twins Archives - Kristen Anne Glover

Stay Up Late Nights

This is how we rolled

I sat on the old plaid couch in my living room, nursing loud, slurping newborn twins in the presence of a dozen or so women who had come to my home for a baby shower.

It was awkward, to be sure, but I was too tired to care.

I had slept with the twins on me the night before, and the night before that. It was the only way they would sleep. When I put them down, they cried, and I cried too because my arms ached with holding them and my breasts hurt from nursing them and all I wanted was just a few seconds to have my body to myself.

But then the sun came up and I smeared concealer under my eyes and tried to hide my still-round figure under a maternity skirt and a once-flattering sweater. My hair, which had been falling out by the handfuls since the boys were born, spun in crazy spirals on my head, and a smattering of hormone-induced pimples blazed on my chin.

I sat there in the middle of dear friends and tried to appear normal. But I was on survival mode. Overnight, I had become the mother of five children, and I was reeling.

But there we were, just a few weeks after my babies were born, the incision in my abdomen still aching, celebrating the miraculous birth of my boys. It was miraculous, truly, and I had not forgotten. I was just so tired.

Maybe those dear women knew it. Maybe they could see right through the mascara. They did not come with silly games or demand details I didn’t want to share. As I nursed the twins, they quietly went around the room and gave me words of encouragement and advice.

Some of them did not have children, and their words were the kind that reminded me of the treasure I had in those sleepless nights.

My five babies

Some had grown right out of motherhood, and theirs were the words that reminded me to cherish those baby grunts and the closeness of infancy.

Then there was the woman who obviously did not notice how tired I was, or how hard I was trying to keep it all together. That woman looked right at me, the newly minted mother of five, and said, “The best piece of advice I can give you is to spend time with each of your children one-on-one.”

Her words flooded over my already-drowning spirit. One-on-one? I didn’t even get to spend time with myself one-on-one.

It was ridiculous to expect that from me! Obviously, she didn’t remember the days when it was a triumph just to get the cereal served, and she could never understand what it was like to mother five children ages five and under.

Micah and Paul, my twin boys

I smiled politely, thinking I’d throw away that piece of advice after everyone left.

But I couldn’t.

Deep down, I knew the wisdom of her words. In fact, I longed to implement her advice. How I wanted to hold one child on my lap and listen to one child’s dreams.

It’s just that somewhere during those busy, little years, I began to view my children only as a collective whole. The days were so full. They all needed food and water and trips to the bathroom and noses wiped and clean underwear. It was easier to line them all up and get it done, assembly-line style, than it was to consider if any one of them needed a little more of me than that.

Of course, I knew my children needed more of me than that. They needed to be cherished, valued, and understood as individuals, not because they were my children, but because each one of them is my child.

I wanted Faith to grow up knowing that I liked her. I wanted Jonathan to be assured of the fact that I longed to spend time with him.

I wrestled with that advice for a few months. Then finally, I found a way to make it work in our crazy, busy life.

I gave each child one night of the week to stay up late with me. For fifteen minutes after bedtime, we did whatever that child chose to do. We made cookies or snuggled into my bed and read a book. We took walks in the neighborhood. We learned to draw. We made up leprechaun stories.

Making cookies with Micah

We made memories.

It sounds so precious but the truth of it is, it was hard. After attending to my children all day, I found it almost painful to give them even fifteen minutes of my attention. It was a sacrifice, an intentional sacrifice, to spend time with my kids one-on-one at the end of the day.

The only reason I didn’t give it up is because Stay Up Late Nights are one of the best things we ever built into our family culture. What started out as a way to meet my children’s needs for individuality turned into an answer to my unknown need to know them individually and to enjoy their uniqueness without distraction.

Stay Up Late Nights gave me that. It’s been years now since we started and most weeks, my children would say that their night–their Stay Up Late Night–was the highlight of their week.

It is the highlight of my week too because I need it. I need to remember that being the mother of five children is indeed hard.

