Rooms for Two

So, when we moved in, we loved how almost all of our house was painted with the exception of the overly wine-themed but tolerable kitchen, and the *gasp* wallpaper in Lily's room. Ella's room is painted with these really cools stripes in bright, fun colors. Lily's room was khaki wallpaper. Now, I'm an only child so I can only speculate, but I believe at some point Lily might complain if her room was left so dull compared to Ella's. I've also heard from various people with siblings that we might want to spruce up Lily's room at some point because Ella's room was so cool. SO, I have been wanting to remove the wallpaper and paint in there for pretty much a year now. Well the opportunity came on the 26th.


A before shot of the wallpaper

I half-joking said to Andrew now might be a good time to do it because we had my mom and Dave to watch the kids while we worked. Well, he thought about it and actually said he thought it was a good idea. I was kind of surprised but we jumped right in. We visited Home Depot, bought a chair rail, paint and other supplies. And rented a wallpaper steamer. As with all these types of projects, things take longer than expected or end up being harder than first thought. So what Andrew estimated being a three day project has turned into a 5 or 6 day project. But that's still a pretty quick turn around.


Patched and Primed, ready to go!

In the meantime, Ella has requested on multiple occasions that we turn her room into a Tinkerbell room. At first I ignored this because she's only had her fish-themed room a year. But then again, I chose that for her. And since again, I'm new to the sibiling thing, we decided to just spruce her room up a bit, since Lily was getting a new room. So we got Tinkerbell bedding (a great deal on a bed-in-a-bag from Costco), some decals for the walls, and we're going to put up crown molding painted in a Tinkerbell purple. We also bought her a new bed, trundle and nightstand yesterday and rearranged her room. Lily will be getting Ella's old bed (or I should say MY old bed--from about eighth grade!) as we retire the crib to the basement. So really in the course of 6 days, we have redone 2 rooms. Although, the crown molding in Ella's room will probably wait until next weekend when Bubba and Grand Pat come for a visit. :-)


Starting to paint and finishing up the difficult chair rail

Lily's room turned out fantastic with a lavendar on the top of the walls and a bright dark pink (called Strawberry Freeze) on the bottom of the walls with a white chair rail in-between. It will sort of be a Disney Princess room, but not overkill on the Princesses. So hopefully she'll think its as cool as Ella's room. Oh, and as my young cousin (a fifth grader) informed his grandfather at Christmas, "We don't say cool anymore, we say sweet now." Sorry to inform young Mike, but that is not a new phrase. As I recall in my old age, I said that as a kid in middle school. What goes around, comes around I guess. I digress...anyway, hopefully both Ella and Lily will think their rooms are "sweet" and it will last them for awhile. :-)

And a HUGE thank you to my mom and Dave for all their work watching the kids and making meals for us the last few days. Especially when they didn't really sign up for all that when they decided to spend the holidays with us. :-)

And Happy New Year's to everyone!
(Photos coming very soon, I promise!)

The Christmas Letdown

I don't mean "letdown" as in disappointing or unexciting. I mean letdown as in, time to recuperate, relax, regroup. We spent all month getting geared up for Christmas. It was especially fun this year with Ella so into it and having a full understanding of the holiday (we even began to tell her The Christmas Story and that Christmas was celebrating Jesus' birthday--not just about presents). However, after 5 or 6 days straight of celebrating, family get togethers, and present opening. We were exhausted! We have spent the last five days recuperating and not even leaving the house much. :-)


Celebrating with the Comandes

We started the festivities by flying to Racine Dec. 20th. We flew not wanting to risk a minimium 6 1/2 hour drive in bad weather. We enjoyed visiting with Andrew's parents and brother and sister-in-law as well as the Comandes and a few of the Isaacsons. About halfway through gift opening, Lily was so overwhelmed she had to leave the room and relax a bit. This was somewhat of a theme throughout the rest of our Christmas festivities. She still had two Santa gifts to open on the 26th because she just couldn't do it on the morning of the 25th. We really enjoyed our visit to Wisconsin. I especially enjoyed my annual trip to the salon for pedicures with my sister-in-law Jenelle and our cousin-in-law Gina. We were trying to figure out how long we've been doing it, it's either 3 or 4 years now. But we always have a good time! Especially with coffee and chocolate in the mix.


