Christmas Decor

 Whilst my sister is in town, she's helping me out by decorating my kitchen for Christmas. This was something she had seen online, and she did it at her house so when I knew she was coming here, I knew she had to do mine as well. 

How fun is this? I love it! 

We're all doing equal work

 Today, the final day before the pictures will be taken, so the final push towards being ready. We had planned a full day of things. Husband and my BIL would be painting the basement, and my sister would be cleaning everything (she has recently started a cleaning company! How exciting!) So since we still had the fellas to worry about, I was on kid duty. I occupied them at first by watching a movie, they chose Sonic 2, of course. Then we needed ore painting supplies, so we all trekked on over to the store. Epifanio carried the tape, as he is a giant man who can do anything.

After a full day of ... everything, we then went to have dinner and I learned that Epifanio eats his ramen noodles in the weirdest way possible. 

What an absolutely insane weirdo. 

Sneks!

Y'all, my house has a small infestation of snakes it seems! I have seen garter snakes all over my neighborhood lately, and I have a small one under my house, I've seen it every year since we've moved here, and it just pokes it's little head out of the porch and lays in the sun. I saw him today when I came home from a walk. Here he is, just enjoying some sun.

 Then later I headed out to chat with someone, and I saw a second snake!

 Of course, as soon as the neighbor approached the porch, they slithered under there again.

Then later, I came back out and the one was just chilling again, rolled up in a snake ball.

I know I should be worried about snakes, but since they don't hurt anyone, eat bugs and whatnot, and just disappear, I've just let them be, because they just let us be. We can all get along, y'all.

Real Gingerbread Houses

This week at the local mall, there has been a gingerbread display happening. Today I finally went with my nieces and y'all, we were blown away by the gingerbread houses! Especially after my disappointing house that I made yesterday haha. But I took a few pic, to show the amazingness.

I honestly can't even fathom the amount of work and talent that goes into these! Holy holy cow! Good work everyone, I am in awe of what you do. 

My First Gingerbread!

Y'all, I have done my first gingerbread house today. For our YW activity, we got these gingerbread villages and each person just took a tiny house. I chose the chateau, because it looked like the easiest, and also, it reminds me of the cabins up at girls camp haha.

I should have something next to it so you can see how small it is, it's just about the size of like, a playing card. And it's certainly not great hahah but honestly, that's okay. It was my first attempt, all of our frosting bags were faulty (they were all just spitting out frosting everywhere) so I did the best I could under the circumstances. Maybe I'm ready to start with a regular size gingerbread house...soon.

Ready For the Holidays

All right, now that the wonderful holiday of Thanksgiving is over, I took the day to decorate the house for Christmas. It didn’t take me too long, and I’m pleased with the final result.

I do love doing the tree, but it always gives me such anxiety. Why? I don’t know. I never remember if I put the ribbon garland on before or after the ornaments, and I don’t want there to be too few or too many ornaments, and the whole thing makes me nervous.This is just one of the tiny trees I have around the house. I like having them on the floors where the Christmas tree isn’t, to keep the holiday alive everywhere.

It seems like every year I add a little something to the ledge with the letters. I like it though.

And the stockings were hung by the chimney with care…now the holiday season feels like it’s begun!

Painting, painting, painting

Last week, we (FINALLY) closed on our house. After taking a while on Thursday of last week to sign all the paperwork, on Friday, at 2:00 PM, everything went through, and Husband and I now own our first house. We immediately went into makeover mode. As everyone knows, we were going to paint, and I so didn’t want to. But hiring painters didn’t work out in my favor, because Husband didn’t want to. Ugh. So we painted a little over the weekend, (only a little, because the city had turned off our water, and its difficult to clean brushes with no water) and then on Monday, really tackled it. And by we, I mean Husband painted. I warned IN ADVANCE that I wouldn’t be painting, that I hated it more than anything, ever. So I spent the week cleaning the house (drawers, etc) while Husband, Sister and Sister’s Fiancé painted. We were doing ok, we ragtag bunch of painters, until we realized Wednesday that we needed the house painting done by Thursday night, so we could steam clean the carpets the next morning, and have them dry by the time we were going to move in on Saturday.

So we all took Thursday off of work, and went into super-painting mode. By this point, all of my drawers and cabinets were clean, so I had to jump onto the paint train. Since I still hate to paint (yeah, this didn’t change) I was mostly in charge of taping off the trim, painting the trim, and general clean-up. We got started early, at like, 9 or so. We were also joined by Brother-in-Law, that was a help. So all the guys are downstairs, doing all the big painting of stuff, and Rory and I are upstairs, cleaning up all the mess from the wallpaper (that took about 3 days to get off the wall), doing the trim, and just working in general. As we’re cleaning up the final bits, I look down at the carpet, and see red splotches all over. Let me preface this with, the night before, as we were painting with the cranberry color, someone stepped in the paint and tracked it all over the light blue carpeting. That made me upset, but seeing it happen again today, I just about flipped my lid. So after I spent some time screaming at everyone (I had to yell, seeing as how we were all in different rooms!) I look down, and notice that its on this thing where I had just stood. So I look down, and its not paint – I had apparently sliced open my foot at some point (but didn’t feel it, or register it, I guess) and I had been bleeding all over the place. So after I apologized to everyone and got it all cleaned up, we kept cleaning. After a couple of hours, the upstairs was totally painted, the floor was finally wallpaper-free and clean, and everything was done. We stopped then, and had lunch.

Then, the rest of the house. At this point we lost Brother-in-Law, he had other things, so it was the 4 of us again. We taped, and painted, and sung, and talked, and worked tirelessly for a long time. It got to be about 6-ish before I started to lose it. At this point, I was sick of painting, I was sick of taping, I was sick of being in the super hot house (we couldn’t have the AC on in the house, because the guys installing carpet were having an issue with the AC and the carpet. Plus we needed windows open for ventilation). So this is when the mood turned slowly from having semi-fun painting to hating paint and hating the house and hating everyone around me. Needless to say, things got dark. But after an hour or so of a downfall of moods, things picked up. We finally finished the painting and clean up at 9:30. We all slowly shuffled out of the house, burned out, tired, dirty. On the way home though, we stopped at Arctic Circle and got ice cream cones. We all skipped dinner, so you’d think we’d have been starving, but no. I was just ready for bed, and an ice cream cone sounded like the best thing ever.

So now, here we are. The house is done, all that’s left is a little light cleaning, and putting vent covers/outlet switches back onto the walls. And by tomorrow evening, we should be totally moved in. I can’t wait to be moved in there, and I’m just glad that we’re done with all the painting. And here’s to hoping that I’m done with painting for the rest of my life.