Decembers are so magical, fun and busy!!
First Christmas.
We bought this table mostly for school. The kids use it every single day. School or not. Johnny wakes up in the morning, gets dressed and sits at the table to create 'things'. One of our best purchases!
1 o'clock church is hard on babies (and tired mommies!).
She was so cute in her dress too!
We have a huge bucket of linking cubes we use for math. I try so hard to keep them up stairs. The kids really wanted to create something in the kitchen with them. I took some deep breaths and told myself, let them be little. Sometimes as parents we endure mess and chaos in order to let our children learn and explore, right?!
Diadora can't quite decide if she wants to be a ballerina or join gymnastics!
Someone figured out how to get the end of her candy cane wrapper open and was sucking all of the juice out!
Addie really wanted to run the Santa Run before Christmas. We signed up last minute for the Santa Runs Tacoma just her and I. It's getting expensive to sign all of us for races! It was a chilly day but it didn't start raining until we were done! She ended up doing the kids 1k after. They ordered too many medals for the half marathon runners so all of the kids got to take one home! This was her third 5k for the year!! So proud. We picked up doughnuts on the way home for everyone and had a yummy after race breakfast!
***
We live about a 3 minute drive away from Victor Falls. After our Santa Run we headed over to check it out. It is really pretty. A little scary to take little kids to. There are some steep edges and I kept envisioning Johnny falling off and in to the freezing water! I am excited to be able to walk there when the weather warms up and see what it looks like in the spring.
***
We were invited to an adults only Ugly Sweater party! Always fun to get out without the kids and be surrounded by adults!! We had so much fun laughing, eating, playing games and doing a white elephant gift exchange!
All the ladies!
We were doing minute to win it games. We were trying to get the pom pom to stick to some petroleum jelly on our noses! Only 1 guy was able to do it!
The first gift we picked during the gift exchange was a Snuggie. I actually really wanted it! We are always grabbing blankets to watch movies! I would never buy one of these, but I would take one as a gift! Too bad someone stole it from us and we had to pick something else! We ended up with some chocolate which is fine by me too!
***
Completely passed out after driving around looking at Christmas lights!
I sent her to her room because she wasn't listening. When it was too quiet I went to check on her and found her like this! Asleep on the floor.
When Dia sees Opal in the carrier lately she asks if she can go in it instead. I usually say no because I need Opal in it. While on one of our many trips to Ikea, Opal was happy in the shopping cart so I let Dia hitch a ride. She was too excited!
I love these sweet faces!
While my sister was here, her and I went to the mall while Daniel and Blake set up the trampoline! They really scare me because they are dangerous (and we have had a few incidences) but they are pretty fun!
***
We have done a few projects since moving in to our new house! Since we finished up about 80% of our unfinished things on the old house just as we were moving out, I decided not to waste any time this time around. I want to be able to enjoy our hard work!
One of those projects was refinishing our table! Since the top of it was severely damaged by a hammer during a project with the kids, it gave me a good excuse to try out something I saw on pinterest! I ordered a stencil awhile ago and we finally got it done before my sister left!
We set up a temporary table while we were painting. These are the chairs we had. You can see how bad the white and pine look in this room!
And the finished table! I spray painted all of the white black. Then Daniel stenciled and stained the top and the bench. The previous owner left 2 of those black chairs here so I went and bought 2 more to match. We sold the white ones on Craigslist so overall I think we spent less than $100 and it looks brand new!! I seriously love how it turned it!
Here's another easy one I did. The sides of the counters have marks where the finish has been taken off. They probably had something hanging there before. I found this cute chalk board for $5 at a craft bazaar. So easy to hang and now the kids can color while I am in there making dinner!
And finally, some room painting! The whole house is pretty much painted. Except the office (aka my craft room!). Since most of the boxes taking up space in the garage are filled with my craft stuff, Daniel got to work painting. The idea is to get the boxes emptied in less than 2 years. :)
This is the before. Boring beige.
Johnny D is always right there whenever there is a project going on. :)
And the after! I love it! Daniel used the same stencil for the wall as he did on the table. He told me when he was done that we are never stenciling a wall again. It was time consuming but it looks so good! We picked a light grey that flows with the rest of the house. I am still waiting on some Ikea furniture to be assembled but I should be up and crafting soon!
That's it for December and 2014, finally!!!