Eating and getting ready to open gifts with some of the Isaacsons.

We flew back to MN on the 24th after being delayed for nearly 2 hours at the Milwaukee airport. Upon arrival, we went to B-pa and Gramma Clare's house for a Christmas celebration. Then came home and promptly put the girls to bed. It was nice to have Santa's arrival as an excuse. We even checked out Santa's progress and impending arrival on an internet Santa tracker! Poor Lily though. I've already mentioned how she is scared of Santa. Well, we kept telling her she had to go to bed so Santa could come. Well, she got all upset and didn't want to go to bed. We finally figured out, she thought Santa was going to come in her room and see her. We assured her that Santa just comes, eats his cookies, and then leaves presents in the family room. After that, she was fine and excited. :-)

Leaving cookies for Santa before bed and the gifts that Santa left!

Christmas morning the girls actually slept later than we thought they would and when Ella got up, she didn't even notice the two giant sleds or mini-trampoline in the corner of the family room. Talk about a letdown for those of us who helped Santa get ready and stayed up putting said trampoline together! Once she did notice though, she was pretty excited about everything.


Don't worry Lily's Christmas is almost over. :-)

We spent the late morning (we were late again, but I beat my dad! He's notorious for being late on Christmas, so as long as I beat him, I was satisfied) and early afternoon at Grandma Mazie's to hang out with the Engelhart family. It was loud, boisterous and fun as always! After that, we headed over to my uncle Joe's to visit with my mom's side of the family. We enjoyed a nice relaxing time there as well as another delicious meal.


Ella with Santa at the Engelharts and everyone at Zawislak family Christmas.

Whew! Christmas was over. We were all set to enjoy the rest of the week with my mom and Dave visiting. Until I got the bright idea on the 26th that maybe we should start a home improvement project. Since my mom and Dave were here and could watch the kids for us. See next post for more on this project and pictures will soon be uploaded from Christmas and our new project. :-)

Christmas is a long time!

We're getting close now! Just a little over a week away! The trees are trimmed, the presents bought, plans made. Ella sighed and said to me yesterday, "Christmas is a long time." I'm pretty sure she meant, its a long time until Christmas finally gets here. :-) I told her she didn't have to wait long now. Just a few more days. We'll be visiting Bubba's house toward the end of the week and the present opening extravaganza will begin on Friday and not let up until the 26th. I think the kids are going to be very overwhelmed, overstimulated and overtired by the end of the holidays. But they'll have a lot of fun in the process.

We had a nice weekend. Andrew was in California for Friday and Saturday. He went to his company holiday party and then visited the 49ers for their game Saturday night. The girls and I busied ourselves by visiting with B-pa and Gramma Clare. Ella helped me wrap some presents in the morning. She picked out all the bows. :-) And we had Kelly, Hope and Isabelle over to make Spritz cookie press cookies. Although the girls had fun decorating the cookies with various sugars, I learned I am not adept at using a cookie press. I assured Kelly I make a mean chocolate chip cookie. We'll have to make those next time. It also probably didn't help that I was distracted by talking and having a good time myself. I kept forgetting to set the timer and check on the cookies. I think we'll be making a new batch of cookies to give away to people. :-)

