Aquarium Showdown!

One might think, based on my posts from the last few months, that the only thing we ever do during Dave's breaks is go to aquariums. But it is merely a coincidence!

Still, since it just so happens that we've visited two localish aquariums recently, I thought I'd do a post comparing the two instead of just more pictures of cute kids and fish.

Chattanooga is about two hours north of here. When I was a small kid, one could go to Chattanooga to see tacky tourist attractions such as Rock City, with its many gnomes and terrifying suspension bridge:

Rock City

But then, in 1992, the River Journey portion of the aquarium opened. I remember going there when I was in high school with my grandparents. This was very exciting for everyone in the metro Atlanta area, because this was back when people thought aquariums should be built near water, so before this you'd have to drive closer to the ocean to get to an aquarium. River Journey is still, Wikipedia tells me, the largest freshwater aquarium in the world. Chattanooga is on the Tennessee River, so the idea was that the aquarium focused on rivers and the things that live in them. Like otters! River otters, that is. We should stop for a moment to note that there is nothing cuter than a river otter, and that, really, the Tennessee Aquarium could have stopped right there and not wasted all that money on fish, because who wouldn't drive a couple of hours to watch otters frolic adorably? 

Tennessee Aquarium Blog

Meanwhile, in Atlanta, back when I was a kid, we didn't even have Rock City. We had NOTHING. Well. There were some things. For example, there was a toy museum. I thought maybe I was the only one who remembered the toy museum, but then I googled and found this guy who thought he was the only one who remembered the toy museum, too. It was there from 1978 to 1984, and I was born in 1975, so it was around for pretty much exactly the years when I would have been most fascinated by a toy museum. It was mostly antique toys, and, as I recall, they were grouped by theme. Like there was a doll room, and a trucks and cars room, and the very best of all was the dollhouse room, of course. But then they also had this sort of surreal Star Wars room, which was supposed to show you what the antique toys of the future would look like. And.....OMG, WHY DON'T THEY BRING BACK THE TOY MUSEUM??!!

Where was I?

Oh, yes. Fish.

So. For a long time, there was the Tennessee Aquarium with its River Journey, designed to revitalize downtown Chattanooga but also with a noble educational, research-minded vision. 

Then someone decided to build a big, flashy aquarium in Atlanta, nowhere near the ocean, and not at all interested in sticking with this regionally appropriate freshwater crap.

(I'm not sure how accurate my aquariums history lesson is here. This is my understanding of things, though).

And the Tennessee Aquarium panicked, because do you know what they don't have in rivers? Beluga whales.

So the Tennessee Aquarium tossed up the "Ocean Journey" building in 2005, the same year the Georgia Aquarium opened. They still don't have Beluga whales. But they do have penguins, which are pretty much the saltwater competition for river otters, as far as cuteness goes. 

We went to the Georgia Aquarium back in January. To sum up: it was really crowded, and the dolphin show sucked.

Last Friday we went to the Tennessee Aquarium. We bought a membership there because it was, at $115, only $20 more than just paying for all of us to get in once. Do you know how much a membership for everyone (minus Abe, who's free) would cost at the Georgia Aquarium? $270. True story. You might already see where I'm going with this showdown.

The first thing you do when you get in the aquarium (whether you choose Ocean Journey or River Journey to start off with (we picked Ocean Journey)) is get on a big old escalator and go to the top of the building. Then you wind your way down through the exhibits. I took this picture of the kids (we went with my friend Kristi and her kids: Lula, Marcos, Cormac, and Leo) on the escalator, and then I felt all woozy and vertigo-y and decided to put the camera down before I fell:

The first animal you come to in the Ocean building is the macaws:

Last time we were there, these guys were completely hilarious; they were repeating everything we said and then laughing back at us when we laughed. It was awesome. And Gus remembered it vividly, even though it was over two years ago. But this time the macaws were, apparently, totally bored with all the visitors, and they weren't saying a thing. Gus was very disappointed.

Okay, so second comparison, aside from price: the Tennessee Aquarium was crowded, but NOTHING like the Georgia Aquarium when we went over Christmas break (this trip was over spring break). No one told us to hurry along while we were trying to gawk at penguins. We did not feel claustrophobic and overwhelmed. I will never go to the Georgia Aquarium during a school vacation again. 

