Grand America

Nate spoiled me and took me to the Grand America Hotel last weekend for my birthday/our anniversary (number six)!  This was my first experience at a really nice hotel like this and, let me tell you, it was fancy! Everybody called us Mr. Morrill and Ms. Morrill and was over-the-top nice. We had turn-down service (which neither of us really knew what it was beforehand) with chocolates on the bed and a little card telling us the next day's weather forcast. The suite was huge and beautiful! I'd definitely recommend this for an anniversary getaway, and its actually cheaper than the Anniversary Inn. Anyway, it was really fun to "live the high life" for a night!  Thank you, Nathan for an anniversary I'll never forget!

 Here's the view of the courtyard from our balcony on the 16th floor:

And here's the ground view of the gardens:

Uhhh, Nevermind . . .

So, ignore my last post. We are not getting that house.  The appraiser noted water damage under the kitchen sink and though it didn't look bad when we did the inspection, we decided to check into it again the day before we closed.  With some further investigation we found mold!!  Though we couldn't tell for sure, it may be pretty extensive.  I can't believe how close we came!  Of course we've been praying for guidance all along and felt OK about things, but in the days before we were going to close I started feeling so unsettled and dark that I couldn't sleep and just felt sick.  Those feelings definitely helped us decide to check further into the water damage.  How lucky we are to have the guidance of the Spirit in decisions like these--especially in situations where we can't possibly know what the future holds.

So its back to square one with the house hunting, but it looks like there are a lot more to choose from this time around.  Tonight Robbie prayed that we could find "a new house with no water damage."  I feel confident his prayers will be answered!

Help! My Kitchen is Ugly!

So, here's some pictures of the kitchen in our hopefully soon to be new house. Unfortunately it looks lots worse in real life.  The cabinets are in decent shape, but someboday put a white "milk wash" on them with some light blue mixed in and then some brown "antique-ing" type stain in the crevices. They just look wierd. The counter tops are kind of whitish grey with a little bit of lovely pastel blue and pink swirled in--hopefully we can remedy this with new counter tops in the future. Do any of you creative people out there have any ideas (that are cheap) for helping this kitchen? I've thought about painting the cabinets white and then painting the wall behind a dark tan or something. Other ideas are painting them black or stripping them and re-staining them (I'm only willing to do this if there is a relatively quick, easy way). HELP!

Ari's First Haircut

Ari was starting to look like "Cousin It" so we decided it was time for some bangs and took her to Cookie Cutters yesterday. Here's the BEFORE picture:

And here's the cute results:

Yay, I can see!