39 & 40 Months Waiting
December 20, 2013
January 20, 2014
38 Months
38 months on the wait list, over 3 and a half years on this adoption journey, 4 years ago that God tore the veil off our eyes and broke our hearts for the fatherless. What a journey this has been! We continue to wait at the top of the list and pray for strength and endurance to continue on in total trust and faith. God has been so incredibly faithful to carry us through, to give us divine peace, grace to trust Him, and deep joy to celebrate with dear friends who’s paths have been quicker than ours. He has given us people to pray for us and our daughter, blessed trips to Africa, and a true understanding that this is about more than we originally thought it was about. Grace upon grace upon grace. He is good, and we will wait for our Nyah until she comes!
Streetfest 2013
Last night our awesome church body had our annual Streetfest, and we had a blast! We were at some dear friends’ house this past weekend and they let Oliver borrow a Patriots football jersey/helmet, which he was thrilled about. He has become an absolute football fanatic this year, which has actually been super fun, as football is my favorite sport to watch (specifically pro football). The Broncos are our very favorite, but Oliver’s school mascot is the Patriots, so this uniform was perfect! He has some hand-me-down baseball pants that were perfect, topped off with his soccer cleats! I’m pretty sure he has been wearing this outfit non-stop this whole week. 🙂 Sullivan got a Donatello ninja turtle mask/shell/bostaff for his birthday in August, so he was pumped to wear that for his costume. I wasn’t going to dress up, but at the last-minute decided I could pull together a mild pirate costume, and Seth did his annual raid-the-costume-closet at our church and came up with some sort of “hippy clown” costume. 🙂 And there you have it! Here’s a picture of my printed pic from the Streetfest Photo Booth:
With today being Halloween and Throwback Thursday (#tbt for all you social media peeps), I got nostalgic and made a collage of pics from 2006-2013. Sweet babies. Enjoy!
Guest Room, After!
Loving how this turned out. It feels bright and airy and lovely and cozy all at the same time. So thankful to have a guest room! We haven’t had a guest room since Oliver was a baby, and I am really excited to have a space that is devoted to hospitality. Since both Seth’s and my parents live out of town, I’m really thrilled to have a space for them when they come to visit!
(Also, I was thrilled to inherit that amazingly huge aloe vera plant from my sister-in-law this summer when she moved out of state! I’m going to rope my mom into helping me split it up and repot part of it when she comes to visit in a couple weeks!)
Guest Room, Before
A fun transformation that I’m excited to finish is our guest room! It was built originally as a bedroom, but the family that lived here for 50+ years before us knocked down a double doorway through one of the walls (living room wall) and made it their formal dining room. They made a beautiful bay window, which I love, and there is tons of wonderful light in this room!
So the first thing we did was frame up and finish out the wall that was open into the living room so that it turned back into a bedroom. The mirror you see in the first pic is the closet doors. The first pic was taken from the living room through the part that we walled back up, and the second pic is taken from the actual doorway that goes into the hallway. Then we took down the window treatments, trim in the middle of the wall, the floor-to-ceiling wallpaper, and the chandelier. I’ve watched enough HGTV shows to know what to do with a great old gold chandelier when I see one! Paint of course! I sprayed it white, and my handy hubs installed it in our current dining room/eating area off the kitchen/family room. And I love it! Because several of the other rooms had wallpaper that was put directly onto unfinished drywall, we hired out some of that work. And since we had a few other walls that we framed-up/built that needed to be finished/textured, those guys went ahead and mudded/textured the walls after tearing down the wallpaper that messed up the drywall anyway…..it was all a big mess! But we were super glad to have help.
So here is what the room looks like now…
And since my parents are coming to visit in a couple of weeks, I’m on a mission to complete it this week! We will caulk and paint first, and then I pretty much have all the components that will go in the room, so will just put it all together! I mostly have a vision of how I’d like it to turn out, but I’m not completely sure on a few things. So we’ll see just how it all ends up. 🙂 Stay tuned!
this beautiful life 