The Tennessee Aquarium has a butterfly garden. The Georgia Aquarium does not:

We saw many penguins! Penguins are great (Georgia Aquarium has penguins, too, but don't expect to be able to get anywhere near them if you go over Christmas break):

We wound our way down through the ocean building, taking pictures. I think there are more jellyfish at the Tennessee Aquarium than the Georgia Aquarium:

I took this bad picture of Lula and Ari just to prove they were really there:

And this one turtle was being mean to this other turtle who didn't even have any back legs to fight back with. Bad turtle!

After our ocean journey, we took a break for lunch, then went back for the river journey:

Then I remembered why I never get many pictures in this building. It's really dark in there!

Also, the otters were sleeping. Boo! They were curled up together adorably and all, but they weren't frolicking. At least we have a membership, so we can go watch them frolic another time.

We did get to pet sturgeon:

There were a lot of fish:

Then we drove home. It took a long time. Next time I think we will stay overnight.

So? Can you guess which aquarium wins? I know a lot of people prefer the spectacle and the Beluga whales at the Georgia Aquarium, but for my money (less than half as much of it), I'll take the low key, less crowded aquarium with otters (disclaimer: the Georgia Aquarium has otters, too. And they were awake. But by the time we got to them I was very tired and mostly just wanted to go home and get away from the crowds).

A New Coat Rack and Bench for Our Foyer=Much Better

Six people live in our house, and five of us wear shoes. In winter, we all wear coats, too. Shoes and coats for five/six people take up a remarkable amount of space.

You know what would be nice? If we had a dedicated mudroom somewhere around here (preferably near a door). But, alas, we do not. We have three doors leading outside: the front door, the garage door (in the kitchen), and the door to the backyard (in the sun room). And the door that gets the most use and has the most obvious coat and shoe depositing area nearby is the front door.

The foyer is, of course, the first thing people see when they come in the house. So it would be ideal for it to look pretty. At the very least, it shouldn't look like this:

And yet, this was our old coat and shoe (and, as you can see, many other things) organization plan. We bought that hall tree shortly after buying our old house, so nearly 10 years ago. It worked pretty well when we had a baby and a toddler with tiny little coats and shoes. But, as you can see, it wasn't really cutting it anymore (I didn't clean it up at all before taking the picture, but I also didn't make it look worse for dramatic effect; that's just how it looked on most days).

It had only 4 hooks (and two of them were kind of broken). Also, kids had to actually lift the lid of that bench/trunk thing to put shoes in there, and, if you've ever been a kid, you know that that's nearly impossible, even if there aren't heaping piles of STUFF all over it. At least that's what I've gathered from observing my kids: if the putting shoes away process is not extraordinarily easy, it simply can't be done. You'll note the evidence of this in the form of several pairs of shoes on the floor near the hall tree. Dogs don't seem to be able to hang their leashes up after walks, either. What's wrong with them? (No opposable thumbs, for one thing).

I wasn't crazy about the style, either, with that scalloped edge up there (although we could have sliced it off, like we did with Ari's bedside table, had it been working for us otherwise).

We needed something new. It doesn't really look like it, but we spent months trying to figure out exactly what we wanted in this space. Ultimately, we went with very simple and very functional (I happen to think it's very pretty, too, but, in this case, that was a secondary concern). Dave built the bench, and there will be a separate post with the full tutorial on that next week (for real! it's already written; I just have to add my intro to it and edit the photos).

I didn't take very many pictures of the coat rack making process, but it was pretty simple. We bought 2 1 by 4s and had them cut down to just a little shorter than the length of the wall we had to work with (my primary goal for the coat rack was LOTS of hooks, so I wanted to fit as many as we reasonably could). We sanded them down with the power sander and then painted them. The color is Benjamin Moore's Frozen in Time. Then we rubbed some of the same Weathered Gray stain we used on the bench on, over the paint, and quickly rubbed it off. I wanted to soften the purple a little and pick up the gray from the bench; I'm not sure how much of the stain really shows at all (it was already a grayish purple).

