$350 Kitchen makeover before/after

These are taken the day we moved in. New floor, new paint on the walls, cupboards, and trim, new curtain rods and curtains. You can hardly tell we have 5 different styles of cabinets and 3 different styles of countertops.

Project

The kitchen project is underway! I have the walls painted, and now the cupboards and trim need to get done. The walls are "almond toast," the same color as our livingroom. The cupboards and trim will be "cottonseed." Kind of a light cream color. Doing the cupboards are going to be a pain, but hopefully they'll get done soon, since the kitchen is completely torn apart. After the painting, I need to put down new floor tile. Phew! I'll post pictures when it's done. This is the biggest project we have to get the house ready to put on the market in February. We still have trim to put up in the dining room, hallway, bathroom, and our bedroom. As well as finish our closet, and fix some siding on the back side of the house.

Christmas 2010

Christmas Eve and Christmas were pretty good for our family this year. We were at church Chistmas Eve for Cael's program. He was a cow, and this is his buddy Ethan, the donkey. Ethan and Cael found one of the kitchen carts and decided to entertain themselves. They would push each other and then spin around. Meemaw Keylon was "taking orders" for supper at the window. We had supper with the Keylons, Gaschos, and Reynolds clans.

It's getting closer...

Allen is back to working out, thank goodness. I'm just glad that he's feeling better. He has the day off tomorrow, so he'll be back out there, running. He bought a balaclava the other day, which I was very happy for, except it was a day late for me, since I did a 12-miler in the snowfall on Saturday. I didn't think my face was frozen, but when I tried to yell at my buddy, Chloe the farmdog, to go home, I realized that I couldn't talk very well. Unfortunately, that was only about halfway through my 12. Allen tried it out on Sunday afternoon, and it worked pretty well. He's got to be ok running in the cold. MO in February is no picnic.

On the mend

Allen's attempts of getting rid of his kidney stone on his own was not successful, so today we had an appointment at Good Sam in Kearney. The doctor decided it was time that Allen was rid of it. 45 minutes later, the doctor brought me a small vial and showed me what was giving Allen so much pain. He's still in pain, but at least we know that this will end eventually. Healing has begun.

A trip to the ER

Sunday morning, Allen got up at 2am so he could go to work at 3. He was experiencing some pain similar to what he's had before in his side, so he took some medicine and set off for work. He got to the edge of town, but had to double-back and come home. He was in a lot of pain. For those of you who don't know Allen well, he has quite a high pain tolerance. Cael and I got up to get ready for church, but something made me stall. About 9:30, he told me that something was definitely not right, so we called his sister with the symptoms and then headed into the ER. 3.5 hours and a CT scan later, he has a kidney stone. I told him that people say it's worse than childbirth, but he told me that he'd rather do this 100 times than go through my childbirth once. This too shall pass, but it needs to do it faster! At least he only has one, and it's "small" (3mm), so hopefully it will work its way out of his system sooner rather than later.

Cael got into a Lego kick the other night, so he and Daddy sat down and built an awesome tower. Cael calls it his "training tower." Apparently, it's where Daddy is going to go to train to be a soldier, and it's where Cael is going to go to train to be a firefighter. By the way, that's what Cael has "decided" to be when he grows up.

Happy Thanksgiving!

My sister was right, my pics are up before the end of the day. We had a great Thanksgiving at our house in Wood River. Our turkey turned out great! Cael made sure he got a turkey leg!

FCA Banquet with Ryan Hall

I know most of you don't know who Ryan Hall is, but that's ok. He's a world class marathoner with an amazing faith. He's a really nice guy on top of it. It was an awesome experience to hear him speak to the Nebraska FCA group. The top picture is Rex Burkhead - a NU Football player who also gave his testimony. Pretty cool!

Halloween

This year we continued the tradition of going to Ravenna to the Keiligs' house. Once again, the dads took the kids out while the moms stayed and handed out candy. Seafood lasagna is a staple every Halloween. This was Cael's first taste of it. He loved it so much that he shunned his plate of regular lasagna to fill up on the good stuff! This was Allen's last Ravenna Halloween, so that was sad, but Cael and I will be back next year. Cael was going to be Dearth Vader (he was at Stuhr Museum earlier in the month), but at the last second he wanted to be Bumblebee. He and Elly had a great time getting lots of candy!

