“Got this in my email today. You have to use the first letter of your name to come up with an answer for each thing and you can’t use your own name when it asks for a boy/girl name.”

What’s your name? Christina

4 letter word: Cold

Vehicle: Camry

City: Chicago

Boy Name: Caden

Girl Name: Cheryl

Alcoholic drink: Cosmopolitan

Occupation: Chef

Something you wear: Crocs

Celebrity: Celine Dion

Food: Carrot Cake

Reason for Being Late: Car Broke 

Cartoon Character: Charlie Brown 

Something You Shout: Cool!

Here are more updated pics of the new house.  Keep in mind, this was in the middle of Thanksgiving Day, so I really wasn’t minding the little everyday messes.  The perfectionist in me really wanted to make the beds and straighten up Erica’s closet.

Here is Eric’s office.  He’s pretty proud of his blinds.  They have pictures of planes on the inside side and are white from the outside.

Here is our Formal Living room.  Still unfurnished.  But I ordered one of those wall rub on things from Denise’s Uppercase Living Party.  It’s actually pretty nice up there on the wall.

Here is our Dining room all set in it’s Thanksgiving splendor:

Here is our Breakfast Nook set up as the kids table for this Thanksgiving, but where we eat most of our meals together:

Here is our 12 foot Christmas tree.  Eric decorated it.  It looks even better in person.  He did an awesome job!

Here is our Hearth Room.  Normally the couch isn’t quite so close to the fireplace, but we had to scoot it over to make room for the tree behind it.

Here is our Master Bedroom.  As we don’t have our Plasma yet out in the Hearth Room and the girls wanted to be closer to the action upstairs, they were hanging out in our room waiting for dinner.

Here is my favorite part of the bathroom!  The big round jacuzzi tub!  The other day I came home from a party/crop so tired.  I made Eric swing past Starbucks and I got a Hot Caramel Apple Cider and curled up in the tub with the lights out and the candles lit and relaxed.  It was even more relaxing without my jacuzzi tub buddy (Erica).

Here is the other side of the Master Bath:

The other rooms upstairs that I didn’t take pictures of, but would have been fun to share is our Laundry Room with the big red LG Steamwash Washer and Dryer.  And then we also have a half bath up there too.

Here is Erica’s Room and closet.  Her closet is so big that on the shelves on the right side are tubs of toys.  Her kitchen, shopping cart and doll house are in there.  And it is big enough that she uses it as her playroom.  And it’s nice for me as the mess stays pretty contained in there.

Here is Ally’s Room:

And Jackie’s Room:

Here’s mine and the girls’ “office”.  What you can’t see here is the other side and then the two sides you can see is large enough to fit a couple large bookshelves on each of all three sides once we get around to moving them here from the old house.

And here is my favorite room in the house….  My scraproom!

Just off to the left of the tables in the first picture is another little area with the fireplace and then a tall corner shelf with altered projects and a large display with all my completed albums.

I just realized I don’t have any good pictures of the kitchen.  I’ll have to remember to get one of those soon and post too.  And believe it or not, but my house does have an outside.  Pictures don’t turn out as well of it when it’s dark outside.  So I’ll have to take some of our outdoor fireplace, backyard and the outside of the house.  But I’ll probably wait for what did accumulate in the way of snow (which really wasn’t very much) to melt.

It was such a wonderful day.  I think we had just about the best Thanksgiving ever for our first Thanksgiving in our new house.  Everything was nice and warm upon serving.  The food was awesome and the company was even better. 

Eric’s Aunt Judy makes the absolute best food and beyond imaginable yummy pies and cakes.  Seriously, I don’t know how she got it all done and made it all taste so awesome.  All I had to do was the turkey (thank you Honeybaked Ham), stuffing (Stovetop), potatoes (made the night before), rolls (Sunfresh) and a relish tray (can you say open jar and then dump?) and she did the rest!

To top off an even more perfect day, my Dad and Stepmom called today.  I always love talking to them.  They are just about the only people in my family on my side that actually will actually listen to me ramble on and on about what’s going with Eric, myself and the girls.  And I found out, they have looked at my blog.  So Dad and Kathy, if you are reading this, I did take pictures of most of the inside of the house and will do my best to put those up tomorrow. 

