HE'S BACCCKKK

December 1 was a very exciting morning in our house! Our scout elf Chippy arrived! Not only did he arrive, but he brought us a delicious breakfast right from the North Pole! It consisted of snowballs, elf pillows and even reindeer poop! I know, we keep it klassy in these parts. But for real, these little cards were super cute! I found a picture on Pinterest. Of course the link didn't take me to an Etsy shop or anything, so I had to search high and low to find where I could get these! I could always make something up myself I'm sure. But look how cute these are! There's no way I could have done all that. Finally, I found them here!

Of course Chippy needed a little nourishment of his own. I mean he flew all the way from the North Pole, carrying all this stuff, and then had to set it all up for us. Unfortunately for Chippy, Monkey got to his 'Reindeer Poop' before he did! Hey Chipster, you snooze, you lose in these parts!

My Crafty Monkey

Christmas is right around the corner! I can't believe it! Nothing is better then home made Christmas decorations. I know, they're kind of tacky, but they're made with love! The same can't be said for those expensive made in China decos you can get every where. Although, for the amount of glue used in this project, it may have been cheaper to just go and buy some decorations at Target lol. Do you see the mound of glue he's got going on there?

 It was great to talk to him about Christmas while we were doing this. He wanted to know why his tree had a star and our tree had a princess. Good question. The truth of the matter is, Mommy's Cricut cartridge didn't have an angel, only a star. Take what you can get.

God bless his preschool teachers. Even more, God bless their glue budget! I think he would have tried to use the whole darn container if I didn't stop him. Rude, I know! What's even worse, I sucked some of the glue back into the bottle! The horror!

 The finished product! He was pretty proud of his tree. It went on the fridge until daddy got home, then we needed to put it in a window. It took a few tries to get this picture. Every time I would ask him to look at me and smile, he would put the tree in front of his face.

I designed everything on my cricut craftroom software and then just cut it all out at once. I really enjoy the software, you can see where everything is going to be, so you only have to load your mat once. It's a real time saver.

Busy, busy, busy!

DECEMBER?! How did this happen? It has been CRAZY in mommyland, let me tell you! I have been wanting to renovate our living room for pretty much ever! Finally, my husband agreed! YAY!!! It was a little over a month of hard, HARD work! My husband worked 12+ hours a day at work and then would come home and work a few hours here. As you can see, we took everything out! We started October 19th after supper time, and we had our new furniture delivered November 20th!

As you can see in these pictures, there us horrid wallpaper, with horrid wood wainscotting. My mom loved it. I think she was ready to disown me when I told her our plans lol. And to top off the green room of horrid, what awful green carpet. Don't get me wrong, the low traffic areas, it was very cushy. High traffic was like a cement floor. It did not age well. Not to mention, years of kids and animals, you can imagine the stank that came out of that bad boy. *barf*

So the plan was to remove all the horrid, take out the bar area that we had been using as an entertainment center, patch where needed, paint, and new carpet. Easy peasy, right? BWHAHA that was our first mistake! nothing ever goes as planned! The horrid wood was tar glued onto the walls! So there were these big clumps of stuff that we couldn't remove. Great! So this meant....ripping out all the dry wall and starting pretty much from scratch! Yay...right? Right?

I'm not going to lie, the demo part was really therapeutic. I hated everything in that room, so it felt amazing to just rip it allllll out! I have some awesome kids who were more then happy to help with the clean up. I think they would have liked to help more with the power tools, but safety first boys and girls!

I really thought the drywall dust was going to be the end of me. I'm not kidding. I was twitching by the end. That stuff gets every where! I have really thick hair. It got alllll in my hair and it seriously felt 20x thicker. Not to mention how many times I had to shampoo to get it to feel normal again. I reallly would have liked to pay someone to do this. But with Christmas coming, we were on a budget. So DIY it was. Thank God for a handy hubby!

These tiles are the only thing that we paid full price for, everything else was on sale! Again, we were on a budget! But look at these tiles, they were totally worth it! That little area cost just about as much as the carpet for the rest of the room, but they're beautiful! We all need a little splurge every now and then, right? We tiled over tile, the lazy way ;) It wasn't until we started dry fitting the wood look tiles that we realized the person who did the original tiles, didn't make the area symmetric. Not awful, but not ideal at all :/ Oh well, some things I need to learn to live with. If you're looking for something like it, the only place I found in SW Ontario was Lowe's.

Finally, the finished product. Again EVERYTHING was bought on sale! Furniture, lamps, carpet, drywall, everything, but the tile! Here you can see my adorable little monkey posing in front of the tree. That's right he has no pants on, he was getting ready for bed. I am in love with this room and how it turned out. But am in no hurry to do it again any time soon lol.