nesting

My goal was to get this post out by January 8, 2010, but Lydia’s nursery wasn’t quite finished until now.

No theme, just the colors and motifs that we liked.

An advantage to not finishing the room until after Lydia’s birth: we can have pictures of her up on the wall :)

The glider was a hand-me-down from Lydia’s cousins. I recovered it with a neutral off-white fabric that can be removed for laundering. Turns out, it hides spit-up stains perfectly!

Lots of books we’ve begun cracking open lately…

Her first personalized gift… a cute Noah’s Ark piggy bank!

I found this cute butterfly fabric on clearance last fall and made some pillows over Christmas break.

We were planning on painting a cute little design over her crib, but when January rolled around and nothing was done, we decided to buy this stick-on wall decal from an etsy shop.

Can you tell what I’ve been working on lately…?! ;)

Actually great news- Lydia slept through the night last night!! From 9pm till 5am we didn’t hear a peep from her! We’ll see if that was just a fluke or if she can keep that going from now on…!?

home for Christmas

With baby Hunter’s arrival quickly approaching, we are spending Christmas and New Years close to home this year :)

We hung our little girl’s first ornament, a “Superbaby” onesie

Our daddy, mommy, and baby gifts from Grandma Bond:

Our Christmas present to each other this year is a digital SLR camera!! It’s so cool!! I still need to read the manual to figure everything out. So far, I can turn it on and take an auto focus picture, but that’s about it!!

Adam has figured out quite a bit this last week. Check out some of the cool photos he’s taken:

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Mom and Dad drove in from CT to spend the next several weeks out in the midwest visiting their 6 (soon to be 7) grandkids!!    

We had a pre-Christmas dinner with Robin, Jon and the kids here on Saturday. It was a fun excuse to get out our fancy china from Grandma Bond :)

Merry Christmas everyone!! Hope you enjoy sweet time with family and friends, but most of all reflect on the most amazing gift ever given: our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ!

making room

In order to start making room for our little girl to enter our world (and our condo), we decided to find a bookcase to store all our books, magazines, college textbooks, notes, albums and craft supplies And believe it or not, we did it!

We got his huge bookcase from IKEA and we put behind the couch. It puts it out of the way and only pushed things into the living room by a couple extra inches. Adam built a bench to put it on so it has even more store behind the couch for things we don’t often use. (Don't worry, it’s secured well to the wall and it not going anywhere!)

I’ve finished some sewing projects: I finally made curtains for the living room windows…

and some pillows to match.

If you’re wondering what Adam is reading… he got a Kindle for his birthday last month! It’s a small and VERY thin reading device that looks just like a real book page.

It’s really cool- so compact and lightweight! Perfect for taking on the train and on long trips and he can store thousands of books on it. I wish they had these when I was in college so I didn’t have to lug all those books around!

Well- I’m off to make the weekend to-do list which will include finishing the last 3% of the bathroom (hopefully??), and then moving on to plan out the nursery!! Yay!!

97% done!

Here are some pictures of our recent progress!!
We went a bit crazy in the last few days of getting it fully functional before family arrived:



I was so happy when we had finally made our last major purchase for the bathroom...



Adam really wanted to get a "comfort height" (a.k.a handicap) toilet. It's 2 inches taller than normal toilets. He loves it, but my feet almost dangle from it because it's so tall!



And here's the (nearly) finished product!!







Inside the shower is a nice niche for bottles and soap.



I think the tiling is my favorite part of all of it :)



And every blogger has to have one of these shots, right?



The roomy storage in the medicine cabinet and baskets allowed us to free up 2-3 shelves in one of our hall closets.



Close-up of the faucet.



This picture reminds me of an intriguing question I read in a blog post a while back:

Are you a "sink" or a "faucet" Christian?

“Sink Christians” view salvation like they would a sink. The water of salvation flows into the sink so that Christians can soak up all the benefits: eternal life, assurance in the present, strength in times of trial. Those who adopt this mindset concentrate solely on what the Bible says God has done and will do for them.

“Faucet Christians” view salvation differently. They look at the world as the sink and themselves as the faucet. The blessings of salvation flow to them in order to flow through them out to the wider world. They rightly see that the Bible describes salvation as something that God not only does for them, but also through them.

I know I definitely need to have more of a "wider world" perspective and not just in my own church or community of friends, but in the world I bump shoulders with on the street, in the store, on the train, etc.



I think we'll take a break from remodeling for a little while and start working on being better "faucets"!


**** Update!!*****
I realized I didn't add a "before" picture, so here it is!! The layout is the same, but otherwise quite different, huh!?



The other 3% includes some touch-up painting and building the baseboard heating covers! (same thing that's still not done in the kitchen!!) We're also thinking about getting a curved shower curtain rod :)

hunting

We have a little furry problem in our attic...



but we also have a lean mean (somewhat scared) marksman at hand.



They both think they're all that...





The tall one went hunting last weekend (with a friend's bb gun).



The furry one was nowhere to be found.
But the tall one did some target practice and is all set for their next encounter...



So you better watch out, little furry one!!



disclaimer: no humans or animals have been injured in the creation of this blog post.... yet.

to be continued... ;)

making progress

It's starting to look like a bathroom!!



After installing new insulation in the outer walls, we put up drywall and cement board around the shower.



Then we had to mud/Spackle all the joints. Peter came over and helped us for a while.



And Erica and the kids came to hang out for a quick lunch/guitar hero :)



Thanks again, Hangs, for all your help!!! You guys are the best!



Soooo many decisions to make about colors and tile...



The day we were going to start tiling (Wednesday) we realized we were WAY short on tile, so we had to wait till Friday to get more in. Finally, this past Saturday we started in on tiling. Once we got up about halfway, we realized the accent pieces we picked out did not go at all with the wall tile! So back to home depot we went to pick out more. (The problem was the tile we ordered has some variation in color from what we picked out in the store...)

Here's Adam cutting tile in the snow on Sunday!! It's a wet, yucky, and dangerous job, but he's doing great!



While he measured and cut tile, mixed mortar, and made dozens of trips up and down two flights of stairs, I was upstairs spreading mortar and laying the tile. Here's a sneak peek of it:



The wall tile is almost done, we'll just need to finish the shelf and grout. Then, we move on to the floor tile.



It's coming along slowly but surely! Our goal now is to finish before the warmer weather of spring/summer arrives for good!! (We got snow this past week, so we're doing ok!) ;)