Random Tuesday

The exciting news at my house is Mariele getting ready to walk! Every fiber of her being is just quivering with excitement over her new skill. She pulls up on something, then will let go and just stand there with a big grin on her face! She likes to get our reactions also. Of course we clap our hands and give her lots of praise. Last night she even took a couple of steps forward. Any day now she will be walking! And visions of chasing big sister around the room are dancing in her head.




We FINALLY got our exercise room usable. And by usable, I mean it has a TV hooked up to a TiVo up there. Because we all know you can't use a treadmill unless you are watching an interesting television program. We have a plan to really fix up this exercise room over the next 6 months to a year. The plan includes carpeting and painting the wall where we had the cabinets ripped out. We also plan to get rid of the monster TV on the very elegant ice-chest and replace it with a small plasma TV on a nice console. Here is the ULTRA-before pic. This is how the room looked when we bought the house (this photo was actually how the room looked when the seller was SHOWING the house). The room has the nice high ceiling, making it a perfect exercise room. We have the office downstairs, so we really did not need this built in desk and cabinetry:



This is how the room looks now. These are also before pics, remember. The ice cooler is not in the long-term decor plan:





It has a nice walk-in closet for storage:



Analese is such a princess. She would wear that darn Cinderella dress every day if I would let her. She wore it yesterday. The tiara too. She was so good all day yesterday, because she was told by Daddy that if she was good, he would do her magic rocks with her. She managed to stay on my nice list all day, so here she is doing the magic rocks with Daddy:






Christmas shopping is 99.5% done. We are thinking about taking Analese ice-skating later.

I have been eating too much Pioneer Woman chocolate sheet cake. It is so good, it just needs to be gone!

9 days until my birthday. 35th birthday too. My birthday is going to be a sucky travel day. Boo! Lee even asked me what I want, and I can't think of a single thing. 8 hours of continual sleep, but IDK how that is going to happen.