Dana Burland

Wanna come along with me on my next project? I’m tackling our basement bathroom; a room that’s in great shape and rarely used, and a spot I’m looking to interject a whole lot of fun. Here are some current (and soon to be before) pictures. I’m doing a lipstick fix which means I need to work with the beige tile floor, gold trim on the shower doors, stripe of maroon tile in the shower and existing vanity/wall cabinet. I thought the fastest way to interject fun is with a small wall of wallpaper. Here’s what I’m putting on the wall where the towel bar is near the shower and the toilet. Is the swimmer theme a big surprise? :) I’m wondering if I should leave the rest of the walls the gray/beige color, or if I should paint them white? I also had a wild idea I could paint the ceiling a soft pink to match the wallpaper, but I’m not sure about that just yet. The vanity is for sure going to get painted. I’m considering two different oranges (yes, ORANGE!) pulled out from the wallpaper...

We have a new book from the library which mentions a new-to-us word: pedestrian. Can you say that? I asked. Pedestrian, you said, without flubbing a syllable, without needing it repeated, without a second thought some adults don’t regularly use that word. On a walk which required safely crossing a busier street you recalled it perfectly: we’re crossing the street safely, we’re pedestrians! Then you yelled “THANK YOU, CARS!! loudly. Oh man, there’s just nothing sweeter than your little kid-isms. At 3-years-old you’re smart and silly but most notably trustworthy. We can go on bike rides together--you on your balance bike and us on our old mountain bikes. You stop at the end of each street, you rarely ride wildly, and you can endure about a mile without our hands on assistance. You can appropriately use the salt shaker at dinner by yourself. You’ll announce needing to run out of sight and why, bopping to your room or the basement, returning quickly and safely. You retrieve...

A true sign of a happy holiday weekend right now: time spent where we enjoyed ourselves so much we forgot about all the other stuff .  We hosted a small backyard cookout to celebrate July 4 with two other families. My favorite parts were seeing humans who aren’t related to me in person, watching the boys do “booty jumps” in the kiddie pool (honestly, this dog pool FTW) and this peanut butter pie I made. That night we went to a neighbor’s house for a dinner cookout and driveway fireworks. They grilled up delicious kabobs and made pasta salad. I brought over rainbow veggie kabobs--cherry tomatoes, orange bell pepper, yellow summer squash, yellow bell pepper, zucchini, green bell pepper and red onions. I marinaded the cut veggies overnight in a store-bought vinaigrette salad dressing. Did it do anything? Eh, it saved us from having to oil the veggies when they went on the grill, so there’s that.  Sunday night one of those unpredictable, hot and heavy summer rain showers rolled i...