My New Floor!

I mentioned a little bit ago about getting new flooring. This weekend we worked on it and finished the family room, dining room and kitchen. And I love it!!!

Those three rooms are all opened together. The family room and dining room both had carpet, which was in really bad shape. Carpet under a table with kids is really not a good idea. The kitchen had linoleum, that was well, pretty ugly. It was beginning to pull up, so to me that was reason to replace it.

After a lot of thinking and not knowing for sure what I wanted, I started thinking about laminate flooring. Still I wasn't sure when it would be that we would take the plunge and purchase it. Then a couple of weeks ago, after church, a friend (Candace) was telling how they had some water damage on their laminate in the kitchen because of a leak in there roof. There whole house was laminate only 1 year old, but they decided they wanted tile instead, so they decided to pull it all up and sell the undamaged part. She had just listed it on craigslist for $400 for all of it. Another friend (Karen) was wanting to pull up the rug in their living room and was interested and kinda acted first, so I quietly told Candace that if Karen decided she didn't want it, let me know because I was interested.

Well a couple of days passed and Karen's husband calls and says, "hey the laminate is beautiful and in really good shape and I will help you lay it." I was a bit confused and asked why he didn't want it. He then told me that there was plenty for both of us.

So here we are with two homes getting the laminate we were wanting for $400 total. That even included quarter round that hadn't been used, floor transitions, plastic moisture barrier and several unopened cartons of the laminate.

We are so blessed and I am so excited. I love it! Here are a few pics...

Here is the old and the new next to each other.

The dining room.

Working hard and remembering to measure twice, cut once.

Happy Belated Valentines!

I hope that you had a wonderful day yesterday. I am a little late in posting, but that is mostly because I was a bit busy to sit at the computer for any length of time.

Jathan and I celebrated Saturday night with dinner out at Chili's (I love gift cards), a little shopping (now that is something that I don't love to do, but Jathan insisted that I buy a belt since my one and only one fell apart and purchase new running shoes) then we headed over to some friend's house for a game. The game was guys against girls. It wasn't exactly marriage building, but it did help us practice seeking forgiveness from each other. And just to let you know the girls won! To help Jathan's sore feelings we stopped by Coldstone Creamery (yet another gift card) on the way home. That will lift anyone's spirits!

Yesterday, was more of a working Valentines. The kids and I had school. And with it being Jathan's day off he worked really hard at tearing out the carpet and padding and removing/prying off the nail strips. The nail strips were not easy to get up from the concrete, I image they had been there since the 80's when the house was built. Before Jathan was finished he took "M" to an appointment and I took over the job. The other three kids were at a neighbors house, I enjoyed the quiet (except the pounding of the hammer on the concrete and my music blaring) Jathan said he didn't want me to mess with it, but once he left I changed clothes and got to work. As I was working I was formulating in my mind my answer to convince him that it was good I didn't listen to him and did it anyway. I was practicing my "I love you and I wanted to be an encouragement, I enjoy this type of thing, so it was fun, I was careful not to hurt myself" speech. Thankfully when he got home, he was happy on the progress and admitted that he was beginning to get overwhelmed with this project and how he was going to get ready for a bible study on Tuesday and a sermon on Wednesday. So I wasn't in trouble. Jathan's parents sent the kids money to take us out for dinner, so that was what we did in the evening. Thank you Grandma and Grandpa!

In case you are wondering why Jathan was ripping up carpet, we are redoing our floor in the kitchen, family room and dining room. It has been something we have wanted to do for a while, the carpet is quite disgusting (it is under our dining room table, you can probably picture what it looks like) and the linoleum in the kitchen, well, it is an eyesore and beginning to come up. In the midst of figuring out what I want, God blessed us with wood laminate flooring at an amazing price from a friend. When it is all said and done I will show you pictures and share with you more about how we got the floor.

Anyway, I hope you had a wonderful Valentines Day.

Empowered to Connect

One of my favorite blogs to read is one of person I do not personally know, but I sure feel like I do. She has adopted children from the "hard places", she homeschools, and she seeks to follow Christ is all she does. And she is very transparent in all of it. I have found great encouragement from reading her posts about how she is learning along the way. Anyway to get to my point. She (Lisa) posted today about a 1/2 off special on two Empowered to Connect conferences being held in Tennessee and Colorado. Empowered to Connect is a great adoption resource. Also a giveaway of one of Dr. Karyn Purvis' DVDs (from Empowered to Connect). Click here, to check out the giveaway and the 1/2 price on the conference. If you have adopted I really think you would love reading Lisa's blog.

