great weekend :)

This has been a bit of a whirlwind weekend.  Friday morning I spent two hours at Lowes getting some necessary things for my house and looking at items I will buy in the near future.  Then we headed to the condo to tape stuff in preparation for painting the next day.

Here's a tip for you about that: I like to try to do things as cheaply as possible when I can...and I love the Dollar Tree store...and they have painters tape. But don't do that. Buy the "real" stuff. You know, the Scotch brand painters tape.  Otherwise you will come back later that evening and find this:

Puddles of painters tape!!  Ack!! lol

Anyhoo. Saturday morning I stopped and grabbed some "real" tape and headed over to the condo once again to begin the painting process.  We got most of the downstairs done yesterday, thanks to my parents and several friends who came and helped! 

The color I chose for the main living space downstairs is called Hinoki yellow.  It is soft and warm and inviting and cheery and I love it.  However, it is actually somewhat close to the color that the walls were already painted - just with more yellow warmth to it - so you may not notice a huge difference in these pictures from the ones I put up earlier, but here's what it's looking like so far...

If you look closely (click on the picture to make it even larger), you can see the slight difference in the color the walls used to be and the yellow that we painted them.  And they got a little darker as they dried of course.  

It just so happened that Michael's nieces and family were in town this weekend so they spent the night with Lauren Friday night and came to help me paint for a couple hours on Saturday.  We definitely would not have gotten as far as we did without them there!!

This picture is funny because the yellow isn't quiiite this dark...and it looks like we hadn't painted that bump out in the wall...but we had! 

 Aaand this would be half of my kitchen in the dining room ha!  Anyone want to buy that stove? It's for sale.  Brand new.  Never been used.  Going on Craig's list soon.

This shows you in full light how the walls look.  Funny, these last three pictures were taken from the spot on the floor I had finally plopped myself after being on my feet all day long...just turning my head slightly for each one, the walls look different in all the pics! ha. Oh well.  You get the idea.

Man my feet were tired!

Here are a couple other details before I get to more painting:

One of the shower curtains I ordered came so I went ahead and put it up in my bathroom upstairs - already makes it look better!  :)

So this was the hideously ugly and extremely dirty ceiling fan in my living room, but it is no more, thanks to my mom for picking out a new gorgeous one and my dad for taking this one down and installing the new one! (And my brother who helped!) 

 Beautiful new fan!

Ok so back to the painting.  Those of you who know me well know that I have always wanted a RED kitchen.  Well my little kitchen here is a galley kitchen and my mom suggested I just paint the end wall red for fear that red on three walls would be too dark and overwhelming.  But just one red wall would not give me my red kitchen! :-p  Then Leah came over to see my new place and I asked her what she thought and she had the brilliant idea to just paint two walls red, which solved several problems and I think is going to turn out just perfect!  

 Mom nervously applying the first bit of red.

Yeah, definitely needs a second coat, but I love it!

When I said red, I meant it!

Show stopper red to be exact. :}

So after working all day, I went and grabbed Lauren and Reegan and made Reegan a cute little tiny purse while we waited for Michael's nieces to finish eating dinner with their family.

So cute! That is almost life-size! :)

Then we grabbed the girls and their uncle and tried out a new frozen yogurt place called Sweet Frog and their Frog stands for Fully Rely On God!  And their bowls have the reference John 3:16 on them! So go check them out at Turkey Creek, ok??

Lauren and Emily

the funny little sisters, Claire and Reegan  :}

and Abby, who just got her driver's license!

(and a photo bomb by the uncle. goofy boy.)

Then this morning we headed over to cheer for Melissa, Michael's sister-in-law, who was running in the relay marathon race downtown.  

Who says you can't have fun while running a marathon??

She had to have had more fun than the army guy we saw running in his fatigues with a complete pack on his back! Bleck! 

Waiting...

 Three of the four relay runners on Mel's team.  The fourth one had to leave immediately after her stretch of the marathon due to a child's soccer game or something like that. :)  Being a mom never stops - even when you do something as awesome as run a marathon relay lol.

Actually stepping on the finish line.  So I was so excited to get to use my telephoto lens on my camera to get better shots than I did two years ago when they did this same race, that I forgot to zoom out just a little bit so you could see the "finish" banner as they went under it! Ha. Next time...

Congratulations hug. :)

 Getting her well deserved medal.

Eve spotted us. :)

...and wanted to make sure we saw her...  :}  she's cute.

 HI!!

 Yup. Should have untwisted your medal, Mel.  :}  Oh well. I obviously didn't notice when I took the pic.

Just hangin' out in Neyland Stadium.

Cuteness.

Love this part of my "other family" to pieces.

Next week: more painting...I hope!!  :}

kathryn kamp, week two

The second week of camp is usually much busier than the first week.  And I usually have 8 big girls to count on to help me out with the littles but this year I only had three!  We managed but I was missing one of my big girls in particular!  Here's a glimpse into our week this year...

