Cute

Pinky dressed herself today! She came in after her bath and had on this dress (it's actually the slip for another dress that goes over the top of it), she also has it on inside out, but she was so proud!!
It's almost 2 in the afternoon and she's still wearing it. I don't have the heart to make her change even though it looks like a rag on her!

Poor car...

So hubby woke up this morning (Sunday) to make a breakfast run (which he does on the weekends... he's so awesome!) And he discovers our car... or MY car in shreds! I drive (drove) a Chrysler 300C HEMI. It was an awesome car!!!!! It was super fast, it had all the bells and whistles you'd expect in a luxury car... and now it is no more! It was a 2007 and we had only had less then a year.

The car was dented up, the windows were smashed (not all the way broken though... but they tried), Black spray paint all over the body and the windows and mirrors, the seats were all slashed up, the seatbelts cut, the GPS ripped out of the dashboard and dashboard mangled, spray paint all over the INSIDE, slashed interior, slashed tires, sugar (or salt) in the gas tank, gasoline dumped into the shredded dashboard, and a jug of window cleaner fluid dumped all over the back. Hmmm, that's all I can remember off the top of my head! Here are some pictures...
Here is exactly what my car looked like, I got this picture from the website to illustrate a 'before'

Here's the after...

This also is from the website, and also exactly what my interior looked like (same color too)

after: the ripped out the GPS unit...

Here's a picture of the back seat...

The aftermath!

Christmas was of course super fun! I feel like this year was better then previous years. We really made an effort this year not to just buy crap for the sake of having stuff to open and that will get thrown away in a month. So, everything this year was good quality stuff that hopefully will be around awhile. We were surrounded by family all day. On Christmas Eve night we spent it at the inlaws. My father in law reads the Christmas story every year and the kids act it out with one of the many nativity sets around their home. They love that! Then, I prepared Christmas breakfast at my place and everyone came over in the morning. Then we had Christmas dinner at my moms place. It was all so good, Mmmm... two days of yummy food!!
Here are a few pictures:
Here is Belle opening a game.


Here is Pinky trying on her dinosaur towel (she LOVES dinosaurs... she prefers them to dolls!)

Here is Pinky and I

Here is daddy and Belle


Now that it's over though, I'm ready to take down all the decorations and have a normal house again. Close out Christmas 2008... goodbye, you were good to us this year!!!

Neat things

Okay, so our new windows were installed a few days ago. They look so... NEW and WHITE! I love them!! I was joking with hubby about how clear everything looks outside now. He said it's like having HD windows, LOL!

A neat thing happened today! I was cleaning the master bedroom before school started. Belle and Pinky were in the school room doing something. Belle kept telling me not to come in. She usually does surprise crafts in there and wont let me see until they are done, so I figured they were doing a craft in there. WELL, she finally called me in there, and she was beaming! She hands me a stack of papers. I look through them and realized they were all of todays work!

She had gone through all her school books for each subject and carefully ripped out the pages for todays lessons (I have the pages marked each day where we are) and did them all! She had 3 pages of math done, she'd done her calendar work, she's done 2 pages of grammar, plus another enrichment activity from the other grammar book we use (she'd READ the lesson herself and did the student enrichment activity at the end of the lesson!!), then she did some pages in her spelling book, she'd read two books to Pinky and practiced her reading. The only thing she didn't do was her history (because that's kept in a different spot from the rest of her books).

She was SO proud and I was really dumbfounded (in a good way). She really shocked me with her ability to find each lesson book, find the right page lesson we are on, then tear out the pages and do the assignments! Granted, there weren't any lessons given by ME obviously... but I think this speaks volumes for where she is in terms of learning. By the way, after checking her papers she scored 100% on them all!

Homeschooling can be challenging sometimes, but it's these little things that make me realize that it IS working! I'm not just completely wasting my time. She IS learning and growing in the right direction!

Pinky too is REALLY starting to want to do all that Belle does. Luckily I have several workbooks that Pinky does. Although she's only 3 and so the only thing she does in them is scribble... but she likes to 'think' she does school work too. I have a binder for her that I keep all her 'school papers' in.

Anyway, thought I'd share that small victory!

Christmas

So, after 5 Christmas's together, we finally have a theme for our holiday decorations. We've been using decorations that we both liked, but none of it really fit together. Well, last year we decided that we both loved red and silver together. Thus, our theme was born. I went to all the after Christmas sales and got all the red/silver things I could find. This year I finally got to use it! Our tree looks better then it's ever looked (well, the tree id also the BEST tree we've ever had as well. We got it from Frontgate during an after Christmas sale last year... so this was our first year using it and we LOVE it). Almost everything we have is either ALL red and silver, or mostly red and silver. We have a few that contradict our theme, but go well anyway.

Here Belle is comforting Pinky because an ordament she was putting on kept falling off.

Here are some decorations I made. This is in the foyer.

This one I got already made, but decided the spruce it up a bit by adding the red ribbon. This is on our front door.

Here is the gingerbread house the kids made last night!

Oh, here's a picture of our kitchen window. I made the candy canes and tress with felt. I was bored one night! Notice the red ordaments hanging on the garland... man, I'm clever!

Finally Pictures!

So our kitchen project is finally done, it's been about 2 weeks now without painters or contractors in the house. Everything is put back together and we have our Christmas stuff up. Here are some shocking pictures... okay, FIRST here is a pic of we first moved in to this house 5 years ago (you can see how horrendous it was!!) All that 'crap' in the photo belongs to the old owner, the pic was taken during a walk through.


We immediately went to work changing all the old appliances (fridge, oven, dishwasher, sink, overhead microwave), we changed all the lighting then we painted it. And then it looked like THIS:




Over time hubby grew to hate the nasty color we'd painted it and I grew to hate the nasty cabinets, so we changed it to THIS:




Now, I walk into my house and LOVE it!! I feel like I'm walking into a new home everytime! After the new year our plan is to get new counter tops, because these look worse then ever next to our glorious new cabinets, LOL!