Illinois or Bust!!!

At this time tomorrow (so in 24 short hours), Dave and I will be in our car headed to the airport.  From there, we will take a plane to Illinois to spend Christmas at my parents' new home with Mom, Dad, and Jen!!!!  I CAN'T WAIT!!!  :o)  The best Christmas present ever:  being there for Tamara's call home from her mission in AZ!!!!  I can't wait to hear her beautiful voice and her awesome laugh!

So way Merry Christmas!!!

Christmas Time Is Here. Already?! What the?!?

Christmas has totally snuck up on me this year!  I guess between lots going on at work, painting the kitchen, being sick for a couple weeks, preparing Sunday School lessons, and normal every-day stuff, time has slipped away.  When I stop to think about it, I get depressed that I haven't even set up my Nativity scene.  Our tree is not up and lit and decorated with our ornaments.  There is no garland or mistletoe hanging.  No red bows.  Nothing.  Zip.  Nada.

I thought Dave was slightly crazy when he came home with a little Charlie Brown Christmas tree that he put on top of our TV.

Complete with the red ball and Linus' blankie!

At first, I was thinking, "That makes everything seem more pathetic!  Why do we seem so grinchy about Christmas decorations this year?!?!!?"  The more I looked at that little tree, the more I loved it!  We can only do as much as we can do.  This year, as much as we could do was this cute little tree with only 1 decoration on it that's even too heavy for it.  But, it's Christmas to the Dave Wheeler Family this year.  :o)  I love it!!!

Plus, since Dave and I are travelling to my parent's new home in Illinois this year (yay!), we will get to enjoy THEIR Christmas decorations.  :o)

Merry Christmas everyone!!!

Holy cookies, Batman!

I am exhausted!  I just made about 15 dozen cookies.  In a few hours.  My back hurts.  My feet hurt.  However, it's all for a good cause, so I'm ok with it.  Tamara wrote home from her mission last week soliciting for help with a service project.  She and her companion want to give out plates of cookies to people for Christmas, but they don't have time to make all those cookies.  So, she asked for people to send her already-baked cookies that she could plate and pass out, spreading Christmas cheer to the good people of Yuma, Arizona.  :o)

So, I am doing service to help someone else give service.  How cool is that?!  Way to pay it forward!

Here are some of the leftovers that didn't fit in the boxes.

Boxes full of cookies and a few Christmas presents :o)

I decided to make four kinds:  Funfetti, red velvet with white chocolate chips, vanilla cookie with chocolate chips, and dark chocolate fudge cookie with peanut butter chips.  Yum!  They were all fairly easy because they were all made with cake mixes.  My official taste-tester, Dave, selflessly risked his life for the good of everyone who will eat the cookies and has deemed the cookies safe to eat.  ;o)

I'm grateful for the opportunity to do service, but I'm now glad to be headed to my warm bed! 

P.S.  Thanks to everyone else who sent cookies to help Tamara with the Christmas gift she wants to give the people she loves down in Yuma!

pictures don't do it justice. really.

So, here are the long-awaited pictures of my newly-painted kitchen!  These pictures were taken just now (at 10 pm) so there is no natural light, which makes the color so much more beautiful, so I guess to get the real idea of just how amazing my kitchen is now, you have to come visit and see for yourself!  ;o)

The blue looks amazing with the white cabinets Dave painted!

The blue color is a few shades lighter than my wedding color blue.  :o)

Look how perfectly the paint swatch matches the wall. ;o)  (Even though it's more gray in the pic than it is in real life...)

Anyway, I am so grateful it's FINISHED!  Thanks so much to Mom, Dad, Dave, Clyde, and Ginny for their help!

Today.

Today, I'd like my after-work schedule to include the following:

• PJs (changed into immediately upon arrival at home)
• take-out Chinese for dinner
• an amazing fortune in the fortune cookie that's part of aforementioned dinner
• leisurely watching "Ever After"
• snuggle time with my handsome husband
• bedtime around 9:30 for once

What tonight's schedule is most likely going to be in reality:

• a dinner from the freezer that can be baked/cooked quickly
• cleaning and more cleaning
• laundry, laundry, and more laundry
• work stuff that there's not time to do during the day at work
• hopefully bedtime by 11

:o(

Trying to stay positive, though!  I just need to keep counting my blessings while finishing out today and my day will have no choice but to end fabulously because I am so way blessed!!!

Lesson Learned (again...)

So, I learned during college that eating sweet things too close to bedtime ALWAYS gives me nightmares.  Weird, but so way true.

I guess I ate the cheesecake last night far enough from bedtime to avoid super scary dreams, but close enough to dream pretty weird stuff.  Stuff that made perfect sense while I was dreaming.  Of course.

