Wednesday's Walk-Meet Mr. Snowman

I can't believe it is already the middle of January! Yes, the time is going fast, but that fact that we've had little to no snow this year makes it hard to believe we're so far into winter already. Although we usually have a pretty good layer of snow on the ground here from mid-November to the end of March, we seldom get snowman snow. You know, the heavy, wet kind that sticks together to make snowmen and snowballs and stuff. Ours is usually pretty light, dry and flaky, which makes it easy to shovel, but more difficult for a little 8 year old to get out and do something fun in it.

Although we didn't get snowman snow, the weather warmed up enough to start melting what snow we had and Michelle was ecstatic to find out it would stick together enough to make a snowman. I wasn't dressed to play around in the wet stuff (no snow pants on, and NOT wanting to play around with wet pants), so I stayed on the shoveled sidewalk and took pictures while she made her very own snowman for the first time. We've made them before, but this was the first one she made on her own. She was so proud of him. :o)

Aw, I think he's blushing!

Till next time...God's love and blessings!

Misc. Monday-Nerf war!

So Michelle and I thought it would be a fun idea to get Mike a couple of Nerf guns for Christmas for the two of them to play with. I'm not sure exactly where my common sense was when we made this decision, but the decision was made, and the guns were bought. The guns sat in their package for several days after Christmas without being used. Finally, one afternoon while Mike was at work, Michelle got the guns out, set up some barricades in the office, and left one gun, some ammunition and a note stating that they were at war, by the door. There was a ton of giggling going on all afternoon as she waited anxiously for him to arrive. Needless to say, when he did get home there was total chaos in the house. :o) I had to finally call a truce for dinner. We were trying to have a family game night that night since Nick would be heading back to OK soon, but those guns kept coming out from under the table and around corners and nerf darts were flying everywhere while we tried to play cards. I have to say it was one of the funnest nights we've had in a while. :o)

A day or so later, Nick took Mike out for his birthday and they picked up a couple more guns, only these two were semi-automatic--less reloading of ammo. This time I was determined to get some pictures of the fun. Here's a couple I took from my fortress in the bathroom.

Nick's hideout was in the office.

Mike, with his semi-automatic, took over the living room.

Michelle had her headquarters in my bedroom. Please don't shoot the unarmed civilians!

While I was a bit worried about something getting broke in the house during these wars, the only casualties were the nerf darts that Layla found and shredded. :o)

How about you? Did you get anything fun for Christmas? What kind of family games do you like to play? I better close this here. Till next time...God's love and blessings!

Through the House Thursday-kitchen remodel

I LOVE having our own home. I love being able to do more than just rearrange furniture when the room isn't working for us. Our downstairs family room/now turned office was one of the first remodels we tackled, but I still don't have any decent photos of it yet, so I'm going to wait before I post on that.

Recently, though, I was tired of rearranging and moving things to try and make things work in another room of the house-the kitchen. Don't get me wrong, I have a pretty nice kitchen, it just has a few quirks that were making it difficult to work in. The most difficult quirk is that it is located on the second floor of our house. Yes, I know, our house is upside-down. Lugging the groceries up stairs isn't quite as annoying as taking a wedding cake down the stairs. The kitchen also isn't all that large, whose is? So a lot of my cake decorating (cake pans, plates, etc) and canning supplies were kept in the garage, but as I needed them more and more often, and being too lazy to go up and down the flight of stairs in the rain or snow, I found myself leaving them in the kitchen and trying to find a place to hide them. It wasn't working-definitely, not working. And don't get me started on the weird, dark wood ceiling.

So, with a $450 budget, I decided to see what we could do. Enter my handy-dandy hubby with his power tool skills and my trying-to-be-patient-and-not-rush-this-job staining skills, and we now have a kitchen that is both beautiful and functional. Since I spend about 50% of my weekend time in there, that makes for a much happier me. :o) Here are some of the before and after shots.

The far end of our kitchen is supposed to be a breakfast nook. This is what it looked like when we first moved in. We didn't have an extra table, so I used a card table. No one has ever used this as a breakfast nook. Ever.

Our dining room is part of the living room. It is open on 2 sides, one side has a window, and one side is a half wall where the stairway goes down stairs. Since there is no place in there for the china cabinet, it was put in here. As you can see, it doesn't quite fit properly.

