Why my Christmas tree still isn't up

We came back from Ohio and had to hit the ground running.  We've been planning on replacing the carpet since we bought the house, really.  It just looked bad from the beginning.  We've put it off for a while, thinking that our kids were little and would destroy the carpet anyway, but friends have told us that their teenagers are just as likely to spill things.  So when it was time to shift all of the rooms, we decided to go for it.  Tyler and Kaitlyn have been sharing one big bedroom, but it was a bit beyond time for the boy and girl to have separate spaces.  So Tyler needed to move into the little bedroom, which was filled with computer things.  The computers could then go into the nursery that is attached to the master, and Jasmine would move into the big girl room with her big sister.

Easy, right? Ha.  If we were doing that much, we might as well replace the carpet.

As Christopher says, he goes back and forth between loving it so much he can't believe we waited this long, to thinking that it was so much work he never wants to do it again.  We took everything from the kids' room and put it in the front room, forcing the kids to sleep in the basement for a week.

Everything in the office filled the nooks and crannies in our room.  And then we had to repaint both bedrooms.  Daddy helped the kids paint Tyler's new room the day they were waiting for their flight to Ohio.  That room had been painted yellow when we got the house, and while they painted the back of the door yellow (who does that?) it was a good enough paint job we left it until now.  And then when we got back, Kaitlyn helped paint over the blue to make it a girls room from here on out.

Daddy said they liked wearing one of his old shirts almost as much as they liked painting, which says a lot.

Anyway, after painting two rooms and all of the trim, all we had to do was rip out the carpet and pad, take out every single staple, vacuum all of the dust that used to be our pad, and haul it all off somewhere.  It only took a couple of days, but we got things ready for them to come and do the first half.

And we were in love.  SO much better!

The bad news was that they accidentally scheduled us for consecutive days, instead of giving us 3-4 days in-between to get the second half ready for them.  ACK!  I think in those two days combined, I got about 6-7 hours of sleep.  Thankfully we weren't painting the rooms in the second half, but just the trim.  And it was all worth it.

Before:

After:

 In the closet of the nursery, there was a piece of paper left under the carpet and pad dated 1978.  That means the carpet in the entire house was original to this 1979 house.  It was time!  Especially on the stairs, where the pad was literally nothing but dust.  Oh, and the crinkly plastic lining that someone put on our pad.  Every step on our carpet has always crinkled.  I remember when that sound used to wake Tyler up as I tiptoed away from setting him in his crib.

Now the kids love their rooms.  So far Tyler got the best end of the deal, since Jasmine has had a couple of rough night adjusting to going to sleep in a different room with someone else.

And the girls' room is a row of beds at the moment, since the un-stacked bunk beds are ready to go, but we don't have a mattress for Jasmine yet, so she's still in her toddler bed.  I splurged a bit on some Pottery Barn quilts, but they are just perfect!  Tyler needed a big boy quilt that was green, since Green is for Tyler.  And the girls have quilts that match in different colors.

We've still got a ways to go, though.  I've been trying to be careful and purge as we go.  Nothing goes back in the bedrooms that we don't actually need.  But that takes time.  And I need to send out my Christmas cards, get all the presents bought and shipped if needed, and make the calendars for each family.

At least I got the cards printed a while ago, so all I had to do was address them and get them out.

In the meantime, Kaitlyn had another piano recital.  It was cute- they had the recital of Christmas songs at a local nursing home so some of the residents could come and enjoy it as well.

So hopefully someday this week we'll get the tree up.  We got the one at the cabin put up, at least.

But since that one is 4 feet tall and the one at home is 12 feet, that doesn't say much.  It has been really cold around here, but I was glad we got one last drive to the cabin in before the snow dumped all the way down.

And even in 10 degrees, the kids loved playing in the 2 feet of powder.

Though I guess Tyler didn't like getting the snow in his eyes.

Such a silly girl.  In fact, the other day she made quite the outfit for herself.  I don't know if she even made the connection to our visit to the Christmas Story house or not, but I thought it was hilarious to see her walking around the house like this for an hour.

Time to get back to getting this house put back together!