Nice Day

We are at the end of Thanksgiving weekend, and it's been full of friend and family fun, Christmas shopping, Christmas decorating, a lovely church service and of course, good food. You can see that the little guy was pretty tired by the end of the Thanksgiving day that he just crashed. The girl sighed on the way home, "Nice day, Mom", as she says every time she sees friends or family. She went from one grandparents' house to another, not wanting to leave either one. We are truly blessed to have such wonderful family to love our kids. E and a couple of her cousins had a great time playing together, and R wasn't left out of the mix. Cousin M wanted to touch his head over and over - evidently my sister in law said that she talked about it all day. It was cute. E announced later as we drove home that she wants to see her cousins "lots more times".
Typically we spend the Friday after Thanksgiving with family, but the hubby had to work, so we headed home. Our little town had their annual tree lighting ceremony where kiddos can make and decorate an ornament and visit with Santa. We heard kids yell "Eden" over and over again - we both kept looking around to see who was calling her name (because seriously, this name isn't common in these parts). We discovered two of her daycare buddies there, so we visited with the parents and the kids ran around, loving life.
It was a lovely weekend filled with many of the blessings we are thankful for. L and I have two pretty amazing kids - a crazy chatty two year old, who has a new interest in board games, Bible Stories, Jingle Bells, and counting to 14 (who knew?), and a happy happy 6 month old who is so curious, yet pretty relaxed and smiley. My girl is so right - it has been a nice day.

Our Bedroom

"The After":

Per Kristin's request, I have uploaded some pics of our bedroom. This really isn't the project we're working on, but since that is still in process (trimming out windows/doors/hanging curtains), I thought I'd show you these.

There are still a few things we need to do in this room, like painting the window and our chest, getting our closet system set up, but it's "done" for a while. As you can see in the "before" pic of our room, they had painted the walls an insane purple, and then sponged one wall blue and purple. You know, they put effort into making it this busy - yikes. The carpet was nasty and ugly, so we pulled it up, kilzed it (it smelled like dog urine, so we primed the subfloor), laid new carpet, painted it like 30 times, and put our stuff in here. Sorry for the last dark pic - it didn't save the changes I made to the photo.

House projects with two kiddos underfoot is a slow process, but we have the rest of our lives, right? We remind each other of that quite often, because we get impatient. Still, with each little project done, the house feels more like "home".

Popping In to Say Hi

Life is good and full right now. We're settling into our new normal, as R is settling into his regular sleep routine. It's amazing how much more productive I am now that the babe is sleeping better! We've been working on house projects like crazy people, but are still making sure to get lots of kiddo time in. E requested the playground yesterday, and we were able to get some shots of the kids. Boy, they are cute, aren't they?

Hope you got lots of sunny time in too!