Getting ready for the Holidays

So I'm extremely excited!!!! My whole family is coming out for the Holidays!

Scott and I have been working hard on getting everything together for their arrival...It's been tough since we only have one car and I work all day long.

Tonight was a super warm night, so we attempted to get all the leaves raked up in our front yard because we haven't had time to do that during the day.

Yes, that is me in the middle of our leaf pile. And this is after we already filled 4 bags!

LEAVES

It even covered Scott completely

:-)

Raining Leaves!

As we were racking leaves this cutie came up and kept me company. REALLY friendly neighborhood cat. :-)

After that, we worked on the kitchen the rest of the night (we're, mostly Scott, are rewiring some electrical boxes now). 

Here are some pics of our progress in the kitchen:

When we first moved in: Vinyl floors, and we found a rotted spot under the counter (the rot didn't reach the baseboard thank goodness), nasty old cabinets (they look cute in the pic, but up close...not so much).

                                                                  Ripping up the Vinyl

                                                                           Prepping

                                                                     Yeehawww

I cut straighter than Scott!

Mine

Scott's ;-p

Yay Tile! (Before Grout)

Getting the Wallpaper off before I found a better way to do it.

                                                                       I wet the walls, scraped and peeled....not very effective...

We found this thing at Home Depot: This thing is super awesome! It puts little holes in the wallpaper then you spray it with vinegar and warm water (they had a "wallpaper remover" solution, but it was expensive and vinegar and warm water worked just fine!) let it settle for a bit, then peel it right off!

Look how much better it works! AWESOME!

Doing electrical before patching up walls then gonna put the counters back in temporarily so we have a kitchen for the holidays. :-)

Getting so excited for my family to come out!

Christmas Party at Work and finally the weekend.

 So work has been extremely hectic with the Christmas Bureau (trying to get all the families adopted), and trying to finish up this year's campaign. But today was a nice breather. I worked till about 11:30, then we carpooled to the Casino for the Office's Christmas Party. First we had a cocktail hour (I ordered a VIRGIN Pina Colada of course), then a fancy catered lunch, and we had a "white elephant" style gift exchange. After much swapping, I ended up with the one I wanted, the gift card to Home Depot! Yay!
Then we all received a card with 25 dollar credit on it to go gamble in the Casino. I of course, didn't use mine but I was a "lucky charm" to one of my fellow employees, who ended up wining 21 dollars. They gave me $5 for being their lucky charm, but I didn't want to accept.....they forced me to, so they will just find the $5 on their desk on monday. :-)

After all that I picked Scott up at school, he took one of his finals today.
I also found out today that my sister Stacey will be able to make it out here around Christmas while my whole fam is here. We are hosting Christmas for the fam this year in our new home. I'm so excited! Just hope we can get everything together to accommodate everyone.
This weekends plans:
Finish the kitchen floor.

Much needed update

So it's been quite a while since I've updated....

Since my last update a LOT has happened, here's the fast version:

WORK:
We had a recognition breakfast at the Ramada Inn for the Campaign Ambassadors this year. Scott was able to come to that, which was nice.

I also have received a more permanent, full time position at United Way, though they are calling it a Temp to hire because of the revamp and reorganization the office is going through, and have not decided on my official title yet. I have moved into my own cubicle/office and received a raise. 

HOUSE:

So the last week of our apt lease, things were getting stressed. They were back and forth on if we would close by the weekend and be in by Thanksgiving. We were biting our fingernails until an hour before the set close time, when we finally received the "OK". So we finally closed on the house the friday before Thanksgiving!

We then attempted to finish packing then we went to a Hunger Games Party. 

It was a lot of fun. Scott and I were from district 3 (the weapons district). So we all dressed accordingly to our district and had a "reaping" and then our own little hunger games. It was a blast. Then we all headed over to see the late showing of the second Hunger Games. 

The favors from the party was a kit with a little parachute on it, such a cute idea.

We didn't get home until 2AM, so we were exhausted the next day when we had to wake up early to pick up the moving truck. The truck was an hour late, so we were late getting back to our apt. where people from the ward were waiting to help us move. It was very nice having help because we got packed up and moved over to our house by like 1PM. 

We found out the first night in our house, that the pluming did not work correctly, so Scott had to fix that and it took about a week to get all the pipes working, but Scott did it. :-) 

SCHOOL:

Scott is into finals for the first semester of Law School. He's such a trooper! I can't believe that the first semester is almost over, CRAZY!

LIFE:

So Scott and I had our Thanksgiving using a hot plate, microwave, and crockpot (to cook the turkey). Because we do not have an oven/stove yet, and our kitchen is not functional at this time. We had a lovely day though and our enjoying being new homeowners (feels like we are newlyweds all over again).

Thanksgiving breakfast! Eggs, bacon, and orange juice.

Crock pot Turkey (a first but it turn out delicious!)

Lovely place settings that were gifts from our wedding, THANKS! :-)

I made up my own recipe for pumpkin pudding and it turned out fantastic! Gonna be part of our holiday tradition each year. 

I love spending time with him :-)

So our kitchen looks like this, so we have to do our dishes in the bathroom...

So many dishes from thanksgiving dinner...."sigh"

We of course had to do our tradition of going to the mall and getting a "Photobooth" pic on black friday, so here it is:

We also got some other stuff to help renovate and fix up our house for perty dern cheap. :-)

When we were looking for a Christmas tree, we only expected a little Charley brown Christmas tree with our budget, but we wanted a real one so we can continue our "ornament-made-from-the-trunk-of-our-christmas-tree-tradition", so we were determined. Scott found this one in a pile of Christmas trees selling for 16 dollars at Home Depot! It's 8 feet!!!

Topeka put on a "Miracle on Kansas Ave" Christmas parade and had a tree lighting ceremony. 

The Capitol downtown on our way back to our car. 

We have started decorating for Christmas!

We put the fake tree we got from my parents in our office (Blue and silver themed) :-)

Decorating our tree!

Scott putting on the shotgun shell star.

That's my boy! Haha!