Whirlwind weekend

We had a quick visit to St. Louis this past weekend and it was great. Sam got to play a ton with her cousins which always makes me happy, we got to see some of the Kuhn extended family and even had Christmas morning! Yup, that's right. We celebrated Christmas.
My sister surprised me Saturday morning by having her house decorated for Christmas, all our traditional Christmas morning foods prepared, a Christmas tree and presents for Sam, Chris, the baby and I. As we pulled into her driveway, thinking we were meeting there for breakfast, they were all out on their front porch in Christmas jammies and started singing Christmas carols. I worked really hard to hold back the tears. I don't think I can even begin to describe how much this surprise meant to me. Missing Christmas with lots of family will be really hard and the fact that my sister thought about this and then stayed up all night working to create this big surprise is truly unbelievable. Best surprise! Thank you Aunt Jojo!
Since it was a surprise to me I didn't have my camera with me, so no pictures but trust me watching Sam open the few presents we could convince her to open, and watching her cousins beg to open the rest was very cute. And my sister in Christmas pajamas was pretty priceless too!

Here are a few of my favorite pictures from the rest of the weekend.

Gettin Crafty!

With many suggestions and much guidance from my sister, Sam and I are attempting to be crafty! I am not a creative person so even the thought of coloring with Sam puts a small twinge of fear into my mind. What will I color? How will I show her how when I don't know how? I know its totally irrational but whatever.
So we started small with "projects" that took multiple steps but were all very simple. We got paper and colored; I just handed her the crayons and encouraged her to put them on the paper, not the table. Then we got brave and painted! Jodie gave me all the steps on how to do this successfully and even though it makes quite a mess we both enjoy it! Then comes stickers. Sam loves putting stickers on her pictures, well on anything really, but she doesn't quite understand yet that the stickers are suppose to stay on the paper; oh well.
Anyway, with those three skills "mastered" here are some of the final projects we created.

This is for sure my favorite because I am hoping that we will actually keep it for a long time. I got the idea from somewhere and can't for the life of me remember where now. I cleaned out one of those Clorox wipes containers, peeled off the label and then when Sam was done decorating the cover I glued it to the container. Since I was unable to glue it on straight (HA!) I glued some ribbon onto the bottom to cover up my poor gluing skills! She now has a piggy bank that she helped to make.
And here was today's adventure. Please excuse the bed head and pajamas that she is wearing. We were feeling very lazy! We are starting to work on the first stage to a wintery kind of project that I am hoping will turn out cute enough to become fun gifts to mail out to friends and family. You will have to wait to see the finished project...if it works out!

"mama all better?"

Is it bad to let your kids see you cry? Hormones right now are kicking my butt. I don't know if it is all the time alone right now in the apartment to think, plan, worry, and dream but I seem to be upset or sad about something almost everyday (and night!). Doesn't help much that I have a serious head cold which Sam has caught; a very woe-is-me mood is floating around this apartment today.
Anyway, today while reading something that was making me cry Sam came up and asked "mama all better?". I quickly wiped the tears away and said "yes Sam, mama is all better". Obviously she has no idea what I am crying about or even how sweet her words were at that moment but in some little way she helped. But, again I ask, does it hurt her to see me upset and not understand why? Is it okay for her to see me cry?

Belated Happy Birthday!

It is horribly sad that I have to say a belated happy birthday on here to my own HUSBAND! Internet outage and an exhausting day meant no sweet, romantic, thoughtful happy birthday post for my poor husband yesterday. Just one way of many that his birthday went unnoticed. I had plans for Sam and I to make his birthday card but then of course the morning got away from me and she chose yesterday to take a super long nap and woke up just moments before he got home. Then the most important part of the birthday, the Enlund traditional carrot cake, turned out a slightly overdone, crooked, slightly broken apart mess! It still tastes okay but looks awful. I couldn't believe that I messed up his birthday cake. A while back he bought himself an IPod, so that was his birthday gift, which meant nothing to open yesterday.
I don't know why but it makes me sad to have birthday's go by so unnoticed. He got a lot of phone calls from friends and family; was even sang to TWICE over the phone! But it still made me sad that I didn't make the day more special for him.

