Finally, our kitchen renovation is done. But let’s start from the beginning. Here is what our kitchen looked like when we first met it:

Before

Absolutely hideous, right? In retrospect I can’t believe we even bought the house. This awful combination of early nineties wallpaper with all white cabinets, counters, and wooden country touch to it would surely kill any appetite if I had to live in it. (more…)

Just downloaded the wordpress app for my iPhone so that blogging can happen anywhere and anytime. Not that this will make any more time to do so available, but it’s one less excuse to not post a few quick photos here and there. Let’s see if this works …

Here is the new theme that I have chosen for our website. I called it Vintage Summer. Don’t the colors totally remind you of a slightly aged photo of a summer picnic out in nature by a wheat field? And ta-da – it does have orange in it. We’ll see how it turns out. Still working on the background of the page and how to incorporate some more of the red tones.

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Someone just accidentally deleted the title of our website and somebody else will have to fix it when he gets a chance. This html thing is a mystery sometimes. But the orange sidebar just had to go.

Orange and me – I don’t think we are ever gonna be friends. I have tried so many different shades of it, but it just keeps reminding me of the trash trucks in Germany. So, it was time for a color change on our website. Right now I’m just playing around a little with different shades of green and blue. They are kind of reflecting what’s going on on our walls right now and what the dining room will be soon. Have I ever mentioned that I am a color geek? That person standing in front of the paint chip collection at Home Depot, comparing 20 different shades of blues for hours – yep, that’s me. If I had unlimited amounts of time, I would probably make a trip to the paint color dream land every week and soon run out of walls to paint. In the meantime I am just collecting a significant amount of paint chips in my desk and dreaming of time for endless painting to magically appear.

Check out this cool tool if you need inspiration for color combinations for graphic stuff, home decor, or just to get a kick out of looking at colors: http://kuler.adobe.com

Update:

Obviously, everythings been fixed and improved. Do you like it the changes?

Honestly, I never really understood all the rage about blogging. Yes, I can write down whatever I want, and almost nobody will ever read it. That’s great. So what’s the big freaking deal? Why is blogging so 2.0, and what does that even mean?

(Check Wikipedia if you are looking for a serious answer (there you go Brad coworker, I learned my English punctuation lesson today. No comma before the if. Just let it flow.)) Anyway, without getting into more technicalities – I found this blog, and I love it: http://www.younghouselove.com/. I can keep reading and reading, and commenting, and getting inspired by it all day long. It’s my new favorite thing. Especially now that I have a little casita on my own and can finally come out of my renter’s closet and make a real home! The blog is about a young couple – now turned family – who bought their first house and started blogging about their kitchen renovation. (All those parallels. Read about our kitchen renovation in the next post). Then they kept renovating and reporting and painting and taking photos and documenting it all for the world to see. Their decorating style is THE bomb, their writing skills genius, and on top of that they seem like really cool people. Now they make their living by doing exactly that. Isn’t that just too cool?

Check out their projects, their house, and their stories. Reading this blog is pretty addicting right now for me. There are so many great ideas about how to home-ify your house that I am willing to go full force forward and sacrificing all my rare free evenings to keep going with my own young house love.

Now don’t get any ideas. I am not becoming a full time blogger any time soon or even later. But I definitely found great inspiration to post more frequently, because there might always be someone out there who is just remotely interested in what I have to share. Or maybe there are even a few people who can find themselves in what my life is about: love, family, house, nature, interculturality, the world, and other stories.

So, there has obviously been a lack of blogging here lately. Time is not an issue, we have always had too little time and still have. Or as Lincoln likes to put it: You can never have too much thyme. The reason for the absolute newslessness is simple and ridiculous at the same time. After all the extremely busy and eventful craziness in the past three years, the past four months just seemed too boring to report about. We have basically just been living, getting settled, working, keeping a big household, being a family, and waiting for summer. Sounds like a lot and still is something, right? But after migrating, getting married multiple times, moving a few times, having our first baby, and so on, I feel like I need to have news like we are expecting triplets or win the lottery in order to top that.

Anyway, I think I have to readjust my vision to see the smaller things as something big enough to write about again. Really, there is only nothing to write about, if you sleep all day and night with no vivid dreams and ear plugs in. Therefore I set this new year’s resolution now and today: I will try to blog once a week. From this day forward. Through better or worse. ‘Til me forgetting my wordpress password do us part. Even if it’s just a photo or video upload.

Cheers and happy new summer!

It seems like only a few days have passed since Milo was a tiny and helpless baby. Today in this new year he is such a grown infant who is taking anything but baby steps towards becoming an active participant in this world.

Just three weeks ago he lost most of his baby hair and now his brand new thicker hair is already a quarter inch long. His deadly grip has gotten even stronger and whenever he gets hold of two adult fingers, he pulls himself up to a sitting or standing position. We used to be able to just lean him against the back of the sofa to mind our business for a few minutes, but now that he discovered his abs, he comes to a sitting position within a minute, eventually kisses his feet, and rolls to the side. Now Milo plays contently with all his toys for hours. He paralyzes the toy with his eyes, then quickly grabs it with both hands, and shoves it in his mouth, looks at it once more, and shoves it back into the mouth.

Since Milo can sit in his high chair now and used to get really jealous about us eating dinner, we started giving him some oatmeal. Most of it – if not all – still ends up on his bib, but he is having a blast with the mess.

This year is going to be a big one for Milo. Not much longer and he will be unstoppable exploring the world. He will move into his own room and be our little big boy. So many people say that they miss their tiny newborn baby and are sad seeing the kids grow up so fast. But honestly, as cute as he was as a newborn, I love seeing him grow up. I’m honored to be there with him in every new thing he learns. Seeing him grow up and learn so fast makes me nothing but proud.