Water bottles come standard with k.kamp.  They just do.  With the hot weather outside I like to know my kids are staying hydrated.  

This week, each day had a theme with one big activity planned by me...my three big girls had to come up with activities that were part of the same theme and led up to the big activity.  The first day was a photo shoot, so the girls did all the makeup, manicures, and clothes everyone was going to wear and I helped out with some of the hair.  Then we trekked down to the spring area for the shoot.

We may or may not have had 12 people in my little car... but hey, this is camp in the country...it's just what we do!  lol

Calli, Kailey, and Alaina

This is Karis.  She completely cracks us up because she has the best facial expressions EVER. Ha! And she took her modeling very seriously.  :}

Lydbug

Abby 

Emily 

Claire

This is Kendall.  She was my youngest this week and was an absolute doll.  :)  She got homesick several times but you couldn't blame her...2 is really little to be away from mommy all week!  :\  Thankfully she adored Calli and would usually calm down and stop crying when Calli would pick her up and whisk her off to play somewhere.  :)

Kendall, Kirsten, and Emily

It was almost Kendall's naptime, thus the lack of smileage in these pics...  :}

I gave each of the three big girls one day where they were responsible for cooking both lunch and dinner.  We had those who weren't cooking vote on it.  They were all judged in three categories:  taste, presentation, creativity, and overall.  

This is Kirsten's lunch - hot dog octopus, green noodles, gold fish, and applesauce.  This meal got pretty high marks!  However, in the end, chef Emily smoked her competition and won!  :)

Wednesday we had "cupcake wars" and each team made and iced and/or decorated their cupcakes.  But somehow I have no pictures of that!!  I have some video...no pics...sadness.  :-p

Thursday was water day.  Kirsten did a great job of entertaining the littles in the morning and even got them to wash my car for me!  After lunch and since all the boys were on a canoe trip, we headed down to "big camp"  to borrow their field and a couple of other things.

Abby led the games down here.  The big red water slide looked fun and they all loved it!

Next we did something never before done in the history of K. Kamp!  We went to the lake to let everyone swim!!  I have never taken them before because I always felt like I had too many kiddos to keep an eye on safely, but since I had big girls and half the kids live there and swim there all the time anyways, I decided this year was the perfect time. :) Especially since I timed it just right and Kendall got to go up to the house with her aunt and mommy for naptime while we were swimming.

This is one of those camp things I would have been annoyed do have to do...but I am not the one who has to do them now lol and they had fun for a while.  :}

That is just a very small glimpse into our week.  I am never ready to leave by the end and the countdown has already started for next year!  :}

Can't wait!

kathryn kamp, first week

So how am I supposed to share about my two weeks of camp when I have 754 pictures to choose from?!  Lol!  I will try to narrow them down and not bore you to pieces.  :}  Here is a glimpse at my first week.

During the day this first week I had 5 year old Lucas, 4 year old Gilliam, and 1 year old Sophie.  On Tuesday, my sweet friend Rebekah came and brought her troop to join us for the day like she has for the past few years.  I love getting the chance to see her and her kiddos and was SO excited to welcome Isaac for his first k.kamp experience!  We did several fun activities while they were here - mostly from Pinterest thankyouverymuch.  :D

Hey moms out there - ever feel like this picture describes most of your waking moments??  lol  :)

Sophia was asleep during most of our activities that day but I made sure she got a chance to try out the shaving cream fun later.  She thought it was great and only tried to taste a tiny bit once and quickly learned that it is only good for squishing...not for eating.  :)

Lucas was gone for the day Wednesday so it was just Gilliam and Sophia so we pulled out my baby pool and played for probably two hours in it.  :)

Sohpia loved Gilliam and would pat his head when she stood up.  :)  He liked to make her laugh.

Thursday we always have a special treat of some sort for working hard to earn pompoms for following the rules, being helpful, etc. This year I made "dirt cake".  The picture in the middle above is their "we're about to eat DIRT??" look.  :)  But really they thought it was pretty great.  :)

I usually have k.kamp tshirts although this year we did bandanas like this instead, but I decided Sophie needed her very own first k.kamp onesie (right David?).  :)

This year's first week went well.  The two boys got along really well and Sophia was one of the easiest one year olds ever.  She only had one issue...

She was TERRIFIED of dogs. i mean completely and totally 1000% scream-bloody-murder-stiff-body-wide-eyed-cling-on-to-me-and-bury-her-face-against-me TERRIFIED.  And that was when Calvin (who is a pretty small dog) was out on the back deck looking in the glass door through the office and into the living room!  So we worked hard on just sitting with me and talking about the dog and how nice he was and how he was far away outside. :)  Eventually she got to be ok with him being outside and would say "hi dog!".  Then we moved him inside and started over. lol :)  By the end of the week this picture above is how she reacted when Calvin would walk up to her.  She was still a little nervous but about 1000% better than the beginning of the week!  :)  Way to go brave girl!  ;)

(if you haven't seen enough of her cute little self, click the picture above to see the mini photo session of her on my photography blog. :)