holidays are upon us!

Even though I love Christmas and am excited about it, it's still weird to see all the stuff forcing the Halloween stuff out of the stores. And it's Wed. and Halloween is not until Sat!
This morning Mollie had a Halloween songfest at her preschool. It was so cute! It was really laid back and they just sang some songs with the music teacher. I think it was all the 3's classes, her 3/4 class, and then a few other classes came to watch. It was weird b/c the kids in her class seemed a lot bigger than the kids in the other 3's classes! I'll have to put up some pictures later. She was one of 3 Cinderellas:) And she decided to wear her Cinderella night gown that Mom gave her rather than her dress-up dress. She had a crown and glass slippers also. She was a very casual Cinderella!
I got some good pictures of she and her friends, especially her new friend Sydney. Her friendship borders on obsession I'm afraid. But at least it seems to be going both ways. Their teachers are trying to keep them apart a little more and encourage them to hang out with other girls some!

I did, because I do love Christmas so much, go do a little Christmas browsing for ideas at Target and Toys R Us after that. I really need to find some ideas for Mollie. I have about 6,000 ideas for Sydney b/c she lets us know frequently what she would like! But I'm not sure what Mollie wants.
So if you have any good ideas, throw them my way!

what a month!

October brings...our anniversary, our wine trip, an unexpected weekend trip to Charleston with Dad as our babysitter! The State Fair, Halloween activities, oh my!
I got to have parent lunch with Mollie in her preschool class on Friday, that was fun. And meet her new friend Sydney who she seems to be semi-obsessed with.
We're really looking forward to Chase's 2nd birthday party on Saturday! And then we'll trick-or-treat with him a bit before we come back to our neighborhood to do the same!
I seriously need to load some new pictures soon!

face lift

I just wanted to share some pictures of our finished kitchen! The counter tops were installed Thursday, the backsplash was done Friday, and plumbing yesterday. I wish I could say it went off without a hitch, but we had a few minor inconveniences. At least we were out of town all weekend so it wasn't that big of a deal to be without a kitchen sink. We ended up having to get a new garbage disposal. Phil hooked that up yesterday afternoon and Viola! All done!

I guess it's kind of hard to see, but here is one view. I love the ceramic tile back splash!
I love how the tile looks under the bar!
Here is a picture of our new sink/faucet. The left side is slightly deeper/longer than the right. I really like it. (can you tell, haha?) It doesn't take much to get me excited!They apparently didn't order enough tile so they tried to just do a line of plain tiles. Which I would have settled for just to get the job done. But they ran out, have to order more, and we're going to have them rip out this strip above the desk and make it look like the strip b/w the bar and sink. Who knows when this will happen:)

If I were to build another house I'm 90% sure I wouldn't choose white cabinets. Maybe at the beach house. And that would be like a distressed ivory or something cool, haha!

I like to say that we built this house when we were young and stupid:) The biggest thing we did right was to go back and add our basement before they officially started! We signed our contract to build our house October 30, 2000. About 3 weeks after our wedding, haha. We finally closed Nov. 29, 2001. It took for freakin' ever. So anyway, it was not the greatest quality build. We have debated moving, but there are too many things we like about our house. Specifically the basement, the large bedrooms.

Things we don't like are our small yard, our small shower!, and the small living room. But anyway, now that Sydney's in school we don't want to up and move b/c the way student assignment is around here we could get moved anyway. Not by choice. So why change our school by choice. We're happy there right now. So we decided to gradually make some improvements. And if we sell 5 or 10 years from now then we will have things that will increase the value of our house and we'll get to enjoy them!

Oh, and then there's the fact that we love our location and our house will be paid off in less than 9 years.

Our next project is more than likely going to be taking the floor up from our bathroom and putting down ceramic tile as well as taking out the white tile around our garden tub and putting in matching ceramic tile. We might do ceramic tile in our little 1/2 bath. You have no idea how tiny that room actually is unless you've seen it, haha. You can almost pee and brush your teeth at the same time:) And we'd love to put hardwood floors in our whole downstairs. We thought that might be sooner rather than later, but now I think later's winning!

Tomorrow is our 9 year anniversary!

craziness

I'm really looking forward to next week. Know why?
Maybe this craziness will be less crazy. Don't you find me saying that a lot?
Probably. And it never really changes because I figured out that I usually cause it, haha.
Sure, I can't control deaths in the family or Sydney's weird back injury that landed us in the dr. yesterday and turned out to be nothing, or things in our house needing repairing like my garage door opening and dishwasher fiasco of earlier in the year:) Who could forget?

