Quick post, no time

As I was chasing Joshua around the halls the last half hour of church, I heard a part of a girl's talk from another ward. She was a missionary from Hawaii and was talking about when she first received her call. Before then, she had fervently prayed that 1) She would not be in a spanish speaking mission - learning spanish would be very difficult for her 2) She wouldn't get called to Mexico 3) At the very least that she, please please please, would not be called to Utah. As "luck" would have it, she was called to Utah in a spanish speaking mission and therefore went to the Mexico MTC. I found that pretty funny, but also a great reminder that Heavenly Father really does know our limits and knows just what we need to grow.

Wall mural complete!

The floor looks bad because it needs cleaning and the ceiling still needs texture and paint, but the mural is done! Now on to baseboards and cabinet trim!

I woke up early to go to walmart to get a few more stocking stuffers and some wallpaper paste. I am very glad I did since it was already pretty busy and would have been worse had I waited. We put up a little more than half of the wallpaper mural. Neither one of us had ever done anything with wallpaper and it was very frustrating in the beginning. We ran out of glue and time and will finish Friday. It really does change the look of the room and makes it look bigger. I love it! I spent some time reading with the kids and watching some shows with them. Then we made a nice steak and shrimp dinner. Then after when we were about to have a nice evening, the freaking dog peed in Will's room since someone forgot to close the gate. I can't get too upset since I forgot to close it 2 days ago and she peed in Maddy's room. So by the time I was done shampooing to carpet, all I wanted was for the kids to clean their rooms and go to bed. We did have some time together, but I am in no means in a pleasant mood right now. I try and I try to like this dog, but the eating poopy diapers and sneaking upstairs to pee and poo and chewing up everything in sight…Oh my goodness, it gets to me. She ate my flip flops this week >:( I don't know what the difference is between her and a brand new puppy. Sigh… Merry Christmas...

Well, do you know what we are never doing again? Installing a ducted hood vent :P We ran into problems left and right and I went to the hardware store about a hundred times. Anyway, it is finally in and I am excited to get all of the tools and everything out of the kitchen and work on other things. We still need to put the trim and molding around the cabinets, but Dave doesn't want to do that until everything else is done. I also finished staining the stair rail; not perfect, but much improved over peeling white paint. I will probably wait till spring to finish the banister part. I get exhausted just looking at it. All the little nooks and crannies with paint stuck everywhere are just too much right now. Will's birthday was Saturday. We went to chuck e cheese and then to his favorite restaurant, Village Inn. I had big plans of taking him to build-a-bear in the mall to build his own stuffed animal, but when we got there he rudely dismissed the idea. I mean, I don't mind if he doesn't want a stuffed animal, but we had a talk about being kinder about these things. So after I got over not wanting to get him anything, we went home and I gave him a stunt racer lego's thing that was for Christmas. He loved that and then later that night I gave him that Love You Forever book and read it to him while trying not to cry. I also gave him The True Story of the Three Little Pigs. He was very excited to get books. lol

Thanksgiving was a little crazy with Joshua and other kids being sick. The raw rundown: I got there late because I had to get medicine for Joshua, dinner felt very rushed, food was put up immediately, and I couldn't even have seconds on turkey because they wanted to make turkey soup. The pies were very good though, my sister in law always makes a ton of great pies, but then I had to leave early because Joshua was just so miserable. Next year, I'm volunteering to have it at our house and we'll provide turkey for everyone to eat until they're sick of it... I'm only a little bitter. haha Joshua is doing much better. Whatever he had has finally evolved to a normal cold. I can't say I'm excited for all these bills though. I have made good progress on the kitchen. The backsplash is done. I haven't put the final seal on it yet because I still need to fix some grout in places, but I can do that next week or next month, so I'm choosing not next week. Tomorrow I will unpack, hopefully, the rest of the kitchen and free a lot of space up.

Joshua has sounded bad all day with his wheezing and raspy noises. I had Dave take him to the regular doctor so they could do something to help him sleep tonight. They gave him a steroid shot, but he is still pretty bad and is waking up a lot. The doctor said cool dry air would be good for him, so we closed our vent. Earlier when he had a nap I was so tired from being up all night I laid down and debated taking a nap at the same time or finishing the backsplash tiles. I fell asleep before I made up my mind. lol So, I finished the tiles tonight. Tomorrow I will seal and then sometime this week I will grout and then the hood vent can go up. I'm excited to have an actual ducted vent since we do a lot of high heat grilling and frying. It will be nice to have all the smoke and steam go somewhere. I guess I better try and sleep. Who knows what tonight will bring...

finally starting backsplash