Now I’m sitting here debating if whether or not I want to venture out to Toys R Us tomorrow for their big sale.  They have several things that the girls have on their lists on sale, and I’d really like to get those more expensive gifts out of the way.  But I’m trying to figure out if fighting with the crowds, waking up at 2am and waiting outside the store in the cold pitch black wee hours of the morning waiting for the doors to open to hopefully get what I want off my list is really worth the money I would be saving.  Part of me says yes.  The other part says to wait a little later in the morning, know I’m still going to have to deal with the crowds, risk even more the items not being there, but get a couple extra hours of sleep as I’m in a deep turkey coma.

Oh well.  Only time will tell.  Hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving and keeps in mind what they are thankful for this time of year.  So, I guess it only seems right that I should share with the entire world what I am thankful for this year.  Of course the obvious is my family, God, church and this wonderful country with it’s wonderful traditions.  But I am also grateful for a husband that will bust his behind and sacrifice so much to provide his family with the best he possibly can.  And this year his best is awesome!  Of course I know his journey in providing this for our family has not been on his own.  I know that God has helped lead him every step of the way.  I am so thankful that even during the times we are not worthy of his blessings, he still has such an amazing perfect love for us, he has poured his blessings onto our family.  And for that I am truly grateful for.  If only my love for my children and husband could be even half as perfect as his, what an amazing blessing that would be.

We got our first drizzle of snow today for those that don’t live here in Kansas City.  I don’t think anyone expected it to stick, but our lawn and roof got a pretty light dusting.  It’s hard to believe yesterday we were all running around in short sleeved shirts.  And then today was sooo terribly cold.

I was really hoping it would hold off until after Ally and I got home from Back To School Again shopping with Ally, but it didn’t.  For anyone who has missed it, not only have we sent Jackie back to public school (7th grader!) but Ally will be transferring to the school over in our new neighborhood on Monday.  So I thought it would be nice to buy here a couple new outfits and new school supplies to go with her new school.

Just finished making up mashed potatoes for dinner for tomorrow.  We are having Thanksgiving over here, and Eric’s parents are coming over along with his Aunt and Uncle from Michigan.  All I have to worry about is the Turkey, Rolls, Relish Tray, Mashed Potatoes and Stuffing.  And Eric’s Aunt and Mom are taking care of the rest.

Anyway Christy told me about these mashed potatoes about a week ago and how awesome they were.  So after looking up the recipe on the internet and armed with all of my ingredients I have one less thing to do tomorrow.  They are called Day Before Mashed Potatoes.  They have sour cream and cream cheese in them and you are supposed to make them the night before and put them in the refrigerator for at least 8 hours.  Then you either bake them or put them in the crockpot.  We had a taste of them tonight and they are awesome!

Looking forward to tomorrow! 

I have to laugh at myself sometimes.  In an effort to maintain some sort of sanity, I get a little OCD about stuff. 

All my glasses and dishes are arranged just so.  I have a certain way I like to do stuff.  And I think it is getting a little bit out of hand. 

In our house (like most) we have some mutiple switches that turn on and off the same thing.  As I was turning off lights tonight, I realized that I have to have all the switches in the off position.  There’s just something that drives me crazy about turning a light off in the on position.

So now that I have just rerealized my issues, I’m off to eat some chocolate.  That always makes me feel better!

Okay, so we are moved into our new beautiful house!  Still have stuff over at the old house that needs to be sorted through, packed and moved over to here.  I have until April/May to do so, but really want to get it done right away so I don’t have that project looming over my head.  Eric’s so busy working these days and traveling out of town so I can’t just leave Erica at the new house and run over there here and there to get some uninterrupted packing time.  And since there is so much remodeling being done, I hate to let Erica run loose over there while I’m packing.