The choices are mine, but really, after this weekend it will be a little better.
No more home football games for us until November. Next weekend is the Duke game at home, but we have a wedding to go to so we sold our tickets. The weekend after that we might be going away b/c Phil might be winning a trip to Charleston (which will require some serious child care arrangements).
Okay, nevermind.

Anyway! My new countertops were installed yesterday! The backsplash is being done right now. It looks awesome! Really, what a difference spend a couple thousand dollars makes. Totally changes things. We are going to have to have a plumber come Monday morning and redo all the sink/faucet/garbage disposal/dishwasher connections. Love the undermount sink and new faucet I picked out. Super. And then it should be ready to go! So exciting.

This weekend is....Wine Trip 2009! WooHoo! We have 11 people this year and have been upgraded to the Mercedes van/bus thing limo which will be fabulous b/c it has a tv and there is an away State game at 3:30. This year Nancy and Travis are going, can't wait. We're leaving tonight to stay with Phil's mom and then in the morning we'll depart to join the group and she'll keep them for the next 24 hours. They can't wait. They are so excited to see their Nana. They saw her in August, but Mollie keeps asking when we're going to her house again, haha.

Then we'll jet back for:
Dad's 60th birthday party!
He turns 60 on Monday!

And then Wednesday is our 9th wedding anniversary:) Which is the reason we went on our wine trip 2 years ago and have continued it. It's FUN.

Mollie's recital

Mollie's Kinderdance class had another little recital yesterday. It was at 4pm which made it really difficult for anyone to come! But it was cute (of course) and Mollie did better than ever following directions. And it really stuck out to me this time that she was the tallest kid on stage! I can't wait to see how tall she is, and percentile for height, at her 4 year old check-up in December!
This is Mollie and her friend Sarah who is in her class, our babysteps playgroup, and now goes to her preschool: And if you don't have a Flip video camera--they're awesome! The software makes it really easy to email videos and you can create all kinds of cool stuff with it. I love it. I got a cute video yesterday of one of the songs:) But Phil wasn't there and it was hard to video and take pictures at the same time!

my big girl Sydney!

My big girl Sydney has had some very exciting things happening lately!

Friday she lost her first tooth! I'm still in disbelief about it. And she looks so cute with her little window in her mouth:) Her permanent tooth had actually started coming in behing it already so we started working on it a little more aggressively. She was sitting in the living room after school Friday eating a fruit roll-up (Nancy said, "at least she was eating fruit") and it stuck to it I guess and came right on out! I was about to freak out! She really didn't believe it either at first. But then she got really excited and wanted to tell everyone she knew about it. It was so cute to hear the stories about how it was loose and school and what her friends said about it bleeding, and what her teachers said about how they can't deal with teeth, haha, she had to do it on her own. I do think this might be the first tooth she got as a baby. She was 5 months old. The one next to it came in next and I think it might be a tad bit loose so I'm sure that will be next to fall out. She's really motivated now:)

The tooth fairy visited that night. She really appreciated the snack size plastic bag the tooth was in because it slid out really easily from under the pillow. She left Sydney $1 under her pillow and sprinkled it with purple fairy dust. Sydney was really surprised to realize later that there was actually fairy dust all over the window sill along with a new easy reader book called I Like Bugs. That she is really good at reading actually! There was dust all over everything from the window to her pillow! She super-loved it!

Sydney has also been riding her older bike (12 in.) with no training wheels! I need to get a video of that. She is not brave enough to try it on her 16 in. one yet. But I'm sure she will soon.

We had our first parent-teacher conference yesterday with Sydney's teacher. It is the end of their first quarter. What can I say, she's doing awesome:) Makes her Mommy and Daddy very proud! Her teacher gave us some extension activities to work on and she said she felt like she would be reading on her own in no time and pick it up really quickly. She knows lots of sight words and can read simple, more predictable texts, and she's getting better and better at home! I think she hasn't really developed enough confidence at school to show her teacher too much yet. She said she's starting reading groups today. I love her teachers! Love them! We're so lucky...in so many ways!

I can't believe how big Sydney is getting. I know it has to happen. But it kind of freaks me out. I'm not ready for all this yet!

show and tell

Mollie had her first "show and tell" today at school. She had to bring something related to turtles. So she took a little stuffed turtle that she got at the end of the year party for MMO last Spring. I was asking her some questions so she would be prepared to speak a little about her turtle. Her name is Cinderella Turtle Greene:) That cracked me up.
And she is her favorite turtle b/c they love to sleep together (haven't ever, but whatever). It was so cute. I always thought show and tell was dumb, but now I see how it actually can be good for them! They learn to answer questions, wait their turn, ask questions, etc. I would just love to be a fly on the wall when they are doing it!