Easter

Easter weekend was lots of fun. I had been optimistic that it would be warm on Easter because it was at the end of April this year, but it was still pretty chilly. We went to an egg hunt at church on Saturday, which was cold but fun for Ruth. On Sunday, Ruth and Eva received their treat baskets, and we took pictures of the girls' new Easter dresses before we headed off to church.

After church, we headed straight to Grandma and Grandpa Christensen's farm for another Easter egg hunt and a prime rib dinner. Ruth loved playing with her cousins. We stayed the night in the little house Jenny (Tony's sister) and her girls just moved into. They have put so much work into that house, and it will be a wonderful space for her family.

Lesson learned during playtime: I guess Crayola makes colored bubbles now. DON'T buy them unless your kids are perfectly neat and clean and never splash bubbles on themselves or others. Seriously. While we were at Jenny's house, the girls opened their colored bubbles, and they made a HUGE mess. It didn't take them long to start flinging bubbles at each other. All of the girls had to take a shower when they came inside, and some of them still had colored streaks in their hair afterward.

This was only the beginning of the mess for Ruthie.

Chaos ensued.

Monday morning the girls didn't have school so Tony took them fishing at a little lake near Jenny's house. They caught six fish, and Ruth had a fun time throwing rocks in the lake.

Easter was a lot more fun this year since Ruth was old enough to appreciate all the celebration. We started our garden over the weekend (another blog post for maybe later this week), and Tony has this week off. Big repairs/updates to our house will be happening this week! I'm excited!

Spring has sprung

I'm so happy that spring is here! We have had a busy couple of weeks, and things aren't looking like they will slow down anytime soon. Here is what's new at our house:

1. We are getting ready to plant our garden. Last year's gardening adventure was difficult, as our garden was easily overrun with weeds and difficult to maintain. This year, we are planting a square-foot garden using the method in this book:
Basically, you plant seeds in raised beds divided into square feet instead of rows. You also use "Mel's Mix," which creates the perfect, weed-free soil. I'll be sure to make some individual blog posts about our garden as we get it put together so you know how it goes.

2. We had a leaky dishwasher. It was leaking for who knows how long, and we discovered it earlier this week. We didn't know it right away because the leak was very slow, and the vinyl flooring in our kitchen doesn't go underneath the cabinets. The inside of our cabinets and part of our subfloor are water damaged. This has meant bleaching and fans in our kitchen. We called the insurance company, and I'm not quite sure if that was the right thing to do. But an adjuster came out and is supposed to let us know today if insurance will pay for any of the costs. (Hopefully they will not just drop us, which is my biggest fear.) No matter what, a new kitchen floor and cabinets will be in order in the coming months. We will keep you updated.

3. Our babies are cute as ever! Ruth is now aware that her birthday is coming, and she likes to talk about having balloon cupcakes with blue frosting (she came up with that). Eva is now more than 6 months old, and she is in the 90th percentile for her height and 80th for her weight. She is already outgrowing some of her 6-9 month clothes. Here are some pics:

(styling by Tony)

(Ruth with her baby doll, whom she has creatively named "Baby Eva.")

(Sweet sisters.)

Happy Easter weekend!

Update (finally)

Hello, all. Here is a long overdue update:

1. Eva "Diva" (what I affectionately call her) is 5 months old! She is BIG! I think she is in the 80th percentile for her weight and 90th for her height. She has outgrown her 3-6 month clothes. She is my smiley, easygoing baby.
2. Ruth is registered for preschool in the fall. She will be attending A is for Art in Benson on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Her friend Jack (the one I will be babysitting until August) will be attending with her. They are so excited to be going to school together. I cannot believe I have a child who is old enough to be in preschool. Where does the time go?
3. I am doing Weight Watchers online and have lost 4 lbs in the last week. Woot! Tony and I are also gearing up to train for the Bill Seymour Half Marathon (in Grand Island) in September.
4. Tony is almost done with is undergrad degree!!!!!!!!!! This is super exciting. He is halfway through his last full-time semester. He applied for graduation last week and should be completely finished by either August or December.
5. Eva has no more binkies. She is sleeping better than ever.
6. Home improvements are continuing. We took down the ugly wallpaper in the living room and have repaired the damaged walls. Next up is sanding, priming and painting.
7. Tax return money is coming! That means more home improvements: finishing the dining room, bathroom and some landscaping.
8. We got a new cat. His name is Zane. He likes to sleep on my dining room table and attack my feet at night. But he is a good cat and tolerates the toddlers very well.

And here are some happy pictures to send you on your way.

Christmas and home improvement adventures

I know this post is very late. But better late than never!