Here I tried moving it to the other wall. In the foreground you can see the table Mike made for this room. It's used more as an extra counter-top than a table. This is where I do all my cake decorating. The china cabinet drawers housed a lot of my decorating tools, but as you can see, I needed additional storage. I had already started clearing things out of the china cabinet when I remembered to take some pictures. This is just ugly!! I can't believe I lived with it like this for almost a month before I finally decided it was time to renovate.Don't worry, I didn't get rid of the china cabinet. I love it too much. It found a new home in our daughter's room as a toy cabinet. She has lots of drawers for the little things and display area for her pretty stuff. I'll have to take pictures of it to post later.

We picked up some unfinished cabinets, stain, counter-top and wood from our local home improvement store. I stained the pieces and then Mike and I put it all together.

Since the window is lower than the cabinets, we decided to simply make a desk area there. Mike put a shelf up underneath for additional storage.

I used some material I already had and an old, tension shower rod to hide the clutter underneath. I like the fact that I can change this out with the seasons if I choose.

This is where Mike's wood working skills came in. He took some simple pieces of wood and made this awesome set of display shelves for me to match the ones he made earlier on the other side of the window.I love that my teacup collection is out where they can be seen and used.

Sorry about the poor picture, but this is what it looks like all finished.I LOVE it!!! The cabinet on the far right is all drawers, and I was able to totally organize my cake decorating supplies. My favorite and unexpected part of the whole remodel is the desk area under the window. This is where I now sit to do any of the fondant work for my cakes. I used to stand at the table, and I still do for most of the cake work, but for the sculpting, I get to sit there and watch the birds or, this time of year, the snow fall. Have I mentioned that I love this? I am so excited that we were able to do this for under $450.

I need to figure out a window treatment. This is one room that changes with the seasons so I'd like to find something that is pretty neutral that doesn't cover too much of the window. Someday I'd like to figure out a way to change the ceiling, but for now I think we've learned to "tune it out". :o)

Anyway, I better close for now. Thanks for taking a peek at our "new" kitchen.

Till next time...God's love and blessings!

Good bye 2011

Can you believe it? 2011 will be over in a couple of hours! Where did it go? Since our church service was canceled tonight due to a snow storm, I thought I'd use the time to do an end of year update here on the blog, but I don't want to spend my last few hours of the year doing this, so I'm going to try and make it quick. In fact, I think I'll just post our Christmas letter since it pretty much summed up our year and it's already thought out. This was the front of our cards. I'm having fun playing with my camera. :o)

Merry Christmas!

     Hello there. This time of year always seems to drive my family crazy. Everyone is always busy with something. There's paper and ribbons everywhere, the kitchen has been smelling especially nice and they put a tree in the living room again. They won't let me near it though. :o(

     Anyway, I thought I'd take a minute and let you know what's going on around here since everyone else is so busy. I've heard the family talking about Nick coming home soon to visit. I can't wait. there's always interesting things on his floor for me to check out. They also keep talking about Angel driving a long way every day. Something about a cosmetology school starting in January. I have no idea what that is, or when that is for that matter, but it seems like she will be pretty busy for a while. 

     Daddy still leaves almost every day which makes me sad, but I love when he comes home and we get to play together. Except a couple of weeks ago when he brought HER home. They call her Layla, boy does she get in trouble a lot. She still doesn't know not to "go" on the carpet. Sheesh, I learned that a long time ago. Oh well, although she can be annoying, I guess she's OK. We do have fun chasing each other around the house. :o)

     Michelle and Mommy and I spend most of our days together. I love to snuggle in Mommy's lap when she reads books to Michelle and I'm great at helping her clean the floor while she's baking those yummy cakes.

     Oh, I almost forgot about Princess. I don't see her much since she spends most of her time out in the garage. Mom tries to get her to come in, but she told me she prefers to be outside. I don't think the mice or chipmunks like her out there though. 

     Well, that's what we've been up to. How about you and your family? We'd love to hear from you and you can see some more pictures of us if you check out Mom's blog tammyjapan.blogspot.com. I guess I better go, Layla just took off with my sock!

     Lots of love,

     Coco

Coco sporting his Christmas scarf and Lalya in her pretty bow. 

Princess wasn't too happy about having her picture taken. 

