Painting and cleaning

Well, they finished the work at our house.

While the furniture was rearranged, and plastic still up, we decided to paint some walls ourselves, over the course of a few days.

We painted the kitchen an olive green.

Then we painted an accent wall in the living room a light tan:

We started painting the bathroom this color:

We quickly realized our mistake when it looked like we used mustard to paint with, so we changed it to a light blue instead:

We still want to paint a little bit more, but we're taking a break for now.  Besides that, we've been trying to clean up after all of our repairs.  With all of the drywall that they did, they left a layer of dust everywhere.  We still haven't brought back in half of our stuff from the garage where we moved it during the repairs either.

-and I can't blame this one on the workers, but have you ever seen a mismatched sock pile this big?  I had a few different bags of socks without a mate, and I decided to finally combine them and find some matching pairs.  This gives you a clue at how efficient I am at staying on top of household chores (not).

Ski Utah & home sweet home

We saw a lot of snow in UT.

That was Blair and my brother one morning after they helped that car get un-stuck.

When we went skiing, there was a pile of snow on our car after:

It was so cold and windy too that day.  I was so surprised Xander liked it.

Who wants to ski in 

this?

Xander and Blair afterward.

What a big boy, going skiing for the 1st time.

My kids love the snow so much.  Here was Will standing like an inch from the door, ready to go out because my dad told him he was going to pull him on a sled.

Brrrrr.  After remembering all that cold, I'd better put some warmer memories up:

Here are all the grandkids getting cozy with grandma Lafaunda.

Will left his mark on my mom's fudge.  What a stinker.

We went with my family to go see the trains at a neighbor's house.  The boys LOVED it.

Now that we're back home, we're in the middle of a disaster.  The builder of the homes here has found that they need to fix some fittings on the pipes, or they break and cause floods (remember our flood back in August?- yeah, it's the same thing)  So we're having our home done right now.

Here's our house (the war zone):

Upstairs.

Looking down.

Even the garage.

After covering everything with plastic, they started cutting holes in the wall everywhere!

Holes, 

holes, 

and more holes.

Yep.  Here are the pieces they cut out.  They told me to plan on like 50 holes in the wall.

We'll be dealing with this until the end of the week at least, so we've been trying to stay away from our house. Luckily a few of our friends have let us come over and hang out.

Merry Christmas

We wish you a Merry Christmas!



-From our family to yours.


I was a little worried that it wasn't going to seem much like Christmas a few weeks ago...


But it cooled off in NV too soon after, and we went and saw some Christmas lights to get us in the spirit.
We went to a Christmas fair in Henderson, and they had some snow shipped in for the kids to play in.

But then Henderson got some real snow of it's own.

...and UT had a white Christmas for sure. Xander went skiing for the 1st time last Monday. He says he wants to go again, so that's a good sign!