SO, happy birthday Chris! Considering next year is a VERY big birthday I promise that I will do better. LOVE YA!

Our Apartment

It is certainly not ideal and we don't love living in a two bedroom apartment but being in the same town as Chris and not being by myself at night is for sure worth the sacrifice of living space. We are starting to make this small apartment feel like home and each day we find some new way to make things more convenient, easier or comfortable. I thought it was time to show a few pictures of our new place.

Here is the living room/dining room/entrance to the kitchen. We don't have much on the walls yet, we are still working on that.

This is one side of the very small kitchen. I have decided that people that live in apartments must not typically cook a lot or at least not cook elaborate meals because the lack of counter space and baking equipment storage is killing me!
The other side of the kitchen. Aren't those cabinets beautiful?! The doors are not actually wood, they are plastic!
This is our bedroom. Really just our massive bed right now. We do have one dresser against the wall that you can't see and one night stand. Eventually we will add the bassinet and changing table to this room somewhere.


Looking from our bedroom toward the bathroom, we do have a pretty nice big closet. Chris actually made his dresser fit in the there. And this is the lovely bathroom. The counters are some kind of white and gold fake marble sort of stuff and the white cabinets, again plastic not wood, have a beautiful gold trim to match!
This is a very dark Sam's room. Not much to it so that fact that the picture stinks doesn't really matter.

And that is it. We live on the first floor so there is no deck or balcony. We have a small concrete slab right outside the sliding glass doors from our living room but with winter coming we don't anticipate using that for much. I plan on planting our Christmas tree right in front of those doors anyway so then we won't even be able to go out them!

All in all we are learning how to make the most of the space and working with it. It isn't much but with only one salary, a full mortgage and rent to pay this is what we can afford. The neighborhood is great with at least four parks within walking distance and lots of green space to explore. We will bundle up and head outside for as long as we can.

Okay, time to get dressed and head out on some errands! We are going to get our library card today. Very exciting!

We did more than just trick or treat

We had a great weekend in Bloomington and had too many pictures to put into one post.

One of the other Halloween firsts for Sam was carving a pumpkin.

Her first feel of pumpkin guts.

Followed by her first taste of pumpkin guts.

Which she promptly spit back out.

After it was all clean Chris went to work on creating the face.

I told him I wanted a crescent moon nose. He said that I should draw it...it didn't turn out quite like I had imagined!! HA!
While Chris was carving the pumpkin Sam had a snack and apparently went into a ranch dressing and carrott coma!!The finished product! With cheesy smiles from everyone!

Sunday morning...some cozy snuggle time!

When the weather warmed up a bit on Sunday we headed out to a park.
Okay, that should be a good picture fill for a while!!

Hope you all had a great Halloween and are now ready for all the Christmas decorations that will of course start popping up in stores if they have not already!!

I LOVE halloween!

This has always been one of my favorite holidays but in recent years it has certainly lost its luster. Going out to the bars as an adult seeing all the VERY scantily clad women using this holiday as an excuse to show way too much skin has just not been enjoyable. I missed Halloween with Sam last year because of work so I was super excited about it this year. We decided to head down to Bloomington and celebrate with Chris's parents. That way we could be trick or treating in a neighborhood that we knew with people that would enjoy seeing Sam all dressed up, instead of just spending it in Madison with strangers.
We had not had much success getting her to wear her costume so I was convinced the actual trick or treating would be a bust....boy did Sam prove me wrong! SHE LOVED IT! Once she figured out the system she did amazing. Running up the sidewalk, driveways or sometimes yards. Being lifted up to ring the doorbell and then standing there looking through the window until someone came. She would get shy at first, not say anything and come rushing back to Chris and I for security but as soon as she saw the big bowl/bag/basket of candy her little face would light up and she would hold out her bag. By the end of the half hour of trick or treating we had her saying Happy Halloween, thank you and bye bye at every house. Happy Halloween came out something like "Ha - alloween!" but people understood what she meant. Watching her get so excited at each new house and actually enjoy wearing her costume, hood up and all, was just amazing. This is what this holiday is all about. The little kids!
Here are a few of the much anticipated trick or treating pictures.