But being the mother to Faith, Jonathan, Kya, Micah, and Paul is one of the best things in the world.

Playing horses (and arachnids) with Paul

The Man Cave

Today is the last post in my house tour series. If you’ve been following along, you know that we sold the house shortly after I started this series. We’ve since packed everything up and moved to El Paso, Texas where my husband began a new ministry as a full-time Army chaplain.

So, some of you may be wondering why am I bothering to finish showing you the house we left behind. After all, in just about a week, all the paperwork will be signed and it won’t belong to us anymore.

It is because God has done amazing things for us in that house, and I want to write it all down and keep a record of it so my kids can look back and see His hand when they can’t remember much about it because they were too little. I want to take a moment to reflect on the work we did over five years, some of it slow and tedious, some of it exciting, but all of it a testimony to God’s provision for us. It’s my way of marking the path, of setting up a stone of remembrance. Because we think we will remember. But we easily forget.

This last portion of the house tour brings us to the part of our home renovation that, collectively, is the biggest reminder to me that God cares about me, even the little things about me that wouldn’t matter to anyone else but my Abba, like what kind of flooring I like and whether or not my bathroom has a sink.

This is the part of the house that reminds me that He is in the little things just as much as the big things.

It is also the main reason we bought it. Sure, we loved the view, but most of the house was cheap and unimpressive. But then we saw this:

Glorious, isn’t it? This looks like an unfinished basement, but in actuality, it was considered a crawlspace. A 500 sq. foot crawlspace with 9 foot ceilings, electrical outlets, and plumbing for a bathroom. Yeah. That.

Because this space was unfinished, the square footage was not figured into the price of the house or our property taxes. The previous owners had used the space for storage and a (rumored) marijuana growing operation in the back corner.

We knew we could finish this space and add all that square footage to the value of our home. Besides, Jeff needed an office/library, and this was perfect.

There was just one problem. The room had no interior access. You had to go around to the back of the house in order to get in. One of our first projects was to build a staircase from the rec room (which we used as a fourth bedroom) into that unused space.

Here are my girls in the rec room before Jeff and a contractor blasted through the foundation with jackhammers and added the staircase.

And this is the staircase after all the dirty work was done.

The picture is taken from the rec room looking down into the last level of the house, which is the space we added. But just a note while we’re here: we needed the rec room to be a bedroom because we have a slew of children. I took you on a tour of this room in this post. Check it out!

But since we’re talking about our office space today, let me get back to business.

We purchased an exterior door for a whopping $40 at the building recycle store so that the room could be locked from the inside in case a future owner ever wanted to use the space as a studio apartment. The small area to the right of the staircase became an extra storage room that we used to house a large, commercial freezer I bought on craigslist for $100.

It’s hiding there behind those bi-fold doors that we also got on the cheap.

After the staircase was in, Jeff and his crew of helpers added two windows and finished the ceiling and walls.

It was a mess, but at least we could get into the room! Slowly, it started to come together.

But we still had to do the floors. We really wanted hardwoods throughout the house, but we couldn’t afford it. Especially when we both fell in love with Tigerwood (Tigerwood, the exotic flooring, not Tiger Woods, the creepy golfer).

Tigerwood was not in our budget. Neither is Tiger Woods, but I don’t really want him in my house anyway.

So, we looked at flooring and calculated flooring costs and went back to thinking about flooring some more. Meanwhile, I had an “I wonder…” moment and typed “Tigerwood flooring” into the craigslist search engine. Sure enough. Some builder had leftover flooring from a home remodel. It was enough to cover our entire downstairs, and he was selling it for a fraction of the cost. Plus, he delivered.

Jeff, who had never installed flooring before, spent quite a bit of time on his knees putting the stuff in. But oh, are those floors gorgeous.

