Before & In Between

Living Room








I love love love the new paint color! It brightens up the rooms so much. I did not want yellow when I was picking out paint colors, but what we ended up with is pretty close to yellow and I can't believe how much I love it.

Kitchen




The kitchen actually got its first coat of green tonight...it's a little different than what we expected, but hopefully we will like it!

Our Bedroom




The paint is finished in here (I think it ended up getting painted the same color that it was before), but we obviously have a mess to clean up. And by the way, we did finally get matching lamps to replace the lamps that each of us have had since we were 12. Seriously. :) Maybe someday we will get bedroom furniture!

Our Bathroom




Wallpaper is off!

Will's Room




What a difference!

Guest Bathroom


Unfortunately I did not take a before picture of the lovely wallpaper that was in this bathroom, but I wanted to show this in between picture anyway because I LOVE this mirror.

As of tonight, all of the walls officially have at least their first coat of the new colors...so there is an end in sight! The game room and office aren't pictured above but they have been finished for awhile. They were just taped off and not acessible when I took the pictures. Each day it looks more and more like OUR house.

OCD?

I think Will may have picked up some OCD tendencies from his daddy...what do you think?

Here are a few other cute videos from the last month or so...



Will was having some fun with the pieces of our favorite board game - Settlers of Catan.



Like any kid his age, Will says "no" quite often...Chris likes to try to teach him to say "yes" instead...his version of "yes" is pretty cute.



This one is from tonight. My parent's cd player is right at Will's level and he knows that there is always a cd in there that he wants to listen to (I guess my parents play it for him everytime he is over) and he turns it on all by himself at least a few times a day. The cd is Frontline and there is a song on there with lyrics that say, "If you've been blessed throw your fist like this..." Apparently, my parents have also taught him the moves. :) The song that is playing in the video is not the same song...but I just wanted fill you in on where the moves came from. The boy can dance for sure. :)

Homeless

Well, the truth is we are not homeless. In fact, we owned two houses for about a week. But I sure am starting to feel homeless since we aren't actually living in the new house yet. Hopefully the painter will be done soon and we can live in our house! If it were just Chris and me, we'd be living there...but it's really not kid friendly right now with paper taped to the floor, plastic covering all of our furniture, and all of the electrical outlets exposed. :) We do feel lucky to have family to stay with during this time. A lot of people wouldn't have that luxury...and it is quite cozy staying with my parents.

I did freak out a little bit about the paint color I chose for the whole house! If you remember, I had chosen Ivoire...but it turned out looking really light on the walls and almost the same color as the trim - not good. So I decided to go a shade darker to Blonde - it looks yellow in the rooms that have been painted so far. I never thought I would want yellow, especially after we repainted over yellow in our last house. We repainted the entire house, even the ceilings were painted yellow and we repainted the ceilings! However, I really do like it...it just goes with the look of the house, I think.



This is the Sherwin Williams simulation of the Blonde. The main living areas haven't been painted yet, so I am really just hoping that I love it when it goes up. I am also hoping that I love the green for the kitchen!

We are getting really excited about living in our new house....I think we will really appreciate it after not having our own house to live in for a couple of weeks. It is slowly starting to look like a house now that some of the rooms are finished and we're getting things set up the way they are supposed to be. I am on the hunt for a couch for our gameroom, bar stools, rugs, and a breakfast table. Brandi suggested a round breakfast table and I think that sounds like a pretty good idea....so let me know if you see a really good deal on any of these items!

Since we were working on the house over the weekend, we didn't do anything for Valentine's Day. So last night we went out to Pei Wei and to see He's Just Not That Into You. The main storyline was cute, but a lot of the other stuff in the movie literally made me cringe and left a bad impression overall. Gosh, I seriously hope most people don't view relationships the way the movie portrays...it's just...well, depressing and sad. Has anyone else seen it? What are your thoughts?

Oh, and have I mentioned how awesome all of our friends and family are for helping us move?? Everyone showed up to our old house at 2 on Sunday and I think everyone was gone by 5....it was a seriously fast move. I think we had 5 trucks and a trailer....none of which we own....and many more people. We are so blessed!!

It happens.

Last night Will pooped in the bath tub for the first time. I was starting to think that I was one of the lucky ones that it wouldn't happen to...especially since I am rarely the one that gives him a bath. It was actually a little bit funny...I knew it was about to happen and I really wanted to grab him and set him on the toilet. I thought it would be a great learning experience...but he wouldn't let me touch him. Ater it happened, we both freaked out...he wanted out of the tub immediately so I took him out and made Chris clean up the mess.



I did finally take some 18-month pictures of him. He is getting really difficult to take pictures of and that is why I (sadly) don't try very often anymore. At 18-months, Will was almost 24 pounds (20th percentile) and almost 31 inches (10th percentile). He does seem to be growing though!

He has definitely gotten some personality over the last few months. He loves to make us laugh and he loves to make himself laugh. He has also gotten really good and hugging and kissing. He's becoming more and more of a mama's boy and I have to say that I love it.



He is obsessed with shoes and wants to have them on as soon as he wakes up in the morning. Literally the first thing he says when we pick him up out of his crib in morning is "shoe?"...and he prefers everyone else to have their shoes on too.

His form of dealing with discipline is acting like he did nothing wrong. When he gets time out, we hold his hands together and count to 10. When we do this, he will not look us in the eye and will just look around the room like nothing is happening. Or when we say "No!" he'll look at us like he is confused. How does he know how to do this kind of stuff already?

He is a very picky eater. But the strange thing is that he doesn't have certain things that he will always eat. It changes from day to day. So you pretty much have to go through everything in the refrigerator at every meal time to find something he will eat. It has been really bad lately and it's the worst when we're at home. I think because he knows there are options at home. Or maybe he just thinks it's fun to watch me pull everything we have out of the refrigerator?

I'm sure there are some other updates I should write about, but I can't think of any now. And since I started this post several days ago, I'm ready to be done with it. I'll have to add more Will stories as they come in.

I'm lovin' it.

I really loathe McDonald's as everyone in my family knows (another story for another day...but probably not). I mean every once in awhile I might get just a plain cheeseburger from there and by every once in awhile, I mean once every few years.

Anyway, after I dropped Will off at PDO this morning I had a few minutes to kill before my workout and I remembered that I hadn't eaten breakfast. A donut (or two) crossed my mind, but I was on my way to workout so that just didn't seem quite right.

I have no idea how this happened, but the McDonald's parfait popped into my head. My mom told me about it a long long time ago. So of course I pulled up my new app Lose It! on my handy dandy iphone just to make sure there weren't a ton of calories...only 156 with granola! The thought of fruit from McDonald's did make me want to gag a little bit, but I thought I might as well try it out. To my surprise, it was really quite good and only $1.08 with tax! And the fruit was actually frozen fruit...which didn't taste as good as fresh fruit, but I'm thinking that it tasted better than "fresh" fruit from McDonald's would have tasted. To say "I'm lovin it" might be a stretch, but for a McDonald's hater like myself to say it was good, is saying a lot!

Oh, and if you have an iphone you must install the Lose it! app. It's awesome!! You can keep track of your food and exercise...and it already has every food on there (even the McDonald's parfait!). I've been meaning to install it, but just remembered last night and I just think it is great already. It even lets you set your goal and figures out your allowed calories in a day in order to meet your goal. If you go over, it tells you and highlights the number in red. I think this could really motivate me.

In other news, we are moving in about a week and a half! Our house is SOLD and we should be closing on our new house Monday! I should probably start packing now....