Then Dave drilled the holes for the hooks and hung the boards on the wall with anchor screws:

The hooks were the most expensive part of the whole project. They were $3.28 each, and we bought 13 of them. Since it's right there in the foyer, I wanted them to look nice, and I also wanted good, strong hooks that could stand up to kids hanging crazy, heavy things on them. I thought about going with something fun (maybe animal shaped!) for at least some of the hooks, and I thought about going cheap and buying some knobs from Hobby Lobby to screw in there. But I couldn't find any fun hooks I liked that weren't super expensive, and I was afraid coats would keep falling off of knobs and drive me crazy. So we went with these simple but nice brushed nickel hooks.

If you want, you can put a baby on your bench:

Hobby Lobby (how many times can I say Hobby Lobby in one post? I spend a lot of time at Hobby Lobby. They recognize Abe there) had baskets 50% off this week, so I went there in hopes of finding some nice ones for the bench shelf. But I could not. I just didn't see anything that I liked that would work. I did buy this pillow there:

Then I went next door to the Dollar Tree and bought 4 $1 dish pans. They are more....utilitarian than I would like. Also more shallow. But they'll do until I find the perfect baskets. The kids can fit around 3 pairs of shoes each in them before they start to look overfull, which is really plenty of shoes for a kid to have in regular rotation. And....$4!

So far it's working well. It doesn't look anything like it does in the pictures anymore, of course. But it doesn't look anything like the picture of the original hall tree either (particularly if you ignore the giant box of shoes and coats that I cleared out of there and still need to put away in closets upstairs somewhere). Three pairs of shoes plus one jacket per kid! And a sunhat for Abe. And dog leashes. And a few other things. But. It's all good, because we have THIRTEEN HOOKS now! Or 26, really, because each one has two sticky outie things.

Pictures from every conceivable angle!

Linking with:
Hookin' Up with House of Hepworths
Stone Gable's Tutorials, Tips, and Tidbits
Inspiration Gallery
The Shabby Nest's Frugal Friday
Miss Mustard Seed's Furniture Feature Friday
Tatertots and Jello's Weekend Wrap Up Party
I Heart Naptime's Sundae Scoop
Monday Funday
Sunday Showcase Party at By Stephanie Lynn
Give Me the Goods Monday
TwelveOEight's Pretty Things Link Party
Tutorials and Tips at Home Stories A to Z
Suburbs Mama Sunday Link party

The Week Via Instagram: Spring Break Edition

Dave's back at work as of today, but let's spend some time reminiscing about back when he didn't go to work for 9 whole days in a row.

We spent a lot of time on house stuff and a lot of time feeding and changing a baby, but we got a few other things in, too.

Remember how the kids put "go to Menchies" on their list of desired spring break activities? We did that! We brought along some friends (and dogs) even, which made it extra fun. Kids + friends in a blissful post froyo haze:

And with those very same friends we went to Chattanooga on Friday to see the OTHER local-ish aquarium. More on the aquarium in a separate post. We ate at Big River Grille while we there, where there is a brick boat. I don't know why.

At some point during the week, I took the cutest picture ever of Dave reading a bedtime story to Abe. That baby loves his books. For real. He stares and stares and coos with delight. It makes me happy.

.

And we wrapped up spring break with a family gathering Saturday at my aunt's house so everyone could see my cousin, Alix, and her daughter, Jude while they were in town. My cousin Jessica wisely rounded up all the kids as soon as possible for an all the great grandkids photo. Everyone except Abe cooperated. Note Abe's (second) cousin, Brody, who is three weeks younger than Abe but already much better at posing for group photos.

Sunroom Progress: Chunky Dresser Makeover

Awhile back, as some of you may recall, I bought a big chunky dresser for $45 at the thrift store (not on the same Friday night that I bought everything else that's now in my house, but at the same store). Said dresser is unbelievably heavy and still has a stamp on the back dating it to 1974. I'd had some hopes that it might work in our den for a TV stand, but it is, it turns out, far too ginormously long for that. 

So it ended up in the special room in our house where we keep all the things we don't know what else to do with: the sunroom! Only this time we sort of did know what we were going to do with it. We knew, at least, that we were going to paint it and then....put stuff in it. I think maybe craft supplies? Extra dishes? Maybe we'll get really crazy and keep extra dishes and craft supplies in there, because it's just that big. Did people have more clothes in 1974? Maybe it's just that they had smaller closets, so they had to keep more clothes in their dressers? 