Okay, so they are prettier when they are clean but I was busy moving. Still, they are beautiful, especially when at one point, it looked like this:

This is a picture of the room in progress. Right about this time, we were deciding where to put walls. Most of the studs were in good places, but some were not. For one thing, we wanted to expand the bathroom. We wanted a full bathroom because it increased the usefulness of the room. That way, it could be a master bedroom, a studio apartment, or even a guest room.

But, we were totally out of money for this renovation. To top it all off, the twins had arrived and life was crazy.

See?

But, God knew our needs. The crazy contractor (you know, the one who knocked my wall down?) found a bathtub at a garage sale for $10. It was in perfect condition and was just the size we needed. I surfed craigslist while nursing twins and found a pedestal sink for $25. We even came upon a box full of tile at a building recycle store in Seattle for just pennies a tile.

And that is how God gave us a bathroom that went from this:

…to this.

This is why I have to remember. God is so good.

But that’s not all He did.

The “crawlspace” was so large, we even had room to build a storage room off to the right of the bathroom and a small closet to the left.

As you can see, the closet door is on the left, the storage door is on the right, and the bathroom is in the middle. And all three rooms have those gorgeous (cheap) knotty alder doors and inexpensive trim we rustled up in our wanderings.

The storage room is actually large enough to be a bedroom or a kitchenette if someone wanted to put in another window. I wanted to put in another window but my bank account had other ideas. That wall on the left, where the ledge is, is the front of the house. Shoot. We should have put a window there.

But even without a window, this room was a godsend for us. We stored everything in here, including the twins when some relatives came to visit and those boys wouldn’t go to sleep because they could see me in the same room with them and they thought that if they could see me, they must need to be nursing.

Most of the time, however, this room was packed full of all the stuff a house of seven needs.

In fact, prior to the move, we had another shelving unit on the left wall and all those books were in the main part of the room along with a bazillion of their closest friends. Did I mention the movers counted 177 boxes of books? I’m sure they loved us for that.

But we needed all those books because biblical studies are Jeff’s passion, and this was his sanctuary (aka, Man Cave). This is where he would come to prepare lesson plans and grade papers and hide from the five children.

It was perfect for him.

He even had his own little covered landing because it rains a lot in Washington and a man never knows when he might need to step outside and shine his green laser at the night sky.

Here is the Man Cave again, from the outside.

It is amazing to me what God did for us in providing a house with all this extra room. We have been blessed to live and work in this place. It took five years to make it beautiful, but what a beautiful home it came to be.

I was thinking about this during our last week at home. The sky was grey, and I went out on the back deck to sip some tea and reminisce. The tears began to creep into the corners of my eyes, so I looked up to blink them back and saw this:

There was a rainbow in the sky above our house, just for me.

It has been a great five years.

Special thanks to all our our wonderful friends and family, especially Jeff’s parents, John and Lois, who spent countess hours at our house painting and beautifying. I could not begin to list all the people who donated their time or expertise over the years, who charged us much less than they should have or who conveniently “forgot” to charge us anything at all. To all the friends and neighbors who have made our house feel like home, we are so thankful for you!

Bed, Bath, and Beyond

That last time I left you on our continuing house tour, we had just visited the main bathroom in our home. Today, we’ll cruise through the upstairs bedrooms and master bath, which are all located a half-flight of stairs up from the great room where, if you recall, I hung a crib on the wall at the end of the hall.

You can sorta kinda see where the staircase is off to the right of the picture below.

Okay, you can’t really see it at all. This was really just an excuse to show you how my living room looked with my mother-in-law’s rug on the floor. I borrowed it from her for staging purposes while we were trying to sell our house.

Unfortunately, this picture also shows my craigslist couches. The moving guy looked at them and said to me, “Are you taking those with you?” and I almost cried. I told him that if he had an accident and the couches accidentally flew off the back of the truck in the middle of the Nevada desert, I would not blame him. In fact, I might hug him. He said he’d make a note of that.

I digress.

