Kadee Christmas Tree Farm and 6 months!

We had our annual Kadee Christmas Tree Farm trip this year right at the tail end of Thanksgiving, and this was our group this year! The Clint Spencers joined us, and it was double the fun! :)

We added a Christmas Sweater contest this year, and this was the winner. It was truly hideous and beautiful all at the same time.

This was about the size of the tree we were looking for this year. We have NO more room due to various items of baby paraphernalia.

This was a group picture of the 2008 Christmas sweater contest participants.

A beautiful family portrait. :)

6 months with the monkey! Caden got his first taste of the monkey when he tried to take off an ear. The monkey forgave him and they worked everything out.

We regularly Skype Slappy and Cookie, and this was one of their sessions. Sometimes we give Caden a little "airing out" time before his bath.

We leave for Nashville on Friday, and we CAN'T WAIT!! Merrrrrry Christmas everyone!

It won't be long!!!

till he'll be all over the place!

Before and After

For the past 2 months, we've been spending our weekends in Longview trying to get our house ready for the renters to move in Jan. 1st, and weeeeee're finished!! We've still got stuff we want to do before we move in, but we've made a serious dent. Here are some befores and afters.

Obviously we didn't do this ourselves, but we had the windows and siding replaced.

There were MULTIPLE bathrooms that had beeeautiful wallpaper. This is the first. It was 3 layers deep, and we'd given up on stripping it. So....we primed it to get it ready to paint over, and the wallpaper decided it didn't want to hang around after all. So Adam took the rest off, and we were able to finish it out. All the bathrooms also had these fluorescent light boxes that Adam and his dad cut out. They then patched the drywall behind and got it ready for the new fixtures.

1/2 bath before and after

This was the easiest wallpaper to remove. It came off in super big sheets and was actually kind of fun to remove......for wallpaper.

The master bath before and after. If you look closely you can see in one of the after pictures that they'd painted the ceiling the same green as the walls. We haven't fixed that yet. It's just too pretty to mess with.

Here's the master bedroom. My mom came down for almost 2 weeks, and we tackled this project. The pale pink EVERYTHING was so nice, but we decided it had to go. We ended up getting a free dropcloth out of the curtains!

I'm sad we didn't take some before pictures with the wallpaper on, but this is the laundry room before and after. We're pretty much painting the ENTIRE house, so there will be an update sometime in June with all the rest of the makeovers. I know you'll be checking EVERY day till they're up! ha! :)

Hope everybody had a good Turkey Day!