My Beautiful Days

I know I mentioned in a previous post that we currently have our home on the market in anticipation of selling and moving closer to our extended family. Our home, desperately searching for its next owner!! :) When we listed our home on February 25th, I was filled with excitement and anticipation about what this journey would bring.  Now, 92 days, 25 showings and five open houses later I would have to admit that my spirit is dragging. We have already reduced the price once with anticipation of drawing the attention of new buyers, but unfortunately we have yet to draw the attention of someone who wants to buy our property. I can't help but feel frustrated at the fact that it hasn't sold.  I can't help but feel frustrated with the whole process.  I can't help but feel frustrated at the possibility of it not selling and our family not moving. In my frustration, I can't help but wonder if it is God's plan to keep us in this house, or if there is a possib...

A few weeks ago I wrote this post  in which I shared that we had recently remodeled our kitchen.  I was feeling a bit hesitant in posting about it due to some negative feedback I had received from a random reader when posting about our home addition a couple of years ago.  After I had written the post a few weeks ago, however, I received so much wonderful feedback from you that I decided to go ahead and open the window of my blog up and share our renovation. In keeping up with something that I started WAY too long ago and haven't kept up with it at ALL, I am including this as part of my "A Peek Into My Home"series. I do have to give a few shout-outs to the people who helped Monte and me make this renovation a possibility!  A big thank-you to Stacy Klone from KitchenWerks  for helping us to look at our space and figure out what would be best for the functionality of our home and for introducing us to the people who helped make it all a reality!!  We are ...

Yesterday was an amazingly productive day.  Colin and I went to Costco and Toys 'R' Us (he earned a reward, and his choice was a little Star Wars Lego set).  Monte and our friend Chris tiled our backsplash in the kitchen.  I took all of the kids swimming at the park near our home.  We had a fun dinner on the patio and Monte and I spent the evening (after the little kids were in bed) playing Texas Hold 'em while sitting at our new kitchen table and admiring the new backsplash.  It was an awesome day. As Monte and I sat playing poker, he asked me if I would be blogging about the backsplash - putting up pictures of our kitchen remodel, now almost fully complete.  My answer: I really don't know.  You see, while I do fully understand that this is my  blog and that I am fully able to talk about whatever I so choose, I am still hesitant to mention it.  The reason?  Well, a couple of years ago when Monte and I decided to put an addition on our...

It's no secret that we've been gone from the blogging world for awhile now.  Life just gets to be too busy to keep up, especially during the summer!  So, instead of trying to catch you up on everything I've missed telling, I'm going to sum it all up in pictures and minimal words ... We cleaned out some of our cabinets to prepare for our kitchen upgrade ...  Ethan has had some fits ...  I planted our vegetable garden ... Ethan played with sidewalk chalk and got it all over his face ... We've taken baths ...  Ethan has run around the house in just his diaper (and LOVED it) ...  Ellis has played soccer (and has done amazingly great this season) ... Colin graduated from Kindergarten and refused to smile for the camera ... We took a family (minus Ethan) vacation ... We visited Wall Drug in South Dakota and posed for pictures with fake cowboys ... We hiked through the Black Hills ... We visited Mou...

Good morning!  Or shall I say, "Happy greasy Friday morning!"?!  Confused by that?  Let me explain.  You see, we've been having issues with our water heater all week long.  We've gone from having fluctuating temperatures (see the meaning of freezing cold to scalding hot) when we shower to having a water heater that randomly shuts off all the time.  What does this mean?  Well, for one, it means that we just have enough hot water to warm it up before it shuts off.  For two, it means that I haven't showered in four days.  Gross, I know!  So, this morning, Colin and I will be traveling up to my sister's house (about an hour away) to give him a bath and for me to take a shower!  Crazy to travel that far, I know ... but when you've gone so long without a shower, you'll go anywhere to get one!  At some time today, we will have our plumber out as he is replacing our water heater with a new unit (due to the fact that we purchased this t...

In a recent conversation that I had with my brother, Tory, he casually informed me that my blog is boring to him and that I need to spice it up.  I stifled a laugh and asked him just HOW he wanted me to spice up my blog.  Well, according to him, my male readers don't always want to hear about pregnancy - they want to see something more manly, like the progress being made on our addition. Before I go into the spicier side of life, Monte wants everybody to know who Tory is, so he voted the following picture to capture his fabulous personality: This picture is from their man's four-wheeling trip to the Badlands in North Dakota.  He's showing his brilliantly beautiful pearly whites after having just brushed them before bed!  :) So, Tory dear, without further adieu, I give you our progress!  This first picture is the tile in our guest bathroom. This is the tiling that will go in the shower (left) and around the toilet (right). This is the tile warmer so that y...

Our bathroom is almost ready to go (in fact, much more ready than it appears in this picture) ... My awesome hubby and adorable son painted some pull-out drawers for inside our cabinets ... Claire was a villager in "Beauty and the Beast" ... Iain, Claire and Ellis enjoyed some pool time while visiting Grandpa and Grandma in Arizona (Colin did too, just not in this particular picture) ... We toured Luke Air Force Base.  This is Monte trying on a helmet with night vision goggles ... This is our whole family (including Grandpa and Grandma) at Luke Air Force Base ... We hiked near Canyon Lake and got some amazing photography opportunities ... That's our life in a nutshell.  So, how are you?!

Things have been extremely busy around here, which is why I've been absent from blogging for awhile now.  As many of you know, we're working on an addition on our home, which will hopefully be complete within the next month or so.  Well, along with building this addition, we are continually finding ourselves at Lowe's and Home Depot purchasing supplies (i.e. lighting, flooring, tile, etc.), which is a fabulously fun thing to do!  However, unlike most people, when we bring the supplies home, we don't have a garage that we can dump everything into.  So, that being said, we've been making due with whatever extra space we have.  While our master closet has already been invaded, we found ourselves having to take away space from the living room to store this stuff, too!  Remember the serenity I talked about in this fabulous chair back in this post ?  The chair I talked about is a great place to rest and relax.  It's this chair ... Unfortunately, the p...