Snow Day

Wednesday night at 9 pm I got a text from the school district saying there was no school on Thursday due to snow. When the girls woke up in the morning I told them the good news and they wanted to run outside right away. So I let them...

Something is missing from this Snow Day picture

 The snow took it's sweet time. But my girls were more than happy to ice skate for awhile.

 Then we headed to Lark's house so her and I could take turns going for a run. I went first and it started snowing pretty good towards the end. By the time I walked in her house and she got ready for her turn, the snow had absolutely dumped. So instead she did a workout inside and the kids played outside.

 We went home and drove up to the neighborhood kids playing and this beautiful site:

Straight out of a movie

 The girls had a blast. They did a snow ball fight with the other kids, pulled each other on sleds, and just had a grand old time. I could not get them inside, despite the frigid temperatures.

Finally at 4:30 pm I bribed them with a movie and popcorn. It was such a fabulous day and the girls were in heaven. Grateful we got some good snow already this year!

Thanksgiving

We got to enjoy a nice long weekend down in Albany for Thanksgiving and the big Civil War game between OSU and UofO.

We try to cram as much as we can into our trips to Albany/Corvallis. We thought with a longer trip it would be easy but man does time fly by!

We did Thanksgiving, Black Friday shopping (Brian), work (me), tailgating, Beaver game (Brian), and then come Sunday we were exhausted. But it was awesome and we all had a fabulous time.

 Thanksgiving was at my Dad's this year and Lance and Kayla came as well.

I love this picture, cousin love and a glowing Kayla

 We had such a good time at my Dad's...girls played and us adults relaxed.

Abby and Bria

Family of 3!

Ames is slightly loved ;)

Oh my goodness I love him! Excuse my big mouth...he's so cute I couldn't resist.

We are obviously the more attractive of the siblings

Love my Kayla!

Safe to say my Dad was in Grandpa Heaven with so many of his grandkids running around

Brian carving the turkey

Cassidy and the girls

Love me some Brian dimples!

It was a delicious meal filled with lots of love and laughter...pretty perfect.

Quality family time

I had to snap this picture because it was a perfect Sunday evening movie night :)

 The girls' friend Presleight had her 7th birthday party at her house and the girls were ecstatic when Ariel and Rapunzel showed up...

*I didn't get a pic with Bria and the Princess's because she was too busy playing during the photo op!

It was so cute watching the girls sit so still and be so enthralled with Ariel's story

 And of course there was face painting!

 It was a great party and the girls thoroughly enjoyed themselves!

Reese had her Thanksgiving program and it was the cutest little thing. They sang so many songs and I was so impressed with how much they remembered.

 Before Brian left on his business trip we were able to go to Zoo lights and Grammy and Aunt Heather came too! It was wonderful to do it as a family, even if the rain started coming down pretty hard at one point and we were all freezing.

Riding on the Zoo Train

 Grateful we can do these kinds of things, Zoo lights are pretty awesome.

Carousal ride

Bring on Christmas!

 We did something we never thought we would do....we had our tree up before Thanksgiving.
Gasp!
I know, we are crazy. But I don't regret it one bit. A large reason for us doing it so early was because Brian will be traveling the first 3 weekends in December, which sucks. So we took the opportunity to start Christmas a little early this year and try and get in some good quality family Holiday time. We did the tree and Brian did the lights outside as well.

Our front window is THE perfect place for a Christmas tree

I've also been doing Christmas shopping since I will be a single mama for awhile and it will be tough to get that done. I have just a few more things to get for the girls and then they are done, wahoo! If only I was so on top of our Christmas card this year...

More house pics!

We have been plugging right along on house projects. Some are bigger than others, some are more rewarding than others, and some are a pain in the arse and come with more problems and projects than originally thought. But that's alright, we are still over the moon with our house and grateful to be home owners.

So, our downstairs has a half bath and it needs a little TLC. It's not complete yet, we need a new mirror and floating shelves will be going up behind the toilet, but the fresh coat of paint and new electrical outlets made such an improvement.

Before/during

After!

It looks like two different paint colors but it's just the lighting. We went with harbor grey from Benjamin moore.

While I was painting, Brian was freshening up our outside and making it look amazing. Pressure washing makes such a big difference and since our house sat for 3 years without any TLC it needed a good bath.

So much moss

 And now she's all pretty and shiny!

It looked so good that Brian decided why stop there? The next day he did the back...

 The before pictures don't even show just how bad it was.

Working hard

I don't have a before picture of the pool house but it was pretty dirty

 And after...

So pretty!

The pool and hot tub. Whew, they are going to be a ton of work to get clean and up and running. We go back and forth between hiring someone to do all of it, and trying to do some of the cleaning ourselves. Before it can be drained, we have to scoop the 2 feet of disgusting debris off the bottom. Not just debris, oh no, that would be too easy. There are dead frogs and dead fish as well. How did the fish get there? Well, for most of the 3 years it sat, the cover was not on. In fact, they only put the cover on back in June. So the once beautiful pool began to turn into a pond, which brought the mosquitos. Obviously the neighbors were not thrilled so they called the county and the county brought out fish to eat the mosquitos. All this to say, our pool is in need of major work. We are hoping by this spring we can start on it and then have it up and running by summer. It will feel really good to get it done because it's definitely an eye sore right now.