Three Things

There are three huge events going on in our lives this month: Working on our new (to us) house; Advent/ Christmas traditions; and planning a totally awesome first birthday party for Keziah. I thought I would share a tiny glimpse on each of these big ongoing events.

The House:

Our house came with this totally awesome breakfast bar that separates the kitchen from the family room. It is made of the same stone that is on our fireplace and the outside of our house. It's a cool detail. Here was the problem. After the original wooden table top got scratched up, someone 'fixed' it by covering it with contact paper. When the contact paper looked bad someone 'fixed' that by painting it red. When the contact paper started to disintegrate into a sticky gooey substance and the red paint was peeling off it, someone 'fixed' it by buying a vinyl table cloth and stapling it the table. Of course I found out all this in reverse order by peeling off each layer in hopes of somehow salvaging the original table top. But alas, it was unsalvageable! Thankfully, my very handy husband decided he could build a nice new wooden table top. It turned out great. He is very talented.

His next project is a mantle for our fireplace.

Advent:

We have many Advent traditions in our family. We are trying our best to squeeze them in despite the fact that we just unpacked all our Holiday items a week ago. This year it is especially fun coming up with new traditions for Keziah. We decided she should get to put the star on the tree this year. (Pardon the tangent, but I just have to share that we got this totally awesome, beautiful, really tall Douglas Fur for only $20. It would have easily been a $70 tree in Tennessee. Oh the advantage of living in the mountains where these things grow everywhere and you aren't paying for someone to truck them in.)

Anyway, we also seem to have a tradition of our traditions turning into hilarious stories. Right after this picture was taken, Michael Paul decided one more branch needed to be clipped off the top and thought he could do so easily enough that he didn't put Keziah down. As a result of his somewhat awkward one-handed snipping of the branch, he accidently snipped the cord of lights and shorted them all out. So we had to un-decorate the tree, buy new lights and start over the next day.

Party Plans: Not much to say here, just making preparations. But I'll give you a hint about the theme of the party: