Baby's First Christmas

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas!

Birthdays on the Town

Dad treated us to dinner at Alto Restuarant in Scottsdale

for mine and mom's birthdays. It was a very fancy occasion.

This was in the lobby

An exquisite dessert

(the best I've ever had)

Dinner was followed by a romantic gondola ride under the stars.

The gondola was rowed by an opera singer

who sang to us in Italian in the middle of the quiet lake.

Fun After the Blizzard

We were snowed in for two days during a fierce blizzard.

Luckily, it ended before Thanksgiving and Brad didn't die on his

drive up here without a heater in his car!

This was our Black Friday fun.

 Brad said I looked like a fat eskimo!

Home Decor

This window treatment was a project for my home decor class.

We finally got them hung up after the construction clean-up.

The hardest part was designing the swag, jabot, and cascade

to fit the bay window. I guess math class did pay off!

Extreme Kitchen Makeover

We tore the kitchen completely apart before leaving for Ecuador.

All we've done since then is work hard, clean up messes,

and find whatever we can that is cookable in the microwave.

The change might not seem dramatic, but we've worn ourselves out

making sure to do a good job the first time.

I've never been so grateful for a stove and a kitchen sink.

Before

After

Before

In progress

After

Under that ugly wallpaper

Much better

The walls were too abused and misshapen to salvage...
we had to invest in bead board

This stuff was very tedious to paint (especially at 2 AM)

New tile, new window, trim, bead board, and a chandelier

 And thus ends the last huge remodeling project we'll ever have to do. Painting the rest of the house is going to be a breeze after all we've been through in the kitchen.

More projects

The little stinker kept kicking the doctor's doppler machine out of the way.
She sure seems to have a lot of spunk.
(This is my painting shirt. We're painting the kitchen)

The old fabric (stains not pictured
for your viewing pleasure)

The chair I re-upholstered. It looks just like new

The Reason I Love Family Pictures