Well, the letter says to check out this blog for more pictures, so I guess I should post a few. I'm afraid I've not been very good at taking candid shots, in fact, I didn't even get the camera out on Christmas day so I don't have many to choose from.

Angel sang a solo with her choir class at the Mall of America. I didn't get any pictures of Michelle's piano recital that night, but I did take a video that I may post later.

I tried to get a picture of all my "kids" together. That didn't work out. It started with the big kids making faces and ended with the dogs fighting over who was going to get to be in whose lap. This is the best shot. Sigh. At least the kids are all smiling.

Michelle had to get out a sled a bit, even if we don't have much snow yet this year. Although, looking out the window right now, it seems that has changed. I guess it's a good thing church was canceled this evening. I think we're going to wake up to a white 2012. I better go make sure the camera is charged for the morning. :o)

Till next year...God's love and blessings!

Tasty Tuesday-Guest post

It's Tasty Tuesday here and I have two "firsts" for you today. I have ventured into the world of vlogging (video blogging) and today I have the first ever vlog for this blog. :o) Actually, I didn't make this cute little video, so there you have the other "first" for today--a guest blogger, or I guess I should say vlogger.

So, without further ado here's our first ever vlog.

I was quite surprised after going back to the kitchen to get my hot chocolate to find Michelle with the camera making this little video. Too funny!

I saw some ghost marshmallows made on another blog and although I didn't want to do ghosts, I thought this would be a cute way to make someone smile. How can you not smile when your marshmallows are smiling at you. I simply used food writers to draw the faces and plopped them into her mug. Easy, peasy, lemon squeezy.

Well, I'd like to thank my guest vlogger for today. Great job, Michelle. It's time for us to do spelling, and it's pretty much impossible for me to help her with that and type at the same time so, I better close this here.


Till next time...God's love and blessings!

Misc. Monday

Although I haven't taken much time to blog the last few weeks, I have kept my camera busy. The leaves were so beautiful and the weather was so warm that we skipped out of school a little early a couple of times and got outside. I'm glad we did 'cause it's getting cold out now and a lot of our autumn color is gone. Here's just a few miscellaneous shots taken over the last couple of weeks.

We had pretty yellow leaves outside my bedroom window.

 And red/orange leaves outside the kitchen windows.

Michelle loves her zip line and I love that she's getting some exercise while having fun.

One of the fun things about homeschooling--getting hot chocolate and cookies while working on spelling--or math, or science, or whenever we feel the need. :o)

 Mom gets home made white chocolate. Yum! And yes, those cookies are pretty crumbly. Angel brought them home from work the night before and they didn't transport well in the plastic bag. They were still yummy though.

 Looking out the kitchen window it looked like someone threw a huge confetti party in the yard. Such pretty colors against the bright green of the grass. I love fall. 

Michelle is multi-tasking here. She's both the model and photographer at the same time. :o)

And here's one of her photos. Love the starburst!

I also took Senior Pictures with Angel this week. See.

Sorry, couldn't resist.  Actually, this was from Senior Day at school for Home Coming Week. I did take some real Senior Pictures as well, but I will post some of them later this week.

There you have it, a couple of snapshots of life here in WI. I hope you're getting a chance to get out and enjoy this time of year. I'm going to close this here and do some scrapbooking.

Till next time...God's love and blessings!

Through the House Thursday-Laundry Room Part 2

Last week I promised some close-ups of my folding table. I LOVE it. It's the perfect size for the girls piles of folded laundry and it hides all those necessary, but ugly, pipes under the window.

Here's the table by itself. There are so many pipes back there I couldn't even get in there to paint the wall all the way. That alone would have driven me crazy to see every day.

Because we have to  access the softener (and probably the well pump sometime), Mike made the table so it could lift up and out of the way. (He's so smart! :o)

The hook hanging here is used to hold the table in the up position.

The adhesive on my velcro didn't want to stick to the paint so I used some tacky glue and a staple gun to make sure it wasn't going anywhere. I simply hot glued the other side of the velcro to the skirt I made out of a drop cloth. Yup, that's right, a cloth drop cloth. It was cheaper than any of the fabric I could find around here and seemed heavy duty enough to do the job.

So, there it is. I wish I had a better "before" picture to show you the difference, but I am totally loving this. Now if I could just figure out a good storage solution for all the coats and shoes on the other two walls of this room. :o)

It is late here so I will close for now. Till next time...God's love and blessings!