Everything we do have over here though is in it’s place and put away.  That feels so good.  We’ve been crazy busy deciding on the perfect furniture for the different rooms that we needed to still furnish.  We buying just a little bit at a time (cash only) so we don’t drive ourselves into a black hole of debt.  But, I so appreciate the things more when we buy something that is just right for our home and we have to hold out a little bit for it.

Our first purchase was a refrigerator for the upstairs.  Couldn’t live out of the dorm sized fridge forever.  It’s really cool (okay, no pun intended).  It has a rotating faucet which make filling up pitchers so much easier!  The other thing I really liked is it measures how much water you are dispensing.  So if you only need 2 1/2 cups of water you dispense until you hit the 2 1/2 cups mark.

Then the next critical item was the washer and dryer.  Now we could have had a washer and dryer like the week after we moved in, but Eric kept drilling into my head we weren’t buying anything temporary, we were buying what we really wanted.  So we bought this awesome set by LG.  The washer has a steam fresh cycle on it that will save us a bundle on dry cleaning.  And we actually got it in red and it is gorgeous!

We were in need of a vacuum, so I’ve been dreaming of Dyson since they first came out and I found a pink one at Target!  It is just too stinking cute!  Eric told me that I just insured that he will never vacuum anything in the house now.  But did I mention it’s cute?!

We’ve now bought our new breakfast nook table.  It’s huge!  We have 5 chairs and then a bench on one side that seats 3.  Fits just right in that room and is just too perfect.  Actually our builder was over the other day and she even commented on it.

Yesterday our Dining Room table (seats and China Hutch were delivered!  Eric’s Aunt and Uncle are coming into town and so everyone is coming over here for Thanksgiving.  I’m really looking forward to it.  It just looks like it was made for our dining room!  But of course we knew we were going to need to get China to put in the China Hutch.  And if we were going to get China we were going to need to get flatware and Crystal too!

So after a week of looking at different patterns online and in stores we finally made our purchase decision last night!  Of course the piece in our China set that was the prettiest, I forgot to have them order!  Ordered almost every single other piece in the collection (Eric told me to order what I wanted), but somehow left that out.  We went with a set from Noritake.

Eric picked out the Crystal as I was too brain dead and overwhelmed by this point.  He picked out a very nice set that had gold rims.  And I picked out the flatware.  Until I can justify dropping $3500 for actual real sterling silver silverware we went with the Michelangelo flatware from Oneida.  I fell in love with it the first time I saw it and it’s a set that’s been around forever so replacement pieces should be pretty easy.

Slowly but surely it’s all coming together.  Decorating is going to be a whole other project!  I don’t even know where to start on that.  Right now all I can focus on is empty rooms or old furniture that we have that we would like to replace.  Then I’ll be able to focus.

I’ll have to remember to take pics of the rooms that we have stuff in now.  Makes it look more like our home than an empty house.    We are loving it!  The first month we were here we kept expecting someone to figure out that we had moved in and we weren’t supposed to (even though we are).  But after the builder was over here the other day and she knew we were living here, it seems really real.  I know, sounds weird huh?  You think about how far I’ve come from that child who attended every single school almost in my hometown, moved from place to place, foster home to foster home and had so little to this, it’s a totally different way of living for me.  I’ll get used to it though! 

Jessica, I’m not ignoring your tag.  I promise I’ll do my part very, very soon!

Oh!  I meant to post to my blog the other night about something else.  Ally came home from school one day and told us she was running for SIM City (her class is going there this month) Mayor the next day.  So that gave us just a few hours to help her with her campaign.  So we bought her the cutest, put together type of outfit.  Then stayed up late while she made a poster, I wrapped 110 smaller candy bars with “Vote For Ally For A Better SIM City,” and we all three worked on her speech.

In her class she ran against 7 other kids and she won.  And then she had to run against the other three front runners from the other 5th grade classes and she won!  And if that wasn’t enough good news for one day, she was selected to read her DARE report at the Dare graduation this next week!  Which is a pretty high honor from what I understand.  She will be getting a gold medal on top of it.  She was totally floating on cloud nine.  So we took her out for Filet Mignon (her new love after Chicago) at the Japanese Steak house to celebrate.  She felt so good about herself.