Do the shuffle.

The month of January was very busy at our house. Everything was getting shuffled around. We started the process by bunking the girls' beds. In order to do this Jeremy had to make rails and a ladder for them. Their beds were actually my brothers' beds growing up, but these key pieces didn't survive over the years. Good thing I'm married to Mr. Handyman. And thankfully we've had amazingly warm weather so that made this project much easier.

Here Grace helps her dad with the sanding. Can you tell the sander is loud?

The completed project. Faith sleeps on the top and Grace took the bottom. Grace is afraid of heights so this was an easy one to figure out.
We really liked how the American Girl bunk beds turned out and used them as a blueprint of sorts for how we wanted to do the rails/ladder for Grace & Faith's beds.
The first night they had them in their room we came in to find this:
Bunking their beds made more room for all the toys that were coming out of the playroom (our future bedroom).

Titus moved out of the bathroom and into our room. These pics still look super plain since we are still working on putting his vintage truck themed room together. We were waiting for his birthday to get some things we need and are waiting for him to move to a bed. (And I'm not in a big hurry on that one.)
All the "boy" toys came to his room.
He also got our walk in closet so a lot of the extra toys are stored in there. I am really loving having all the toys on the main level of the house, much more accessible.

Here he is his first night in his new room. He did great.
That left the playroom for us. It is actually the biggest bedroom in our house. We are enjoying having a bit more space. While this room has 3 closets they have always been our extra storage. So I had to find some space for our stuff.

Now that everything is shuffled around there is really no reason for the kids to be in the basement unless we are entertaining guests. I am enjoying having it as a sanctuary in the evening since it stays cleaner being a kid free zone most of the time. Grace explained the move this way, "You and dad have an apartment downstairs and Me, Faith, & Titus have an apartment upstairs." That made me laugh.

It has been a challenge for me sleeping in the basement with the kids alone on the ground floor. I'm adjusting to sleeping with two baby monitors. It also doesn't have any heat vents so its a bit chilly. But, overall I'm trying to enjoy the positives and especially love feeling like we aren't popping out of the seams in this house. I told Jeremy I'm trying to fall in love with our house all over again since I have no idea when the Lord will direct us elsewhere. Overall, I'd say our shuffle was a success.

Last Day O' Break Fun

I loved Christmas break. I really cherished every moment of having my girl Gracie home with us. We slept in. We ate breakfast at 9 o'clock. We did crafts. We watched movies. It was unscheduled bliss. It was so hard to see it end. On both of us. But I wasn't letting her know how hard it was for me. So her last morning of break I let her make a list of fun things to do that day. We read books, watched movies, and made a special snack. We had been wanting to try out making our own homemade pretzel bites and decided this was the perfect day. We used a recipe found here.

First of all let me say that there is nothing hard about this recipe. But it does have a lot of steps and is a bit labor intensive. We had done homemade pretzels before, but had never done the step where you boil them in the baking soda water. While a lot more work they tasted a whole lot better. Just like the mall pretzels.
We made regular bites to go with homemade cheese sauce and cinnamon and sugar bites to go with cream cheese frosting dip. VERY YUMMY! This ended up being our dinner for the night. We couldn't stop eating them.

Sorry there are no pics of our finished product. I guess we were too busy stuffing our faces. I know we will be making these again.

Breaking up is hard to do.....so you might as well make a party out of it, right?

A Trip to Nana's 4 Christmas

This year we went to Nana's house to have Christmas with her. We started our weekend by meeting her and the Rothzen's for dinner at a Mexican restaurant. It was a bit crazy (spilled tea, dropped ring pops, double ordering, the usual) with 5 kids, but it was still good to have a quick visit.

That night the kids got another wear out of their matching Christmas pjs and watched a Christmas movie. After they were in bed the adults opened our gifts. Charlene surprised me with a Kindle (wow!). The next morning the kids enjoyed opening all their gifts.



The girls loved playing with Nana's collection of misfit toys.

Thanks Nana you always spoil us!