We had a wonderful Christmas here. Opening Christmas presents became a week-long thing, though, with opening presents from grandparents on Sunday and Monday, presents from aunts and uncles on Friday and Santa's arrival on Saturday. We were blessed with some great gifts -- I got a stand mixer, some earrings and lots of other neat things. Santa brought Tony and I fly fishing poles and reels. Ruthie got some Lego blocks, a Princess kitchen, books, and lots of other toys and clothes. Eva got a tummy time mat, books and clothes.



Ruth and Jack also spent some time decorating graham cracker houses before Christmas. They did a great job.
And here is just a cute picture of them playing together. Jack is such a good sport. :)


Christmas is such a wonderful, magical time, especially for children, and now I can't wait for it to come around again this year!

And now for our home improvement adventures...
We decided to take down the wood paneling in the dining room. We did it on a whim one night as a "date" of sorts. It ended up being a fairly stressful date. Taking down the paneling was easy enough. It's repairing the walls underneath that will be stressful.



The previous owners did a really messy job when they cut the bar area into the kitchen. Since our walls are all lath and plaster, we will have to tear down and patch up what we can with drywall. But since there is probably lead paint in the walls of our 101-year-old house, we need to do it on a day when the girls and I can leave the house and Tony can spend the day doing demo, drywall, and cleanup work.

We also found another surprise under the paneling....

Mr. Moldy-mold made an appearance under the windowsill.
The mold was under the oldest window in our house (it is seriously extremely old and falling apart), so chances are good that it formed because the window is leaking. I cleaned up the mold with some household cleaners and we have plans to replace all three windows along the window seat. We are also planning on tearing out the window seat and completely replacing it along with the small section of wall that was moldy. There is no insulation under the window seat, and that area of the house is very drafty.

However, it's cold out, in case you haven't noticed. So the dining room project is on hold until it warms up a bit and we can get the windows replaced. *sigh* If you come over, please forgive my ugly dining room.

Here is a before:


And after:


We left the paneling up on the top part of the wall temporarily, because there are chunks of wall missing underneath up there, too. We will take the paneling down when Tony's ready to do the demolition and drywall.

In the meantime, we are going to tear down some wallpaper and paint the living room. Tony even went out and bought some paint and supplies. I'm incredibly indecisive about paint colors. It drives Tony a little nuts. I can't decide what color to paint the walls, and I also can't decide if I should leave the wood trim unpainted or paint it white. Right now I'm leaning toward painting the walls a basic taupe-brown color and painting the trim white. So if you have any feedback on what color you think I should paint my living room and whether or not I should paint the trim, let me know. :D If you want to see a pic of our living room for reference, click on this post.

Also, our little baby Eva is getting big! She is 3 months old now! My, how the time flies.


I think that's all for today. Tomorrow I'll post about our 10 days of real food challenge, which ends today!

What's new?

Hello. It's Sunday and I thought I'd post a short update. I was going to post photos of Tony's projects he's completed around the house so far, but unfortunately our camera is dead. :-( It will have to wait for another day -- hopefully tomorrow if I remember to charge the battery.

The snow is finally melting, and our spirits are lifting! The temps have been in the 40s and 50s this week and should stay that way next week. We can see patches of our yard! Honestly, some spots don't look so good. They will probably have to be weeded really well and re-seeded. There's a lot of landscaping work to do. We live on a street that gets a lot of foot traffic, and there seems to be a lot of trash in our front yard near the sidewalk, so we will have to go out and pick that up this week.

We are making some progress on our decisions about how to decorate the house. We are going to take down the paneling in the dining room, although it probably won't happen for a while (probably this summer). We are also going to paint the living room a basic neutral taupe color and get some fun fabric for curtains and pillows. I think we'll paint the upstairs a nice cream color and possibly add an accent wall. That's about as far as we've gotten. :) We are also looking forward to a total redo of the bathroom. We were hoping to do it this month but probably won't get to it. Right now we're trying to decide whether or not to replace the tub, which is in okay shape but it's aluminum and pretty shallow. A new tub and liner will easily double the cost of our project, so we'll just have to wait and see how rich we are when we go to buy materials. :) The idea of a nice, deep soaker tub does sound good right about now, though...

We still have some unpacking to do. I need to get it done this week because we have company coming into town on Saturday. We are excited to show our house to some good friends!

Tony has one week to go until Spring Break. Boy, does he need a bit of a break. Poor guy works his bummy off. And then in three weeks we are going to Walt Disney World!!! We've been so busy with other stuff that it really hasn't sunk in yet. But we could really use a vacation, and we are SUPER EXCITED to see all of our family! I'm sure I'll blog more about it in coming weeks.

As for me, I've been pooped and not feeling great. I have to eat every couple of hours or I feel nauseated. I think I'm going to have to start working a nap into my afternoon routine because I'm exhausted by 8:30 or 9 p.m. every night. I've lost my workout routine since we moved, so I'm going to try to get back into that this week. However, I have started using this nifty page from SparkPeople called BabyFit.com to track my nutrition and set fitness goals. I've been doing well with my calories so far. I find that I actually have to make an effort to eat enough calories for the day. If only it were like that when I'm not pregnant!

