Getting ready for Christmas...

 We have been getting ready for Christmas around here. I have been starting to come up with some fun things to do as family traditions and have also decided to make 5 new matching stockings for our growing family. One of the traditions we are going to try to do is build a gingerbread house every year. I even came to find out that all that yummy stuff needed to make them will never go to waste because daddy wants to eat the house with the kids after Christmas...yuck. I really want to bake the gingerbread at home and build our own designs but we have decided we will just use kits. Just for a few years until the kids can help. That works out great for us because they are faster (great for short attention spans) and smaller which is good for our small house. Lets just say that all Buster was interested in this year was getting parts of our house into his mouth. We had to really watch his little hands because they were super fast at grabbing candy and gingerbread and moving towards his mouth. He kept saying "that house looks mighty tasty."

We went and cut down our tree from a tree farm and were a little surprised at how expensive they are here. They are at least 20 dollars more here than back in Bellingham. It was a fun time, and we kind of had to do it because big brother kept talking about how we were going to go cut down a tree from our front yard. That is what we did last year, unfortunately for us we were all out of small pine trees this year so we went to a tree farm.

Here is my guy trying to smile in front of the tree. He is in that phase now were I say "smile" and he says "cheese" while making an awkward face. The tree we got is super sharp and prickly. We based our decision on size but also thought that the sharp needles would deter little hands from messing with it. I think the only hands it deters are mine. Both kids are not bothered by how much it hurts to try to touch it. Needless to say I went out to buy a few more packs of shatterproof bulbs because the glass ones I have seem like a bad idea for a few years. 

We love our sweetie too so I added a picture of her here doing one of her signature faces at the dinner table.

And last but not least some live action of the sillies. Daddy says brother has good beat.

The Kitchen

I realized recently that when we moved into our house I purposefully left out the pictures of our kitchen. One of my friends asked me about what my kitchen looked like and I replied that I had a few things to do to it then I would post some pictures. Then I found out that I was pregnant with baby R and I stopped caring about how ugly my kitchen was and just tried to survive. When my parents came out for her birth and for Christmas last year I think they were a little disturbed by some of the aspects of the kitchen that I had gotten used to living with for nine months. When we bought the house I came up with a short term fix for some of the storage issues we had in our poorly laid out kitchen and I thought I would just slam something a little more permanent together including some new counter tops and a new sink in within the first year. Now that we have lived here almost two years I have come to despise the layout of the kitchen and have a very clear picture of what needs to be moved and done to make it pleasantly functional.

Do you see those nasty cabinets back there? When we bought the house they were down in the basement. They had probably been there since sometime in the seventies, perhaps earlier. I am basing this assessment on the fact that we have a porcelain brown sink and some seventies looking tiles for a backslash in the kitchen currently  These cabinets are almost 80 years old and may even have been built by the builder of the house. I think they were the original cabinets in the kitchen.The drawers are heavy and have no gliding mechanism and they had a super ugly fake grain paint job.

Here is a better close up of the nasty paint job. The very first thing we did as soon as we moved into the house was haul those cabinets up from the basement and give them a good cleaning and put them in the back of the breakfast nook. I had to do this because we had no where to put food and pots and pans in the kitchen as it was. They were super dirty and I didn't even have a counter top for them. When I had baby R my dad worked really hard and installed a counter top for us (again out of the basement).

Here is my kitchen as it is today. Last January I started painting the bottom cabinets all the way around. I was going to paint the top ones as well but got a little burnt out and also decided that I didn't mind the wood with the blues we had in there. I used a oops paint that I got at Loews  for 5 dollars, which I also used to paint our "shoe room" as well. I really love this blue and have started using it in other areas of the house too. 

When we finally do get a new kitchen (I hope the year 2014) I am planning on a similar paint scheme. There are original hardwood flooring under about 7 layers of linoleum and sub floor. I have plans to move the stove  and fridge which are just out of view on the right side of the picture.  

And that's our kitchen.