything. ALICE: I can't believe how much she's grown in one year. This was her at the start of 2015. This is her at the end of 2015. She went from being a baby in a bouncy toy to bouncing toddler. She eats food, she has words, she knows simple commands, she runs, she slides, she points out words she knows, she has favorites, she laughs at funny things, she's a full on little person. Our life revolves around her and we love it. FAMILY (extended, my side): It was a mixed bag with my family this year as we had a few family fights (once again taking a mom break) but we spent a good amount of time together with our kids. We found out my sister Mari is pregnant and we'll welcome another nephew in early March. The full line up in February. It's gonna get a little more crowded s...

My desire to clean up around here has translated to cleaning up digitally and I changed all the tags that used to say "burbank house" to "fredrich family farm" since that's what we call the house now. Did you know that the best nicknames all come from someone else? My friend Alex was the one who started calling me EvY and the head of production at a company I work at was the one who first asked me "How things were going down at the Farm?" which lead to it's nickname.  Anyhow... as I was cleaning it up I came across the fact that last year I was also in the mood to do a big purge and I had a list of goals for 2015 and here's how we did: 2015 House Goals  1) install upper cabinets in the laundry room  (woo-hoo!) 2) paint the master bedroom 3) paint the living room 4) plant lots of greenery in the backyard 5) plant more veggies in the front yard 6) install some shade over the seating area in the backyard 7) replace the table behind the ...

Last week as we got home from visiting a friend we hung in the front yard so Alice could use her little slide and we were all looking decent so I called in a pro (our tenant) to help us snag some family fotos. My ideal kind of photo shoot: unplanned.  Alice was in a terrific mood and super cooperative plus she knows and loves the photographer so she was just hamming it up and would do things we weren't asking her to do like just sitting on the bench. This one is such a gem, it captured her little thoughtful state so well.  It looks like I'm still off this week and as we're all still recovering from a busy bunch of days we're just gonna chill at home and enjoy our new toys (Alice got a little Ikea kitchen and lots of puzzle boards, Matt got a dope video game, and I got copper mugs). I want to go into every nook and cranny in the house and give it my usual end of the year purge since I'm in the mood to get rid of stuff.  How was everyone's...