small successes

I have been in an exhausted funk lately. Due in part to Mike’s work-related absences and my difficulty sleeping as of late- perhaps brought on by pregnancy, but my mind has just been wondering a lot more, and I can’t seem to suppress my rampant thoughts at 4:30 in the morning. But Mike’s work has settled down remarkably, so I’ve been able to catch up on a little sleep, even if only in the past day.

Even though I’ve been worn down, I’ve still managed to plow ahead with some projects I’ve been wanting to tackle. While Mike was in California for business (with the help of my brother watching the kids some evenings), I was able to repaint the kitchen, which I’ve been wanting to do since about two days after I painted it the first time. I’m not a yellow person, and I was envisioning a less-yellow, creamy shade before I covered our walls with it. Now, it is a much more subtle shade of off white, which I like a lot in there. Since we’ve moved here, that’s only the second room that I have repainted my own paint job. Not too bad. I’m finally happy with all of the rooms though and how they flow together. Also in the past week- wet vacced the first and second floors. And were they disguuuuusting. That water was the murkiest stuff I’ve ever seen. Washing it down the drain and turning on the disposal was a wonderful feeling, indeed.

I had been wanting to make some ornaments for our Jesse tree, but since Mike was away for the first couple of days in December and time got away from us, we haven’t done any of the devotionals, and I haven’t gotten past making three or so ornaments. I’m really not sure how attentive Jack would be to it all now anyway, now, and while I’d like to go ahead with things and start our own traditions even if we think the kids might be too young to completely understand, we’ve just turned what was going to be our Jesse tree into a tree displaying tiny nativity ornaments. It’s a nice opportunity to talk about each of the figures and tie those in with Advent devotionals, which we also have yet to do. We do have an Advent wreath and a child’s Advent wreath, which Jack’s Godmother gave to the kids, which will be nice in years to come. Thus, we aren’t observing Advent as fastidiously this year. Not too concerning.

Our house is festive though. We got our Christmas tree today. We looked for a place that didn’t look as commercial as the places we’ve patronized in years past, and while there was still a tiny little shop of Christmas wreaths and ornaments and such and a few refreshments for sale, Allison’s Tree Farm was a lot more refreshing. It took us a while to even find someone to fill us in on where to start and where to look for what kind of tree. Soon, another couple with a girl about Jack’s age arrived, and a tractor pulling a hay wagon took us out to a field of Douglas and Fraser Firs. Jack was afraid to get on the wagon at first, but he talked all about how much fun it was afterward, as we expected her would. I had Abigail in the Ergo, bundled in a few layers, and she did well, until we had been looking at trees for a few minutes and then started to fuss. Her fuss got louder and more distressed, and we knew we had better pick up the pace and find ourselves a tree, whether it was the best one or not. Poor Jack was such a good sport– it was freezing in the 20’s and snowing- kind of a wet snow. My toes were numb. I finally took Gail out of the Ergo because she was just wailing, and that calmed her. We really did make a rash decision about a tree, getting one that was a bit dead ’round the base, but it was a nice shape. Most of the Frasers looked like like funny little exaggerated decorations- they were SO skinny. We got a thin one (which was nice because we don’t have a large space for it), but it looked fat compared to some of them. Once we got home and realized I had mis-measured and Mike had to cut off about a foot from the top and bottom combined, it was nicer than I’d expected because the brown needles got axed. It really does look nice all decorated, entirely with vintage hand-painted glass ornaments, lights and some bead garland. I’ll put up pictures later.

We got some hot chocolate and sat in the heated shop for a few minutes while some teenage guys shook and baled the tree and tied it to our van top. I’m sad because sometime while we were out getting our tree, all of the pictures on my camera from the past few days were erased– including some of Jack on Mike’s lap in the hay wagon on the ride out to look at the trees that were really cute- and others that I’m upset about losing.

See the snow starting to accumulate as we were leaving? It never really amounted to much, but it was pretty.

One last thing I accomplished in the past week– I repainted the hutch that I got for $30 last year. I had painted it a shade I already had after degreasing, but I wanted to try something else with it, so I mixed some other paints together that I already had on hand and made a nice plum-ish color. I was thinking that after letting the plum color dry for a few days, I would put a creamy whitish coat over it and then sand and score it in places to make an antique affect. But after painting the plum, I decided I really liked it that color. So it’s staying plum, at least for now.