Incidentally, Dave does not like calling this dresser a dresser. He really wanted an alternative name, since we won't be using it as a dresser for clothes. I introduced him to "credenza" and he was all over that, but I don't think it is a credenza, even if one defines the term really generously. Although Wikipedia seems as confused as Dave about the definition of credenza. It says that a credenza is "a piece of furniture comprising a central cupboard flanked by symmetrical quadrant glass display cabinets, usually made of burnished and polished wood and decorated with marquetry" ....and then shows two example pictures that aren't anything like that. So I guess Dave can call our dresser a credenza if he wants to.

It started out looking like this:

I've been itching to use some turquoise or aqua somewhere in the house, and the sunroom, with all the light it gets and with its terra cotta tiles, seemed like the ideal location. I spent quite a bit of time online researching the prettiest colors Benjamin Moore has to offer on the aqua to turquoise spectrum, wrote down the names of several top contenders, then got to the store and....couldn't find a single one. I should have written down numbers, too, it turns out. I could have asked for help, but the store was pretty busy, so I just looked at the samples and picked one out right there on the spot. I ended up with Florida Keys Blue. 

It's a little more aqua and less blue in real life than I expected (although in the pictures it looks bluer than in my sunroom. I think. It's hard to tell. Light is a funny thing), but the great thing about Benjamin Moore is that even when colors don't look how I expect them to, I'm still all, "OMG--it's the prettiest color I've ever seen!" Benjamin Moore does not pay me. But they should. 

I agonized for quite some time over how to paint this. I got the paint in semi gloss to leave my options open. Ultimately I decide on mixing plaster of paris in to chalk paint it up, largely because I was feeling lazy and didn't want to sand and prime it first. Also because I knew if I wound up distressing it (which I hadn't decided about yet), I'd want the dark finish to show through rather than bare, sanded wood. I use this recipe from I Heart Naptime. This time I added in a little more plaster of paris, just as an experiment as I've seen other formulas that use a lot more. I didn't notice much difference over other times when I've used it. 

I did two coats of paint (Dave liked it after one coat, with some of the dark stain showing. I kind of did, too. But not enough to stop painting). Then I sanded the edges to distress it, then put a coat of wax on it. 

I only briefly considered swapping out the hardware. I thought it would be hard and/or expensive to find something substantial enough to look right on there, so I just repainted the old hardware with Rustoleum satin nickel metallic spray paint instead. This kept the whole cost, for the dresser plus paint, down around $70 (and we still have plenty of Florida Keys Blue and satin nickel spray paint left over). 

That rainbow striped vase? That I did get on clear-out-the-whole-thrift-store-Friday. 

I think the bottom picture gives the best representation of the real color.

I'm excited about getting a usable sunroom! There have been a couple of other changes in there, too, so I'll have a sunroom update post sometime in the fairly near future. 

Linking with:

Give Me the Goods Monday

Tutorials, Tips, and Tidbits at Stone Gable

Hookin' Up With House of Hepworths

Friday Link Party at Craftionary

Inspiration Gallery

Miss Mustard Seed's Furniture Feature Friday

The Shabby Nest's Frugal Friday

Chic on a Shoestring Decorating's Flaunt It Friday

Tatertots and Jello Weekend Wrap-Up

I Heart Naptime's Sundae Scoop

Monday Funday

By Stephanie Lynn's Sunday Showcase Party

Tutorials and Tips at Home Stories A to Z

Get Your DIY On

Disney Planning

I love Disney World more than anything else on earth. Well, I mean there's my family. I love them more. I love Disney World more than anyWHERE else on earth. Although I do like my house a lot. If I had to pick between my house and Disney World, I would live.....in this house IN Disney World:

Golden Oak at Walt Disney World

That's right--if you have at least $1.6 million to spend, you can live AT Disney World. A shuttle will pick you up at your front door and drive you to the parks whenever you want. You never have to leave Disney....EVER!  I'm going to start saving my pennies. Although I'm not sure we'd really fit in so much. 