The dream, in a nutshell (at least the part I remember most):

Idina Menzel (a very talented singer/actress who I had the pleasure of seeing in concert in Atlanta last year) was coming back to Atlanta to give a concert.  She asked for me to be her accompanist on the piano.  How awesome is that?!  It was a beautiful, grand piano!  We were half-way through the most amazing concert of my life when Lady Gaga (whom I don't really like or enjoy much of "her" music) waltzes out on stage and crashes the concert.  I was furious!  So was Idina.  lol

Then I woke up.

Ummm....  Ok?

Moral of the story = no cheesecake (or other scrumptious dessert) within 4 hours of bedtime!

P.S.  I have pics of our kitchen "remodel" to post soon!  It looks amazing!!!!!  I'm most grateful for the fact that it's FINISHED!!!  I intend to never, ever remove wallpaper again.  Like so way never, ever!

Ummm... Only in Georgia??

Am I crazy for being shocked to see a teenager (a person of an old enough age to know better) sitting in front of us at church drinking a Dr. Pepper.  In the chapel.  During the most important part of church!  She even spilled and didn't bother to do a great job at cleaning it up.  Really?!?

Whatta man!

This post is dedicated to my amazing, handsome, wonderful husband!  :o)

A couple of Sundays ago, we had a friend over for dinner.  We ate yummy, moist pork roast and mashed potatoes.  :o)  Later that evening, we (well, it might have been mostly "I") decided we ("I") wanted some of the homemade pretzels I had bought the kit for.

Side note:  Dave is from Pennsylvania.  They love fresh pretzels up there.  Cinnamon sugar.  Or salted.  With cheese.  Or marinara sauce.  :o)

Well, I don't know what I was thinking when I bought the kit, but you actually had to make the dough.  Like use the dough hook with the Kitchen Aid.  Add yeast.  Let it rise.  Roll out the dough.  Get messy.  All that junk.  What?!  I thought making pretzels was going to be easier!  It was a kit for goodness sake!  lol

I decided we were not going to have pretzels because I really did not feel like going through all that work and messy-ness.  As I got up to put the kit back in the kitchen, I turned to Dave and jokingly said, "I should make you make these for us."  He said, "I'll make them :o)"  He was being serious!  I told him what was involved and he was like, "It won't be that big of a deal."  And he went to the kitchen and made homemade pretzels.

Whatta man, whatta man, whatta man, whatta mighty good man!

Clyde, demonstrating his awesome pretzel-shaping skills!

Cinnamon sugar on some, and Dave's favorite--the salted ones  :o)

Don't they look scrumptious?!

The pretzels were AMAZINGLY yummy!!!!

Dave's now earned himself the title of Resident Pretzel Maker in the Wheeler home.  :o)  Thanks, my love!

This past Saturday, Dave helped me embark on a task I've wanted to do since before we moved into our new house, but I just hate projects like this and have been dreading it for months and months.  I finally felt motivated and decided to go for it!

This is the ugly wallpaper that was in my kitchen and dining room.  I just do not like it.  At all!

This is another shot of the ugly wallpapered kitchen...

This is the magical steamer we borrowed from a friend who came and helped us take the wallpaper down.  We actually had 2 friends bring steamers.  You know you have a true friend when they are willing to spend 4-5 hours on a Saturday doing really hard, not-fun stuff with you.  :o)  Thanks Ginny and Clyde!!!

The steamer worked wonders!  However, I do not want to ever take down wallpaper again!  EVER!!

Later that evening, Dave came up to me and said, "You're not going to like this..."   I was like, "What??"  He said, "I just realized that the bathroom in the hallway (the non-master bath) has wallpaper."  I marched over to it, looked inside, noticed none of it was peeling off and it kinda matches our decor, so I said, "It stays.  We are NOT redoing it!"

Here's some "after" pictures of our kitchen/dining room.

That's pretty much what it looks like currently, except Dave has spackled so there are white patches that we now must sand.  I think that fun mess starts tomorrow...  Joyful.  Actually, I'm excited because then we are that much closer to painting!  I have narrowed down the paint swatches from about 40 to 2.  Pretty proud of that accomplishment.  :o)

Oh!  And as if all the above wasn't enough, Dave and Clyde also hung our twinkling star lights on the house outside after all that hard work taking down wallpaper.  Thanks, boys!  They look fantastic!

Again, this post is dedicated to my wonderful husband!  Who helps me and loves me no matter what!  :o)  Whatta man!

and I wasn't even trying!

I've lost 6 whole pounds since I last got on the scale a couple of months ago!  Only 6-8 more to go!!!  Maybe the bathroom scale isn't as scary as I thought ;o)