Eliana's "New" Room and A Good Day for Samuel!

 Today as a shakin' and movin' kind of day and it felt good to get so much accomplished! Of course, I guess that's how I feel every Thursday since it's the one day I have a car to get anything accomplished at all:)

This week I finished Eliana's room! We are excited to have non-white walls in our new place (for the first time ever!) but also wanted to have real color in our rooms. To finish Eliana's furniture re-do, I painted her dresser purple to match the bookshelf! Here is the before. This is a really old dresser that has been around in my family for years. It needed a makeover!

Ta-da! I love how it looks but most importantly, so does she! Once I got it painted, dried and in place, I decided to just get everything fixed up in her room and hung a few things on the walls. She was SO happy when she came in to see!

When you walk in her room, she has her two towels hanging up:)

Straight ahead is her window, baby doll area and dressers. No curtains yet though. I have to add some material to her old curtain to lengthen it. That will be the finishing touch!

Her "new" dresser and baby corner:)

Her other dresser. This is a really cute dresser that my mom found at a garage sale. We paid $10 for it. It has really little drawers, hence the two dressers. Okay, and she has a lot of clothes;)

Her bed. She and Samuel were making monsters with a funny little kit we have.

Her closet! All of our closets have built in shelving and rods, which we adore! It made organizing so much easier.

Her bookshelf and rocking chair, a.k.a. reading corner!

And her dollhouse and hooks to hang purses and whatnot on. I just love how her room looks and she says she loves it, too. Her old room was teeny tiny and was wall to wall furniture with zero space to play so I just love that she has so much space! She's lucky though because she's the only one who actually has anything hung on her walls. I'll have to hang something on the boys' walls and show you their room next:)

We have been couch hunting this week! Yesterday I snapped this really cute picture of E checking out a huge over-sized chair with my mom. Love her smile! We actually found a couch tonight (hooray!!) which we just love so much better than our old one. We pick it up Saturday and then we can actually have a living room and invite people over. Yea!

Samuel had an awesome day today! He got 100% on his social studies test and felt SO good about it. It was over government which he has never had before and he was really struggling with it. We studied really hard together and this was the result. Way to go, buddy!

And then a few minutes later....he lost his first front tooth!! How cute is he?? He was really excited to lose it but after a few hours of it being out, he's not tho thure about talking anymore and how he thounds:)

We told him he just needs to lose the other one so we can sing to him this Christmas: "All I want for Chrithmas ith my two front teeth, my two front teeth, my two front teeth!"

It was a good day all the way around today!

Toothless and Veggie Galore!

 Mr. Z lost another tooth, just in time for his birthday! We are notorious for our slow teeth-losing so I am guessing this may be it for awhile:)

He's pretty cute with missing teeth!

We have always loved his baby blue's! We are going to have to divide his birthday celebrations into a couple of days. Ben won't be home tomorrow so I will make Zakkai's special birthday dinner and he will get to open some presents (he has a small pile waiting from his Grandma!) and he very sweetly agreed to having a cake and opening his present from us on Friday night when Ben can be with us. Who can say no to ongoing birthday celebrations!

I figured out the secret to getting everyone to fulfill their vegetable quotas ~ veggie trays! I grabbed one at Sam's Club a few weeks ago on a secretly hopeful whim and was pleasantly surprised to see how much vegetable consumption went on that week! I don't have to cut up lots of vegetables and everyone really loves picking out whichever ones they like and munching. Win win!

Eliana especially loves the veggie tray! She gets upset when I put it away:) She adores sugar snap peas, carrots, cauliflower, broccoli and peppers. She would munch on them for an hour if I let her!

I figure $9.98 once a week is a good way to spend some of our grocery money! It's much cheaper to get a bigger tray at Sam's than it is at the grocery store. It does take up a lot of room in the fridge and maybe it would be cheaper to buy them all separately and cut them up but honestly? I don't really care! I am usually so careful about splurging on food items because we have a tight budget to adhere to (which gets tighter each month it seems, with all these growing munchkins!) but this is worth any extra pennies to me.

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The weather has turned beautiful in the past couple of days! Beautiful for winter anyways:) The sun is shining and melting the icicles and snow (never mind the slushy mess) and the warmer air feels so good after so many weeks of frigid temperatures. Who knew 38 could feel like 60 degrees? It gives one hope that life will emerge after the harshness of the winter months.

I feel that way about life in general, not just the weather. Hoping for new life to emerge. It has been a very harsh winter for us, especially the past month, and I am beyond ready for some little green blossoms of hope to sprout. We are so thankful for all of the continued prayers and encouragement we have received from our family and friends. We are even really thankful when people honestly say to us, "I have no idea what to say to you. I don't understand all of this either but I am praying for you."

It's nice to just have people care and be there with you in the tough moments and to not always try to fill the silence of your pain. To just let you be sad for a little while. While I am so thankful for all of our family and friends who have supported and prayed for us, I am especially thankful to my mom, Ben's mom and my Grandma for loving us through all of these years and for being our prayer warriors!

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Anyone else been watching the Olympics? Even though NBC's coverage stinks, I still enjoy being able to turn on the tv in the evenings and have something fun to look forward to. It will be hard to get used to going back to nothing once it ends this weekend! I really enjoyed the ice dancing the other night and watching our couple win the gold. Does anyone else think she looks like Princess Jasmine??

Samuel has loved the snowboarding events and even went to the library and picked out a book about snowboarding. I can't quite picture him doing the half-pipe or snowboarding down a mountain but stranger things have happened!

I am off to pick up my boys from school...