Okay, anyway, I'm not really ever going to have $1.6 million to spend on a house, and Georgia's already hot enough for me. But I do love Disney World. So much. 

I went a couple of times as a kid, and Dave went once, for one day, but my Disney obsessiveness is largely something I've developed as an adult. The first time we went, the kids were 5, 3, and 9 months old:

So little!

Then we just sort of kept going. At Dave's old school, they had this awesome September break that no one else had, so we could go when it was (incredibly hot and) uncrowded. We did take one year off to meet up with Dave's parents and sister (and sister's family) in DisneyLAND instead.

Our last trip was in September 2011. And then two terrible things happened. Not really terrible things, but terrible from a Disney trip perspective. Dave got a new job, with a new county, with no September break. And I got pregnant. You can't ride Tower of Terror when you're pregnant (side note: I went to Dollywood while pregnant, and you can't ride ANYTHING there. Like, not even the carousel. At least according the sign. Don't go to Dollywood pregnant. BORING). But mostly it was the job thing. I would go to Disney pregnant but I wouldn't go (with three kids) without Dave. Well, I might. But I'd rather not.

So we didn't get to take our September 2012 trip. We are now part of the sad mass that can only take trips during regular school vacation times. This is kind of a bummer, but we're going to work with it as well as we can, and we have a trip planned for the end of May, as soon as Dave is finished for the year.

One of the very saddest things about a May Disney trip instead of a September Disney trip is no free dining. For the past several years, Disney has offered the Dining plan for free when you buy a hotel/ticket package for the fall. And we love free dining. Without free dining, I can't really find a way to justify the expense of staying on Disney property. We've stayed off property once before, and, well, I'll just go ahead and say, without irony, that it's not as magical.

But having a baby waking up all your other kids by crying in the middle of the night in the tiny hotel room you've stuffed yourselves into is not particularly magical, either, so, really, there are some reasons, no free dining aside, why staying somewhere with more space makes sense this year. So we've rented a house a couple of miles from Disney World with lots of room for everyone to spread out. It even allows pets, which will save us a gazillion dollars on boarding or a house sitter.

And we only have two dining reservations. If the food isn't free, we're not getting it! Well, as much. Also, there's that baby thing again. Abe will be 4 months old....so not old enough to eat solid food, but old enough to get pretty restless while we do. We're planning to cook at the rental house a lot and grab snacks instead of full meals while we're at the parks. All of this should make our vacation cheaper, but truth is....there's really no such thing as a cheap Disney vacation, at least not when you have 4 kids (although Abe doesn't count as a person yet for Disney purposes, so that's something).

Okay. So that's the rundown on our Disney as cheap as Disney gets vacation. I wanted this post to be more cohesive and organized and....helpful? But then I kept trying to write it and it kept mostly coming out all, "I LOVE DISNEY WORLD!" so.....there you have it. I am sure I will spew forth more of the same in the weeks to come. Maybe I'll post the cutest picture in the world of Gus with Winnie-the-Pooh last year. But for now, I'll leave you with my three favorite resources for Disney obsessing planning:

1. The Disboards: there is nothing you can even begin to think about having to do with Disney that the people here have not talked about for a good 30 pages. And if you have questions, you can ask them and a million (mostly) friendly people will show up to answer them. The people who run the boards have a weekly podcast, too, which I listen to religiously.

2. The Unofficial Guide: It is possible that I've purchased outdated copies of The Unofficial Guide just so I could read about what Disney World used to be like 10 or 15 years ago, before we started going. It's possible. I'm not saying it's likely. Anyway, it's my favorite guide book, hands down (and it's also possible I've read pretty much all of them).

There you go. That's it! That's all you need to plan your vacation way, way more than any vacation really ought to be planned!

(I promise we really are working on house projects. They are just....time intensive. I ask for your patience).

Editing to say: I reread this and realized that I can't count to three (I think originally I was going to break the Dis Unplugged podcast into a separate thing). But I'm leaving it there to demonstrate that Disney trips leave me so excited that I can't even count.