More pictures and updates to come this week!

A White Christmas

Hello, everyone. Christmas has come and gone, and it was a year to remember. I don't think I can adequately explain on here how stressful this Christmas was for me, mostly because of our home buying process and issues related to that, as well as last minute Christmas shopping and a cold/flu bug that we just can't seem to get out of the house. However, I can say that we have seen so many miraculous things this Christmas, I am amazed. I just know that Heavenly Father answers prayers and gives us what we need.

With that said, we had a wonderful Christmas. It all began on Dec. 23, when Santa visited my parents' house. He brought Tony and I a 26" flat-screen LCD TV! We were speechless. Here it is all set up in our basement:

Tony also got a new power drill and some tools, while I got a sweater, necklace and a few other items. Ruth got a lot of clothes, a book, a teddy bear and this neat toy that's too hard to describe:


She loves that toy. Then, on Christmas Eve we went and visited my Dad's family out in West Omaha. In case you haven't heard, we had a big blizzard here, and it started Christmas Eve. There were some giant snow drifts around, but luckily my parents own two four-wheel drive vehicles and let us ride in one on our way out to visit family. Once again, Ruth got a ton of clothes and toys while we were out there.

Christmas morning came, and Santa had made a stop at our house.


Tony got some new ties, the new Spanish translation of the Bible, and a giant battery-powered Nerf tommy gun. Ruth got A TON of stuff from Santa and Grandma Christensen, including a Nintendo Wii, wood blocks, a Zhu Zhu Pet, books, a snow globe, Christmas ornaments, etc. I got a George Foreman Grill and Pampered Toes. Also, Grandma and Grandpa Gardner sent Ruth a beautiful quilt, dress and pillowcase and a wonderful movie compilation of photos from our trip to Utah.

That day we were supposed to go over to visit Tony's mom, but because of the blizzard that was still taking place, we weren't able to make it out there. It was disappointing. Since my parents live a couple of blocks away, we borrowed the Jeep overnight and had to snake our way through the neighborhood to find the best streets to get to my parents' house. We ended up spending the day with my Mom, Dad and younger brother and eating our way through part of a prime rib roast. Since my Mom's side of the family couldn't make it on Christmas, yesterday my parents had everyone over to enjoy more food and good company. Our Christmas ended up being four days long! Now, I feel like we need a bigger house just to hold all of our stuff! I think this week I will go through the toys and whatnot and get bags ready to take to the thrift store.

We are so very grateful for all that we received for Christmas, including the chance to see and talk to family and friends. And we are especially thankful for the opportunity to reflect on the Savior.

The snow was so bad that they canceled all church meetings today except for the 1 p.m. Sacrament meeting. It's pretty rare for them to cancel church! Since I'm not feeling well (I'm the last to be hit by the bug circulating through our house), we are just going to stay home and relax.
Here is the view outside our front door. In case you can't tell, we got well over a foot of snow (on top of the snow that fell a couple of weeks ago).

I hope you all had a wonderful, safe Christmas and are able to reflect on 2009 as you get ready for a fresh start in 2010! I'll post my year in review in a couple of days!

Mischief Managed

I made beans and rice for dinner last night. This is Ruth's post-dinner shot. You can't see it from this photo, but she basically dumped her whole plate of beans and rice on the floor and managed to get some on the wall, too. She's shirtless because she was wearing a white shirt, and I took it off before dinner so she didn't stain it. She also decided to take out her ponytail during dinner, resulting in the mohawk/bed-head mess you see. She smiled for the photo, so you can see her two little teeth. :) Can you say blackmail material? :D Oh, how I love her!

In other news, we have found a cosigner for our house! It's very exciting. We are in no hurry to find a house because our lease isn't up until the end of February, but we will probably meet with a real estate agent next week. We're looking forward to taking advantage of the $8,000 first-time homebuyer tax credit, assuming they pass it. We hope we can find something worth buying in our price range. The amount we're looking at spending would make our total mortgage payment (including taxes, insurance, etc.) cheaper than our current rent payment. Here is a picture of one of the houses we are looking at:


The idea of buying a house and making it our own is very exciting! It makes me want to buy up a whole bunch of copies of Better Homes & Gardens and get decorating ideas. For those of you who have already bought a house, do you have any tips? Is there something you wish you had known when you went through the process, or is there something you wish you would've done differently?

Thanks for your help. And happy Halloween Eve! We're going to a Trunk-or-Treat and Halloween Party at church tonight, so I'll post photos of Ruth in her costume tomorrow.

-Meredith