Stuck!

This weekend our family was invited to Juliana's first birthday party up in Portland which we were excited about. My Mom has been needing me to come up and help her get her house ready to sell so it was great timing to spend a weekend in Portland. David is super busy at work and elected to stay home in order to get more work accomplished. His reasoning was that he'd feel guilty not coming with me and would work all the harder for it. Plus he'd have a lot of distractions if he tried to work up here. He had a big point there.

So Saturday morning the kids and I drove up to McMinville to pick up a booster seat for Ethan that I found on Craigslist for $5 before heading to my Mom's house in Clackamas. We got here at 12:30 and immediately started work. Most of the work was upstairs where we moved just about every piece of furniture around in order to stage the rooms. We moved two beds, four dressers, three end tables, a rocking chair, brought countless items down two flights of stairs, and took apart and reassembled the toddler bed and crib. And then we spent 3 hours painting one of the rooms blue. It was a lot of work to accomplish in one day and we were exhausted at 11pm when we finally hit the hay.

Sunday morning we did some shopping at Michael's and Walmart to find some artwork (scored a super good deal on artwork for the fireplace mantle!), fabric, and a few other odds and ends. We rearranged decorative items to make the house look ready to sell. If you've ever seen Sell This House or any other such HGTV show you'll know what our weekend was like.

At 2:30 the kids and I loaded in to the car to go to Juliana's party and got about five minutes from my Mom's house when I pulled over in a parking lot because the car had clouds of sweet smelling white steam coming out of it. Not good. I called my Mom because I knew my cell phone was almost dead and sure enough it died right after I called her. After she got there and we called David and my Father in Law to figure out the issue (our guess: tear in a hose which caused the antifreeze to leak). We called a bunch of auto repair shops and none were open on a Sunday which was no surprise. So we got a recomendation for a nearby auto shop from the guy working the bar (I was parked next to a Pub) and left the car in the parking lot with the keys in the overnight drop box. It took me awhile to move both car seats to my Mom's car (she doesn't have LATCH which makes things a LOT harder) and then we went back to her house.

Since I was stuck here another night we made the best of it and slipcovered 7 pillows and made a valance from the fabric we had bought at Walmart earlier in the day. They look great and she still has fabric left over to do more pillows if she has the time/energy/desire. The valance looks adorable! Mom sewed it into the valance and I sewed a bunch of colorful vintage buttons along the bottom to brighten it up (for the staged "kids room"). She has the coolest vintage button collection from her grandmother so it was fun to use them. I just might yoink it from her when the house sells and put it up in Grace and Ethan's room!

So I'm still stuck here on Monday morning hoping to get home in time to set up MOPS for tomorrow. I've heard from the auto repair shop that they have my vehicle but they haven't called with an estimate and time frame yet. Please God let them call soon with a cheap estimate and short time frame because I really don't want to be stuck here another day.

David is also stuck at home because the van is in the shop until Wednesday being repaired in Salem. Yes we have no driveable cars at the moment. Such is life.