Easter Photo Spew

Saturday we did all our our Easter prep work. Like the egg dyeing. And my trip to Target to get the last minute egg dyeing kit. Some time last week I thought maybe I was going to find some amazing homemade egg dye recipe to make with the kids. Then I looked up recipes, and the first one I read started with, "take a pound of blueberries...." And then I decided I'd just get the $1.50 kit from Target instead of spending several times that on a pound of blueberries that we wouldn't even get to eat (and that just for the BLUE eggs).

So, much like with blueberries, I can't stand the thought of wasting eggs just to make them look pretty. Partially because we buy expensive happy eggs because we used to have chickens, and I love chickens, and I don't want the ones who lay our eggs to be sad. And Dave's the only one here who much cares for hard-boiled eggs. All of this to say....I only let the kids dye six eggs. Two eggs each! This is going to be one of the stories they tell about me when they grow up to demonstrate how crazy their mother is. Or how much she loves chickens. Same thing, pretty much.

Anyway, here they are, decorating their stingy allowance of eggs. The cheap egg dyeing kit came with a "magic crayon" so that one can draw designs on the egg that the dye won't cover up.

I appreciated how pretty the eggs looked being dyed in our Ikea bowls. Although I realized too late they were too shallow for submerged eggs. But we turned them around after a few minutes (or transferred them to a different color), and that all worked out fine.

Six eggs!

Next, we moved on filling up eggs for the next day's egg hunt at my grandparents' house:

Abe sat around having really pretty blue eyes while this was going on:

For our final Saturday task, we made bunny racecars!

I found this idea for bunny race cars made out of Reese's eggs at Kitchen Fun with My Three Sons, and I knew I had to make them. Because look at them! Annie's even makes gluten-free bunny cookies. Let me tell you, never will you get so much credit for doing so little as when you make Reese's egg bunny race cars. People love these. They love them on facebook and then they love them at Easter dinner at your grandparents'. But they are SUPER easy. No cooking; you just have to stick them together. The hardest part is cutting out the little slots for the bunnies without cracking the eggs too much.

We put out the Easter baskets after the kids went to bed. I'm nearly as stingy with Easter baskets as with eggs. Apparently, at some point since I was a kid, Easter has turned into this sort of Christmas-like event wherein you receive actual presents instead of just chocolate bunnies. But here we do a book and a chocolate bunny. Unless I don't make it to Target until the day before Easter, which is usually, and all the good bunnies are gone (they did have some horrifying "gummy bunnies" but I passed on those). Then they get a random assortment of what's left at Target. Like Peeps and Cadbury cream eggs. But I did  order the books from Amazon DAYS ago instead of just getting whatever they had in the measly Target book section like I usually do. These books are award winners!

Oh, Abe can't eat candy, so he got two books. One of them was too big for his basket (also purchased at Target on Saturday. I was pleased to see that they're still selling wooden baskets with cloth liners, so that his can coordinate with his big brothers').

Sunday morning we....tried to go to church. Really, we did! We're between churches at the moment, and Ari had expressed some curiosity about the Catholic church that is in our backyard (well, it's right behind our backyard, anyway). It's the church I went to as a kid, actually, and that my grandparents (not the egg hunt grandparents, though) went to for a very long time. So, even though I'm not Catholic anymore, we thought it might be nice to go over there, have the kids see the church I went to when I was young, and, in the bargain, not have to deal with Easter church traffic, since we could walk there. Plus it would be kind of lame to show up for the first time at a church you might actually go to long term on Easter.

We got there a good 20 minutes before the 11 o'clock mass started and.....yeah. It was completely packed. Completely. So, we walked back home, feeling kind of sheepish. But I did take this nice picture of the kids dressed up:

Too bad they didn't have a plaid shirt in Abe's size. But the plaid shirts have sort of that same aqua color in them, so it all kind of works. Ari didn't want to match. But he didn't mind coordinating.

And then to my grandparents' house to visit with extended family and have (in between rain showers) an egg hunt. I am not thrilled with my egg hunt pictures for the most part (the kids kept moving). But here's what I've got:

So there you have it.

We spent today working on big spring break project #1. And we're not finished yet. But tomorrow we're changing gears and working on big project #2 some. So who knows when I'll actually get to post about said projects. Hoping to get to a couple of smaller projects, too, though!