Family Pictures

On a beautiful fall day at the lake my lovely and talented sister Cate took some family pictures for us.  Here are a few.

Merry Christmas to All :)

Angels and Nerds

For our church's Christmas concert Jayme and Nicole were angels.  So cute! And the big news here is that Jayme has started wearing her hair down!  What a different look for her!

I didn't get the best pictures of Nicole, but trust me, she was adorable!

We went to our first 3D movie and the kids took their glasses home.  Jayme had nerd day at school, so she wore her glasses and of course Nicole needed to copy her big sister.  She wore this for an entire morning... cutest little nerds I've ever seen!

Dining Room Before & After

Here was our dining room the day we moved in.  Gasp... white carpet under the table!  And I have 3 not so tidy children.  And gasp... brass fixtures.   One of the funniest things about our new place is these lights in the alcove.  They are actually kind of cute...minus the brass,  and we wondered where the light switch was, and then we discovered that they are actually candle holders, so we decided to remove them, until we saw that they weren't even painted behind!  Would you believe that "Granny" had HOT PINK walls... like the nastiest dusty rose colour you will have ever seen.  So we took the holders down and I used my trusty can of spray paint and voila, no more brass.  We put our old cabinet in the alcove for now (although Mark wanted the piano to go there... gasp)  We took down the mauve valance, we removed the white carpet and put down a beautiful dark hardwood floor.  

I would still like a buffet, and some art, and eventually a different table, but for now, I'm loving it!  

The chandelier enjoyed a coat of spray paint too and the old hurricanes replaced with super cute little silver shades!  Voila... brand new and not 90's dated chandelier!

Flashback

One thing I have always enjoyed is crossing things off lists.  This week with the Remembrance Day holiday and then Mark's Saturday off today, we were able to cross quite a few things off our house list.  Yippee!!  I have great "after" dining room pictures to post.  But this post is something altogether different.  In cleaning out our laundry room (which had become a dump place for everything without a place) I came across some old picture CDs.  Oh the memories!  I just have to post a couple from my sister Tricia's wedding, almost 5 years ago.  I sat here and literally laughed out loud at the memories.  The first thing I remembered is that my then 4 year old Jayme CUT HER OWN BANGS about 3 days before the first wedding she was ever a flower girl in!!  AHHH...  Look at them!  Good thing she was so so so cute with her long beautiful curls!

The next memory was that Brady kept saying he was a ring "tiger" instead of a ring "bear"  He wanted to growl while going down the aisle.  Look at his cute shaggy hair!
Here is a picture of him growling, and the last thing I remembered is that he used to point with his middle finger... what a kid!

Crafting

I'm passing down my new love, knitting to Jayme and Brady.  They are catching on quite well!  And bonus for them they will get a badge from BG club for learning to knit!

So concentrated :)

Here are a couple things I have recently made... a cute hat for Colie 

And a crocheted baby blanket for a cute new baby,  Adam, son of  a couple from our small group.

Bedroom Before and After

Tada, the bedroom! The only thing left to do is paint the brown dresser black, and get some art up above the black dresser.  So what's new?  The bedding, and dresser, both from Jysk, the head and foot board were sort of my creation, I saw a homemade canopy bed on a blog and loved it, and decided to try and adapt it to our space.  I designed it and had my dad put it together.  I sanded, primed, painted and clear coated  it in our garage.  Learned a few things along the way.  What I thought would be a weekend project turned out to be a 2 week project, but I love the end result, and it was only 60$ worth of material, you can't beat that!  I bought a couple of pillows (the black ones) and sewed the teal ones (OK, my Mom helped, but I'm learning!)  I had envisioned a bench at the end of the bed, but I think that that may take up too much space, so I will leave it for now.  I'm going to paint over the canvases from our old room (in the before pic) and put them up over the dresser.  So once that's done, and the dresser refinished in black, with new hardware, we will have a winner :)

Front Entrance

The colouring is better on the second photo, but we didn't actually paint or anything, we just put up a cute bench that I designed and upholstered (My Dad made the plans come to be) and Mark put up the mirror and I ordered the verse from a website called Lifewords.com.  It's a great site, you can order any wall decor words in any size, in any colour and in any font.  The flowers are from Urban Barn, so cute to add dimension to the wall :)  You will see them again in the bedroom... hopefully coming soon, just a couple more things to do until that room is finished.  

