Boys Coming + Office Re-do!

I am very excited for Joe's brothers Ben and Andy to visit us next week!! I love having visitors! Andy arrives on Sunday night from Omaha and Ben arrives on Monday night from Las Vegas, where he is currently working with the Air Force. We have a kayak tour on the Chicago river planned for Wednesday night, which is also Ben's birthday! I am SO excited for that and I am praying that the weather is decent. It has been GORGEOUS weather all this week - and next week they are saying storms starting on Monday through Wednesday, which is when they will be here! Crap! I hope it doesn't storm all day so we can go out and do fun things, and of course, we don't want our kayak tour to be cancelled! Cross your fingers!

Joe and I decided to do a major overhaul of the office/2nd bedroom in our apartment, and of course we waited until right before the boys come to start doing it! This past weekend we got a new twin bed which will be a nice addition to our 2nd bedroom. Even though a twin is small, at least it something other than the sofa or air mattress! Then, after searching for weeks I finally found a decent twin comforter set that wasn't super expensive or super ugly - at Target no less! I love you, Target!  I was surprised at how hard it was to find a decent twin set. Everything we liked wasn't available in a twin...I guess that's because usually twin beds are for kids. ;-)  Our thought was that this mattress can be used for our future children too, and for now be a nice extra guest bed.
So I spackled the holes and cracks and taped earlier this week and yesterday we went and got paint and started painting. We got about 1/2 way done with the room and it looks SOO good!! I am loving the color - a very light gray.  They never painted our apartment in between tenants before we moved in (FOUR years ago) and so the walls were pretty dinged up. Plus, the color is your typical yellowy white...forgiving for apartment walls, but just plain ugly to me. Joe and I didn't ever want to paint our apartment because we don't own it, so it seems wasteful, and because we might have to paint it back before we move out. But having painted just half of the room now makes me wish we had painted the whole place RIGHT when we moved in! I can't tell you how much better it looks! I might have to just live in that room 24/7!
I will finish painting tomorrow and put everything back in the room and reorganize it. Then we have most of Saturday and part of Sunday to clean and get ready for the boys' arrival. YAY! So excited!
:-)

Saturday I am also doing TurboKick on stage at the Taste of Chicago with my turbokick instructor from TEAMiFIT. We are only doing half of one round of Turbokick, which is about a half and hour. Wish me luck!

Hunger Walk

This past Sunday, Joe and I walked in the Chicago Food Depository's 5k Hunger Walk. We walked to raise money for the St. Vincent dePaul Food Pantry located in our church.

Needless to say, I wasn't in a good mood on the day of the walk and things kept going wrong to frustrate me more. ha ha. First of all, I was super tired from being out/up too late the night before at the Taste of Chicago with my friend, didn't get much sleep. No sleep = crabby Mindy. I should have known better!

Also, to make my mood even better, I couldn't find the bottle of sunscreen the morning of the walk and spent the morning on a mad goose chase in the apartment to find the magic disappearing sunscreen that never turned up... I knew Joe and I would get sunburned. Arg.... Then, the "team" we were supposed to walk with decided not to wait for everyone to arrive before they started walking. They told us to be there at 9:30 and we were...we assumed we would all be walking together. We called the guy in charge when we arrived and he told us that they started early and were half way done already. What? Hmmm. Oh well, so Joe and I were on our own walking...lucky Joe getting to deal with crabby tired and hot wife. Sorry Joe! ;-)

Anyway...so aside from my crabbiness the walk was fine. It was a hot and very humid day, but we survived. We walked from Soldier Field, south along the lakefront path. We hadn't seen that part of the lakefront path before. It was really pretty and well groomed, the paths were nice and the landscaping around the path was very nice. There were cool yachts and boats in the marina which was nice to see. The best part was the awesome views of the lake as well as the city as we walked back north along the path.

After the walk I went home and took a nice long nap!  I think I overdosed on volunteering that day. I've been doing too much of that this past couple of weeks. ;-)

Here are some photos from the walk...

D4D - Garden Planting

This has been a busy couple weeks of volunteering for me! On Friday I volunteered to help plant a garden with Designs for Dignity at the Madonna House. D4D is a local organization that provides interior design services to area non-profits. With the support of manufacturers, vendors and volunteers they are able to transform environments for those in need.

I signed up to help plant from 10-2, but when I got there at 10, they had a lot done already. I still helped plant a bunch of day lilies and also helped spread mulch and clean up a bit. I ended up being done by about 12:30 or so. In total they ended up planting a bunch of perennials and several trees in the backyard and creating more of a landscaped yard which was only grass before.

The Madonna House is a place for women and children that's affiliated with catholic charities. Recently D4D redesigned the interiors for them. They created a video showing the interior project as well as a couple other projects they have done... I LOVE the video, seeing it inspired me to get involved with them. This was the first thing I have done for them, but hopefully I can do more in the future.

I am posting the video below...the music is perfect and the designs that they did are amazing because they work only with donations. Watch the video and be sure to turn your sound up! :-)

Chicago Cares

On Saturday, June 12th  I spent the day painting a mural for the Chicago Cares Serve-a-thon event. The Harrington College of Alumni Association formed a team for this event...even though it was a small team, we still did a great job. Chicago Cares helps Chicago schools year round by using volunteers to do projects that help to spruce up the schools. The serve-a-thon is the biggest event of the year. I think I heard there were over 6000 volunteers and 150 buses this year!

We checked in at soldier field at 8am and we were assigned to a bus that drove us to the Elem/Jr High school to do our work. Teams were sent all over the city to do work in at many schools. They are able to get SO much work done in one day, its amazing.

The school we went to had lots of jobs to be done, painting walls in classrooms (lots of rooms) and painting murals. We (of course) jumped at the chance to paint murals, being designers and all.... :-)   The murals were painted on canvases, not on the walls at this school. The schools choose which murals they want, and they picked a really detailed sports themed mural and a couple other simpler murals. We jumped at the chance to do the complicated one. We traced the template design onto canvas using an overhead projector, then traced over that with a sharpie marker. Then we began to paint using a reference image. It was a fun day and our painting turned out great! The Principal and other women from the school loved it!

This was the first time I had been into a Chicago public school. I was very sad to see the condition it was in. The exterior was decent, but the interior was just really old and dirty. I don't even think it was one of the worst schools, but it was still sad to see how poorly kept up it was. It just seemed so run down, like a really depressing place to try to learn...

Here are some photos from the event... Thanks to everyone who donated to support our team! Click on the images to enlarge.

Happy Father's Day!!

Happy Father's Day to all of the Dad's out there! Especially to our favorite Dads, Greg and Dan!
Chloe and Louie think Joe is a pretty good Dad too! Happy Dog-Father's Day to him! ;-)
Hope everyone has a great day!