5 years old

I like to take Cael out to take pictures around his birthday. I took these last weekend after church at Stuhr Museum.

Scarecrow Patch

We went out to the Scarecrow Patch by St. Libory today. Always one of our favorite times of the year! Cael and Dad each picked out a pumpkin. Zipline! This is the first year that Cael went on the big one. The big slide. The corn wagon.

MEPS

Well, Allen passed MEPS, which is where he had to have his physical and mental exam. He's sworn in and the contract is signed. No turning back now! Allen brought home a backpack (courtesy of Sgt. Christiansen) for Cael, who absolutely loves it. He had to transfer everything from his super hero bag to the cammo one as soon as he could! I'll try to get pics up.

Career Change

Our family knows, but not a lot of our friends do. Allen is embarking upon a career change. He will be working with Satalite Communications for the US Army. He's wanted to be in the military since he was 17, and almost went into the Guard when we were 23. I, of course, was stupid, scared, and selfish, so I let his brother talk him out of it. We are on board with this decision as a family, though, and I am very happy that Allen has made a career choice that he's excited about. I've never seen him so happy, upbeat, and motivated. He's been pretty miserable in his jobs for the past 9 years, so it's about time that he choose something for himself that will be good for the whole family. Cael is excited about this adventure, as am I ("Daddy's going to be a soldier!"). Allen goes to MEPS on Thursday for his physical, swearing in, and signing of his contract. His ship-out date is Feb. 23rd (which, for Allen, can't come soon enough!:) He will finish Basic around the end of May in Fort Leonard Wood, MO, then head off for 27 weeks of Sat. Comm. training at Fort Gordon, GA. He'll get done with that around Thanksgiving. Cael and I will have plenty of "quality time" together if we survive each other that long. :) We'll find out where we will be stationed toward the end of Basic. That's what I'm excited about. Hopefully, we'll get somewhere really cool, so everyone will use us as their vacation destination! We'll keep you updated as things progress.

First day of school

Cael's long-awaited first day of school finally came in August. He's in the Monday-Thursday class, and loves it. With the look on his face, his teacher should have her hands pretty full! Some of you know that our wrestling program was cut at HLHS. Unfortunate as that is, Allen has had the offer of taking over the Centura Wrestling Team. This is pretty cool, since his dad was the head coach of that team when he was principal there in the 80's. I was looking forward to seeing Allen more this winter with no wrestling, but you can't take wrestling away from the Blake boys. It doesn't work!

Start of another school year

A couple weeks before school started, Allen and I took a 2 month old little boy into foster care. We fell in love with him, then 6 days later, he was placed at a relative's house. Devastated was a good word for our household. School started, and things seemed back to normal. This last Monday we got the call that our foster son needed to be placed again and would we take him back? ABSOLUTELY!! We now have a 3month old in our house. It's a big change, but everyone is happy to have him back. Cael does so well with him and is a big helper! WE'll keep you updated.

Special Delivery

Allen and I have been working with Nebraska Children's Home in hopes of adopting. We still have our fostering license, but kind of forgot about it...until last Friday. We took a 2month old little boy for the weekend as a crisis respite. We find out today if we get to keep him longer. I can't say much more, other than he fits in perfectly with our family (Cael's in love), and would appreciate any and all prayers!

Shape Scavenger Hunt

Gymnastics

Cael's been in gymnastics class for almost 2 months now. He loves it! There are only a few kids in his class, so that makes it nice. If you watch the video, I am taking it from the waiting area outside the classroom, so you can hear one of the other moms talking to her little boy. This is just a tiny snippet of what he gets to do in an hour.

I should have taken a picture sooner, but this is Cael's eye with his mosquito bite. It looked MUCH worse Monday and Tuesday. So much so, that on Monday at gymnastics, another mom asked, "What does the other guy look like?" because it looked like Cael had a black eye. It was so swollen, his eye was starting to close. Luckily, we got some pretty strong cortizone cream and it wasn't infected. Phew! Darn mosquitos!

Summer Solstice

I know, I know. I'm a huge geek, but I can't help doing this twice a year. On June 21 and December 21, you can balance an egg. Really!