Tada... the after :)  Maybe a new rug would go better now, I'll keep my eyes open for something.  And of course normally there are a bunch of shoes that didn't quite make it into the closet, and usually a sweatshirt or two as well!

Coco's room

OK, first post on the new house.  I've taken pictures of each room, but I think I'm going to post them as before and afters as I fix them up.  So Colie's room is done and it's oh-so-cute!  My lovely and talented friend Shannon came and helped rearrange, organize and decorate. And now Colie actually keeps it clean and everything has it's place!  Luckily her room was a nice neutral colour and all it took was putting her already cute things in place.  My mom is still planning on making her a quilt for her bed, but yeah, one down, too many to count to go! 

Photo Shoot

I found these pictures on my camera one afternoon.  Apparently it was taken by some princesses and used for a creative mini photo shoot.  Maybe Jayme will take after a couple of her Aunties and be a photographer.

Brady's Teeth

For much of the summer Brady's two front teeth were wiggly, and not just a little wiggly, but hanging down, able to flip and turn and all kinds of grossness wiggly. The first one fell out on it's own in the car and that pesky second one hung on for a disgustingly long time.  Finally after a week at camp with me, we got home and he decided to let Daddy pull it, it didn't take much and he looks so cute with them gone!

Before

After

Summer part II

We had some wonderful times at our trailer this summer.  Even with selling the house and buying the new one, I was blessed to be there with the kids for about 5 weeks of the summer.  Mark had about 3 of those weeks with us!   Jayme and Brady had so many friends there and we sometimes didn't see them for hours at a time.  I thought forsure that Nicole would love her preschool chapel, but alas, she did not.  I even tried bribing her with ice cream and that didn't even work!  I had been reading her the Dr. Seuss book "Marvin K. Mooney Would You Please Go Now"  and she told my mom that it was a book about a boy who didn't want to go to prechool :)  Well there's always next year!

We actually had some warm weather this summer, so we were able to swim in the pool a lot and go tubing behind Grandpa's seadoo.  Both kids passed their swimming level and they really grew in their swimming ability and confidence.

Brady's crazy hair after a wild tube ride!

We did quite a bit of quadding and they loved the freedom of driving their own quad.  Jayme is quite cautious and would listen well to Mark and respect his rules.  Brady liked riding on the wild side a little more (especially when there was an audience!)  Thankfully we had angels watching over us and there were no accidents.

Like father, like son :)

What a great summer...aaahhhh 

Our summer: Part 1

Our summer started off with a bang!  Our May/June months were crazy: soccer 4 nights/week, plus all the prep we did to get our house ready to sell, we worked many late nights painting, cleaning, decluttering, oh my, just remembering it makes me tired.  But finally by the end of June, our house was cleaned, and staged ready for the open house, it looked so good we almost reconsidered selling, ALMOST!  We finished up and headed for the lake for a couple days to recoop and relax.  Then we drove home (and stopped in to see a cute new baby girl:  Jillian Patricia, born June 24th to Trish and Jacob)  That night we flew to TORONTO!! What an exciting way to start summer holidays!

Poor Jayme had a bit of air-sickness, but all in all we enjoyed the flight.  It was so good to have so much family on the plane with us!  When we landed all Nicole kept saying is: "I can't believe we're here, I can't believe we're finally here!"

We had a super duper amazing time staying at the always wonderful Chateau Paradise, with the two most amazing hosts in the world.  We enjoyed a beautiful wedding and had such a great time with our Letkeman family.  

The kids looked so cute in their wedding duds, and Jayme happily wore a skirt (I know miracle!)  They danced the night away at the reception.  They had a blast with their big cousins and aunts and uncles.  In fact just today they were reminiscing about the wedding and were talking about all the songs.  Brady wished there was a CD from the reception!

They had fun taking turns riding in the "short bus"

All in all it was a great vacation!!  Jayme says it will be a long time before she will fly again, but they are keen to drive to Toronto again very soon, I'm not sure how keen Mark and I are on that 24 hour drive, but we'll see!