I’ve already shown you the kids’ rooms in previous posts, but indulge me a moment while I bombard you with pictures and links from the past because I’m feeling sentimental these days.

This was Faith’s room the way it looked when we first moved in:

Here it is after a little work:

We didn’t do much to her room but paint it with paint from the paint recycle store. Yellow! We also replaced the carpet in the entire upstairs (very recently) and trimmed out the rooms with trim we purchased from a building overstock store for pennies on the dollar.

Which brings me to a great money-saving point: adding trim to a house, whether interior or exterior, adds exponential value to the home. It makes every room look nicer. However, purchasing trim from a box store is like bleeding money.

If you are fortunate to have a building surplus store in your area (and many urban areas do), check them out for inexpensive woodwork. Most of the woodwork in our home came from one of those stores. We even replaced all of our cheap, hollow-core doors with solid wood doors for every room in our home (which you’ll see later). You’ll die when you hear how much we paid for them.

Back to Faith’s room. You can’t see her dresser, bookshelf, or keyboard, but you can see her daybed which was a hand-me-down from friends at church. If you’ve followed my blog for awhile, you might also recognize the Butterfly Chandelier I made for her. It’s one of my all-time favorite projects. Check out the original post for instructions!

Jonathan’s room was right down the hall, although it started out as the twins’ room for the first few years.

That room originally looked like this:

You will notice that none of the mint green ice cream paint was wasted in this house. Not a drip. It was in the kitchen, hall bathroom, and this room.

I got some blue paint at the paint recycle place, but it was too baby blue for me. After all, I wanted a room that could grow with my boys, and I didn’t want to have to repaint in a few years.

So, I used the baby blue to paint the wall below the chair rail, then I purchased a glaze in a denim blue and a special brush for creating faux linen texture on walls. I applied the darker blue glaze in two directions over the free baby blue paint to create a washed denim look. The end result was just what I wanted: something sweet enough for a baby’s room but cool enough for a pre-teen.

When the twins were in the room, I strung up a bit of twine and hung up some of their outgrown overalls for a fast and cheap way of decorating a large portion of the wall. Besides, it’s so hard to give away those sweet little baby clothes, isn’t it?

But then the room became Jonathan’s, so I took down the baby clothes and painted giant gears on the wall.

His wall art was super easy to do but everyone who walks into the room takes a breath because it looks like I killed myself painting gears on that wall. But it really wasn’t as big of a project as it seems. You can see more pictures of Jonathan’s room and check out the tutorial in this post.

His pegboard organizer is another favorite feature in his room. It helps him keep all his little stuff where it belongs.

Right across the hall from Jonathan’s room is the master bedroom and bathroom. I don’t have very many pictures of the master bedroom because it is the Final Frontier. It is the last room I ever clean and the only room I never finished decorating. By the time I got around to taking pictures of it, I had taken most of the decor down in preparation for moving. So, apologies all around.

When we bought the house, the room was in sorry shape. It looked like this:

Boring, boring, boring.

The walls had a zillion little nail holes and places where someone had tried to putty someone else’s nail holes and I was 8 months pregnant with twins and didn’t have the patience for any of it.

So I got a huge pail of joint compound and a gigantic-o putty knife and I smeared that stuff all over the walls. I was going for a DIY Venetian plaster look, minus the DIY.

About two hours in, I realized it was probably not a good idea to start smearing joint compound over every single inch of my master bedroom walls when I was eight months pregnant with twins, but because my husband kept walking past every half hour and grunting and saying things like, “Do you know what you’re doing?” and, “Are you sure this is going to look good when you’re done?” (which is entirely the wrong thing to say to a woman who is nesting, especially if she has a full bucket of joint compound at her disposal), I had to continue.

For days.

My husband helped by continuing his half-hour rounds with a camera in hand. He thought taking pictures of a very pregnant woman standing on a very tiny stool was funny.

It is not.

Also, there’s a very good possibility this is not what the nurses meant by “bed rest.”