We've started a new activity around here. It seems a lot of our weekends I tend to recuperate from the week and do laundry and random things around the house, while Andrew watches the girls. And Andrew tends to be a bit fixated with football during the day on Sunday (is the season over yet?!). We've decided to do "Family Movie Night" on Sunday evenings. We've viewed Jingle All the Way (we discovered this one was probably not the best choice for 2-4 year olds, more like 9 year olds), Daddy Day Care, and last night we had a special treat. We went to the movie theater to see Alvin and the Chipmunks! It was a really good family movie for little kids. Ella LOVED it! She told us she wants to watch it at home. I told her she'd have to wait a bit for that. She said it was silly how the Chipmunks made such a mess of the house and she thought it was funny when Simon was flying around the fan because his balloon got caught. Even Lily was interested in a good part of the movie too. She did much better than she did with Shrek 3. We would love to hear any suggestions you might have for good (preferably non-animated) family movies for future movie nights!

As we get closer to the holidays, we hope you all are finding the time to get everything done, take a deep breath and relax a bit. Enjoy the holidays and festivities, and time with friends and family! Merry Christmas from the Isaacsons!

And another year goes by...

Andrew celebrated his 31st birthday on Tuesday this week. Actually, we really celebrated it on Sunday. That way he could have a full day of relaxation, football, and fun. He opened his gifts Sunday morning. Besides a new jacket and shirt, he received Guitar Hero III (with a wireless controller!). He was pretty excited to receive it and I think we will ALL have fun with it. :-)

Cindy, Shawn and the kids came over in the afternoon to watch the Viking game. Ella, Emilee and I made chocolate chip cookies with Cindy supervising. Andrew and Shawn watched football, side-by-side on the couch, with their laptops open, refreshing the stat tracker every 30 seconds. My dad and Clare joined us for make-your-own-pizzas later on. And we all had a fun evening hanging out.



I think all in all Andrew had a nice birthday! Soon I'll be adding a picture of Andrew and my dad with their chocolate chip cookies complete with birthday candle in it. My dad's birthday was Dec. 1st and we didn't get a chance to celebrate because we were having a blizzard that day. So we added him to the celebration also!

Andrew has been working on a lot of NFL stuff this fall. Recently, he was talking to the Buffalo Bills about Marshawn Lynch. Apparently, when Marshawn gets the ball he goes into a state of mind which he coined "beast mode." It means that at least two or three defenders need to tackle him before he is brought down. Andrew sold them on this idea to do an animation of Marshawn in beast mode with the style of a comic book character. Apparently, it turned out awesome! Here's a link to what fans were saying about the spot after seeing it at the game. And here's what the video looked like:

He's Makin' a List, and checkin' it twice

Last Wednesday, I spontaneously decided we were going to spend the latter part of the morning and early afternoon at Mall of America. My mom sent the girls cute Christmas outfits and Ella had been eyeing them. I figured I might as well give the girls a reason to try them on and wear them. They were so excited they even posed for a bunch of pictures for me beforehand. "To get ready for Santa".



We headed out and there was absolutely no line at the time and we made it right before Santa took his lunch break. Ella was very excited to talk to him; Lily cowered the whole time. But I did convince Lily to get on the rocking horse and she took a couple pictures, but only if I was right next to her. She would have nothing of it when I tried to back out a couple inches so the camera lady could crop me out.



After that, we visited the bookstore, the aquarium and the Lego store. Ella played with the Legos for nearly an hour(!) while Lily and I raced Lego cars and browsed the store. They have some REALLY cool Lego sets out there. I sure hope the girls continue to like them when they get older so I can have an excuse to buy a couple of the more unique sets. :-)

Other than that, we've actually been relaxing a bit around here. Sort of nice before the holidays get underway. We received about 8 inches of snow on Saturday and at least that much again today. It was really coming down out there today! And we still don't have any gas for the snowblower yet. :-( Ella loves playing in the snow this year. She is always asking to go play out there. Lily, again, she's not so sure what she thinks of it all. Once she is bundled up and out there, and you help her walk to where she wants to go, and plop her down, then she's good to go for a few minutes. She thinks she can't walk in her boots and snowpants. :-)


There's some new photos up in the November and December photo albums!