Weekend Projects

 On Friday after school Brian and I finished painting the baby's room.  I had to climb on a chair to get to the high areas, so after a while I just let Brian paint while I sat in said chair and typed up his talk for Sunday.  He dictated what he wanted to say while I typed, and when he woke up the next morning, his laptop had restarted and didn't auto-save the file, so he had to start fresh.  On Sunday morning he was left with twenty five minutes to speak, and he did an awesome job.

 On Saturday we went outside to plant a lilac bush and ended up tearing up a good chunk of yard.  Brian's mom is famous in their family for her Saturday morning projects, which this was very much like.  She would apparently say, "If we all work together, we'll be done in an hour or two," and then, several hours later, they would still be working.

So we went outside, pulled a few weeds - okay, a lot of weeds - and dug a hole for the lilac bush.  Brian found the sprinkler pipe, and he didn't want the roots to damage the pipe, so we decided to move the sprinkler line over a few feet.  With the help of Brian's brother, Eric, and the bishop's teenage sons, Justin and Jeff, we were able to get the sprinkler line moved, the lilac planted, and the stone edging for the flower bed started. It's obviously a project that we didn't anticipate doing on Saturday.  It's still not finished, but we'll work on it some more after we put in the mow strip for the fence.  I'll post pictures when it's more done. 

 Eric

 Marcus

 Ethan with Jeff and Justin, and Alyssa's in the background.  Our boys absolutely loved having the "big boys" working with us.

The nursery walls turned out great, but they looked just a little bit too much like Neapolitan ice cream.  I still loved it, but I kept feeling the temptation to cover the walls in chocolate syrup and whipped cream every time I walked in the room to admire our work, which I do a lot, because I love a freshly painted room.  I also was a little hesitant to put up some molding in between the colors (even though that was the original plan all along) because our line was perfect.  I didn't want to cover it up.  But it really did need some distinction between the strawberry and chocolate scoops, so I experimented with some dark pink ribbon and ended up starching it to the wall.  It doesn't look uber fabulous in the picture, but in person, it does.  I love it.

Nursery-wise, I've got the crib bumpers almost finished, the curtains planned in my head, and really cute woodland pictures being drawn by my super talented niece, Megan.  It's all coming together with plenty of time to spare.  Since I haven't put any decorations up in the room yet, my favorite piece in the nursery is the tiny pink "little sister" outfit I got on sale at Carter's that's hanging in the closet.  We'll see if it stays at the top of the list when I move some furniture in and put things on the walls.  It's going to be hard to beat!