But I I finished my Venetian plaster walls before the twins were born, and I love them!

Are we in Washington or are we in Rome? I don’t know!

After the joint compound dried (which took just about as long as it took my husband to have faith in my artistic vision), I painted the walls with a couple of shades taupe I mixed up from paint I got at the paint recycle place. I’m telling you, that place saved us so much money! I just dabbed lighter and darker shades together however my inner Michelangelo dictated and called it good.

Here’s a bigger view so you can see the texture on the walls. Please ignore the rest of the decor–we were moving and it’s kind of embarrassing. I don’t think a china blue bedspread is Venetian.

In order to distract you from my decorating fail, I will tell you about our doors, as promised. Those knotty alder doors came from a building surplus store where we found them for $30 each. I’m pretty sure you can’t even cut down a tree for less than $30. We collected them as we found them and replaced the cheap, tacky doors in our home with one by one.

It was worth living with mismatched doors for a few years because in the end, our entire house had these, and we didn’t have to pay over $300 apiece for them, which is the going rate at Home Depot.

Ack! I love those doors. I really wanted to take them with me to El Paso but I had a feeling the buyer would notice if his bedroom didn’t have a door.

Now, won’t you follow me to the master bathroom? It was a very scary place when we first bought the house.

Oh, avert your gaze! The stick-on vinyl floor tiles multiplied and migrated from the hall bathroom to this bathroom. There was another builder-grade golden oak vanity, a cheap mirror, and awful brass “beauty bar” lighting. Ugh.

Not to mention the fact that whoever installed the toilet paper holder must have had a sense of humor.

We knew we needed to tile the floor, and we really liked the look of natural stone, but it is expensive. Our solution was to find an inexpensive tile that looked like natural stone, in keeping with the Venetian theme I had totally committed us to.

In order to make the floor look expensive and rich, we bought just a few of the more expensive tiles and scattered them throughout the floor. I drew out a pattern of the floor and placed the expensive tiles right where I wanted them, and our dear friend from church tiled the whole thing for us.

Don’t you just love those little 2″ bronze tiles?

I used some leftover Cabinet Transformations product to redo the bathroom vanity just like I did in the kitchen. Only this time, I knew what I was in for and I only whined about 30% of the time, and most of that was before I even started.

As it turned out, the bathroom vanity was so much easier to do than an entire kitchen. The project was completed in less than two days, and most of that time was spent waiting for things to dry. I didn’t have to work at it full-time like I did with the kitchen.

I couldn’t wait to take out the ugly brass faucet. I’m not much of a plumber but I can read directions just as well as the next girl so I hanged out the faucet while Jeff added bronze cabinet pulls to the vanity.

I also built a frame around the cheap mirror using some solid wood trim we picked up at that same building surplus store for just a couple bucks. I used the Cabinet Transformations product on the wood to make it match the vanity, only I added a strip of antique bronze paint to the inside rim of the frame before I applied the polyurethane coat.

For less than five dollars, that cheap mirror looked like a much less cheap mirror.

And, I got to use the miter saw again. Bonus!

Here I am in the shower. I wanted to get a picture of my less-cheap mirror and the fabulous light fixture I found on craigslist.

I love the architectural element this light fixture brings to the room. It balances the Venetian thing we have going on. I didn’t want the theme to get out of hand and have my master suite start looking like a cheap Italian restaurant complete with fake ivy and replicas of naked statues all over the place, which, while classy in Rome are kind of trashy in America. You know it’s true.

Back to the renovation. Jeff finished the vanity with a row of glass mosaic tiles in the same chocolate, cream, and bronze colors we had going on in the room already. LOVE the glass mosaic tiles!

When it was all done, it was hard to believe it was the same room we started with.

P.S. We also moved the toilet paper holder.

I’ve only got one more stop on the home tour for you and I think I’ve saved the best for last! Next time, I’ll show you how we added about 500 square feet of useable space to our home. You won’t believe it!