Good afternoon! I haven’t posted in a while and I’m so sorry! It’s hard to sit down and put two thoughts together these days. I have some great new fabric and a giveaway post that I’ll work on for later this week. I’m apologizing in advance for this post. It deals with mice and toilets!! That brings me to my first photo. This pretty much sums up our daily challenge around the Gulledge household. We have a 6+ year old who doesn’t deem it important to flush the toilet. Jeff has sat all 3 kids down on numerous occasions to discuss flushing, the pros and cons, how to, etct. His sit-downs don’t seem to be working for our precious middle child we refer to as “G”. Last week he (G) thought it was a good idea when we proposed (jokingly) that he write FLUSH 10 times on paper to help him remember.  We then decided to hang it on the wall for further enforcement. It seems to be working! Although I haven’t been upstairs in a few days… Looks like we need to refill the TP too…

We had a 4 day holiday weekend this weekend, so we took a little family vacay down to Orange Beach, AL. The weather was amazing and we had a wonderfully fun weekend! Nothing really exciting happened, but we had some great eats and some fun on the lazy river. I won’t mention the football watching (Auburn = boo).

While in OBA, we spent some time Sunday at the park. As a bonus we got to walk around the Scarecrow Fest which was really cool! It appeared as though different businesses decorated a scarecrow and we took a few pictures of our favorites. This one is of the scarecrow who is *scared* of 3 crows that were perched on top of the cross. You may not see them well in the photo. This one won a ribbon.

There were 2 rows of scarecrows in a big U shape, so tons of them!  Everything from Santa Claus to Mickey Mouse and some I didn’t understand.

This was a scuba scarecrow and also won a ribbon.

This one also won a ribbon and was Sissy’s favorite!

 Now to our other latest battle aside from getting G to flush… I noticed a week or so ago a little something on my desk. It looked like a piece of pencil lead. I threw it away and then thought nothing of it. A night or two later I was woken up a couple of times during the night and *heard* noises. I thought it was our ice maker and again, thought nothing of it and didn’t get out of bed to see what it was. The next morning I decided to investigate and low and behold, I see a drip of something on my desk (tee tee I presume) and also see another pencil lead on Jeff’s desk. You guessed it, a MOUSE!! Luckily our pest control guy came that day and confirmed that my pencil lead was indeed mouse poop. He gave me 2 mammo-jammo XXL glue traps to go along with the 6 I purchased earlier that morning. For at least 4 nights we left the sewing room armed with these glue traps and got nothing! One morning I even found a pencil lead in front of my keyboard, as if to say “HA HA POO ON YOU”!!!! After several days of nothing, we forgot about the mouse.

Here are all of our traps with cheese. 8 booby traps in all. Do you know how much trouble it is to do this every night? We couldn’t leave them during the day for fear the kids would get themselves stuck.

We had 2 per desk and then one on each wall.

The mouse was forgotten. We went out of town this weekend and thought nothing of him. Didn’t even leave out a trap! We assumed he had moved on. Yesterday afternoon as I was unpacking from our trip, I was in the bathroom headed to my closet and A MOUSE RAN RIGHT BY ME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I screamed several times (loud enough for him to freeze in his tracks). When I say I screamed, I mean I screamed the loudest I’ve screamed in a loooonnnnngggg time. He then ran to the wall in our bedroom by the door and froze again (and pooped). Jeff was “on the other side” with the kids behind him so he lined up the glue traps in the doorway and passed me a broom and I was able to shew him through the door and on to the trap. VICTORY!!!! I will spare you the pic Browder took with his Ipod and I will say, Mallory’s response was “awwwww he’s cuuuuuute”!!!!! They also said his legs were crossed on the trap.

Of course now I am super paranoid thinking every lego on the floor is a mouse and turned the light on in the bathroom all 4 times I had to get up last night. I am hopeful he doesn’t have a friend or relative and I can only imagine the “Open Mouse Party” that might have been held here this weekend while we were away. Anyway, mission accomplished… for now. We live next to an empty lot, so I assume that is where he came from. Not exactly sure how he got inside.

Not much else going on around here. I have some great new fabric and a fabric giveaway I hope to post by the end of the week, so stay tuned for that. Oh… a few more photos…

Last month our friends at Lake Martin Voice Realty  helped us celebrate 10K Facebook fans! Sadly this was the only photo I got from the evening, which included a cab-van ride to downtown Montgomery and a fabulous dinner at Central! You don’t see a lot of cabs in my neighborhood, or Montgomery for that matter, so it was interesting in itself. It was really a fun evening and we appreciate John and Palmer for making 10,000 fans such a big deal! There are lots of other sites who have double that or even more, but we like to think we got ours the “organic” way without paid ads and massive fan drives. We’re amazed every day to see the new fans pop up on our page and we hope they are enjoying our designs as much as we enjoy making them! BTW we are now up to 10,717, but who’s counting!!

 Here are a few pictures sent to me from Erin at The Clutch Boutique. She wanted to share how she “tacks” down bows on her appliques so you can’t see the stitching. She uses the “button sew” feature on her sewing machine and is able to tack down each side of the bow under the middle piece. Her customers love it because it not only keeps the bow in place but both layers are sewn together so the little darlings can’t pull it loose.

 I’m not sure how she ties her bows or what kind of sewing machine she has. This is just her suggestion if you have a sewing machine w/ a button sew feature! BTW this is the Applique Cafe Ghost Patch design!

 Looks great! Cute font too! I have emailed asking what the font is and will update that as soon as I hear from her! Update: Font is Carmen from www.8clawsandapaw.com!

Have a great rest of the week!