Busy, Busy

Saturday Dec 15th we went to a Christmas party with the Mom's group I've been trying to get involved in down here. It was at a place called Gym Kats - VERY COOL! It's a gymnastics/tumbling place for kids ages 18ms and up. The kids had a BLAST and they've been asking to go back ever since. It's very reasonably priced and I think we're going to sign them up. My contribution to the pot luck was the cake.
CHRISTMAS EVE
Dave, Jan, Brian, Beth, and Lily were here. We ate, made sugar cookies for Santa, opened the Christmas Eve PJ's (which every child had a matching pair thanks to Grammy Jan!) opened a few presents from out of state relatives (Thanks everyone!) and of course put out the Reindeer food before we went to bed....

CHRISTMAS MORNING
Grace was up at 5am. We put her off for a little while, but eventually quit torturing her and woke everyone (but Morgan) up. We opened presents from Santa and the grandparents. And played, and played, and played, and played.

Dave and Jan MADE those cool adirondack chairs for all 5 grandkids. No they weren't kits - Dave designed them and cut every piece. And they made the cool wood truck, trailer, and car you see in the same picture.
Notice there are no pictures of Morgan on Christmas day. It's because he STILL hasn't been awake long enough to open his presents. The whole family has been sick. I've had the kids to the Dr 5 times in the last 8 days (including two different appointments on Christmas Eve), countless hours and $350 later they're all medicated. Morgan ran a fever for 6 days straight. He's slept literally 64 out of the last 72 hours. We've had the normal cold virus, a weird bacterial skin infection, the vomit virus, and all three have ear infections. Aaaaaahhhhhhhh!
Despite that we tried to make the best of it and had a very Merry Christmas and I hope you did too!

Making Progress...

in the living room. It's as done as it is going to get without buying the last couple of things we need. The only thing that is lacking is some tie backs for the curtains and a clock to hang in between the windows over the couch. CJ wants to use barbwire for the tiebacks and we're searching for a clock we like but nothing has really struck us yet. It may have to wait until after Christmas.
With that said here's BEFORE

DURING

AFTER



Yes, unfortunately that's our old, nasty, stained, dirty furniture that we really did not want to move into our brand new house. But, alas, we had to spend (and are still spending) more on the house than we had budgeted so the new furniture will have to wait until tax return time. Good thing it's only a few months.
The picture below is one of my favorite things we have in the house. A box ceiling (one in the living room and one in our master bedroom). Because we elected to just do standard 8 ft ceilings, having the box really opens those two rooms up and didn't cost us any more money in the construction of the house.

The Spic N Span journey begins

with the utility room. The utility room? I know what your thinking "Staci, we really want to see pictures of the HOUSE, but is the utility room that important?" Well, to me it is. Mainly because I've had boxes and boxes of stuff sitting around with no place to go until CJ built these wonderful shelves in my utility room. YEAH!


Now, on to the kitchen: BEFORE

AFTER

BEFORE

AFTER


See the fabulous woodwork on the backside of the cabinets? We ordered those cabinets unfinished because our origional plan was to lay a rock wall up the back side of those (which was CJ's idea and I thought it would look awesome), but in the interest of shaving off many more hours of labor intensive work this is what we have. Isn't it beautiful? It is the idea and handywork of my brother-in-law, Brian. Way to go Brian!
Well, I'm off to try and clean the living room and then maybe you'll get pics of it too. I'm on a completely finish one room before I move on to the next mission. Wish me luck.

She got her groove on!

I have the most beautiful niece, even when she's not dressed up and dancing. Lily had her Christmas recital on Tuesday night at Ridgmar Mall. When I told the kids we were going to go watch Lily dance Grace says "Mommy I can't wait to see her moves!" And boy did she have some. They were all adorable, but especially Lily. I didn't get as many pictures as I wanted because my camera was flippin' out on me but here's a few good ones. Enjoy...(and make sure you tap, tap, tap in your head as you watch the pics)

After, we went to Olive Garden for dinner. It was taking forever to get seated. They kept calling "..... party of two ..... party of two.....party of two...." After a while CJ says "I remember those days." But, what about us? Oh yeah, our two families are now a party of 8! (and soon to be 9!) WOW! How did that happen? As we were leaving I was walking toward the back of the group and as the kids held hands and skipped through the parking lot I thought to myself "wow, look at our clan!" It made me smile and gave me a warm, fuzzy feeling inside. Life is good. It's kind of weird to be able to step back and see reality from an outside perspective. To sort of take yourself out of the moment and not be so caught up in the middle of everything that you can't appreciate it. Things have certainly changed a lot in 10 years. 10 years from now they'll be even more different. I can't wait to see.

It's starting to feel a lot like HOME

So much to blog where do I start. How about Halloween...Grace was a Bat Girl, Morgan was a goat, and Tanner was a police officer. We went to the square to trick or treat and also around the neighborhood where the rent house was. Kids had a great time only Morgan was about to suffocate because we went to the square about 3:30pm and it was like 80 degrees.

And, of course, we made time to decorate our tree last weekend. Here are a few pics of the kids to tide you over...





(sorry about the poor quality of the pics. Had a smudge or something on my lens and ended up with a white blurry fuzz in the middle of every pic.)

Now, show of hands, how many people knew it's impossible for three small children to sit still and look at the camera for a picture?

I know, I know

I told you to check back and then.....nothing. I just can't seem to keep up with my life yet. Between the everyday things of running a household of 5, trying to unpack all the stuff we got out of the storage unit, and trying to make progress on our "to do" list of unfinished things on the house - I'm buried. There's so much stuff stacked in my office that I can barely get to my computer. I'm trying to get some pics up but it's going to have to be another day. Just wanted to let you know we're all doing pretty well and I'm up to my neck but I'm trying. Don't give up on me!