Adoption Finalization Update

I have had a few people ask when we will finalize "M". I sure do wish I could tell you, but since I really don't know, I can't. What I do know is that we just met with one of our social workers. This social worker is the one that does our monthly visits and keeps in contact with us. She let me know that the social worker who is in charge of our homestudy and finalization has a list of families he is working on to finalize and we are #10 of 30. She was encouraged saying she thought that the families before us would finalize in the spring, so drawing conclusions maybe late spring or early summer. Here's hoping. It is a better projection than the last one which was by the end of 2011.

We aren't sitting around doing nothing though. If you have ever adopted, you know that sitting around and doing nothing is hard. We are getting new TB tests, getting our CPR up to date and getting statements of health for our other kids. The former two have or will soon expire, so it is nothing new to work on, just keeping current. The latter was a new thing to complete. When we were working with a private agency, I remember taking the CPR class for the second time in the process and feeling very discouraged. A year in and no prospect of a child. At least this time around we have our girl!

Who are the Joneses?

I was quickly skimming through the Compassion Magazine I received in the mail today and I read this statement: "While we try to keep up with the Joneses, most people just try to survive" The picture is interesting. The top portion is the upper half of a poor woman holding her child with a drab background. The bottom is the legs of a woman in very pink slacks with 5 good size shopping bags around her. It was such a stark difference. The small caption said

"The quest for success often keeps our focus on that next raise, that next house, that next new thing. But if we think we have some catching up to do, we should consider how the other 90 percent of the world lives. See how you stack up to the rest of the world at: whoarethejoneses.org"

I checked out the website and wanted to share it. I read statistics all the time about "the rest of the world". But is it making a difference in my life? Have I changed anything in what I do, what I focus on, what I spend my money on because of it? I encourage you to check out the website and see how you stack up. How would you respond? What difference does it make to you? I would love to hear what you have to say. If you would like to see the rest of the magazine and/or the picture I am describing just click here.

Dinner Tonight...

I came across this recipe in my Sunset Magazine.

Take a close look and see how many types of critters you find in this dish.

I don't think my kids will go for this as our dinner tonight!

But if you are interested in the recipe, you can click here: Bouilloabaisse.

I showed Drew this picture, his comment was "they should poke those eyes out" I agree, I don't want my food looking back at me!

Looking Back - Winter in CA

Since I missed posting anything the last couple of months of 2010, I decided to start a series called "Looking Back". I took a whole lot of pictures and there is a lot to tell, but I don't want to recap 2010 all in one post (I doubt you want me to either) so I thought periodically I will put up a post about 2010. So here is my first one.

As many of you know, winter in CA is a bit different than many other places in the country. Even Fall is different. Leaves still fall off several of the trees, you will notice it especially when you are driving by a stone fruit orchard or nut trees. However, when you think of Fall, like October and November, our leaves are still very green. Then comes the change, when everyone else has moved on to winter (we have too, we have our Christmas decorations out) our leaves begin to change and we finally start raking the first of December. You drive around town and think "Oh, a beautiful Fall day" Of course you have the Christmas lights to look at too.

So you have the month of December, where you feel it should be winter, because you are singing songs about a winter wonderland and a white Christmas, but you are still raking leaves. What to do? Well this year we decided to do a typical winter activity, at least typical in colder climates.

We went ice skating.

Only this isn't typical ice skating, it is advertised as synthetic ice. Huh? The ad says you don't even need to bundle up. Well this we have to check out.

We find half price tickets on the internet and a group of us drive about an hour to this outdoor synthetic ice skating rink. We decided to pack heavy coats, mittens, scarves and hats, because where we are from, you dress warm for something like this. Keep in mind that we went with families who were not native Californians, one mom had lived in Colorado for many years, and the other lived in upstate New York.

Well we arrive to find a little rink (and I mean little) with a white picket fence around it and Christmas music blaring. It looked like ice from afar and they are using real ice skates. Then we get closer and see it is white plastic.

This will be interesting.

We lace up our skates and hit the "ice".

The problem is that the blades on the skates do not cut through the plastic like it does on ice and you end up sliding about a foot and figure it is easier to walk. The older crowd wasn't too happy about this. My young kids didn't think it was too bad. Of course they had nothing to compare it to. After about 20 minutes of this, the coats, mittens, and hats came off. After about 10 more minutes the skates came off. We found we could slide a whole better better on the plastic with our socks. I wasn't sure what the employees would think of this, but before long they were conducting sock sliding races and contests with our group. They must not have minded.



After our adventure, the socks went in the trash. They looked pretty bad. It was an experience, but we all agreed that we were especially thankful we didn't pay full price for this. But it will be a memory we won't soon forget.