Another Birthday - My Amazing Daughter

It seems just a few days ago that I hit publish on this post for her last birthday, and now here we are again and the year has flown!

How can it be that my girl is already 17!

She is the best and I could not be more proud of the amazing young woman she has become.  God has so richly blessed our family to have her as our own.

She has an awesome sense of humor and is a loyal fan of Dr. Who.

She shares important events with her brother and is a great friend to him.
They laugh a lot and are always there for each other.

She is really smart, beautiful, caring, quick witted and sometimes sarcastic, kind, loving,
thoughtful, talented in more ways than I can count, works hard, dreams big, and loves Jesus,
her family, and her orange cat (hopefully in that order!).

Every day I am thankful that God gave me this wonderful person and I'm honored to be her mom. 

Happy Birthday Jess!  I love you more than you can know and I continue to be amazed by your gifts and your joy in life.  Follow Jesus and dream of great things because God has big plans for you my girl!

With all my love always,
Mom

First Project of 2014

On Tuesday last week I decided to begin working on the upstairs (full) bathroom.  Keep in mind that this is one of the two bathrooms we have in our home and the one that 3 out of 4 of us use daily for showering, etc.
So of course it makes sense in my non-logical brain to render it mostly unusable for the majority of the week.

When we bought the house, this bathroom was painted the same green color that the downstairs (3/4) bath had been with the same off-cream/dirty beige trim paint.

This is BEFORE we bought the house

After 10 months I'd had enough and wanted that green gone.  The walls had been sort of weeping after every shower as the moisture condensed on the walls.  I had scrubbed and washed to no avail.  This time I used Simple Green and scrubbed the walls and then rinsed them all and the applied a coat of Kilz primer that claims to be mildew and moisture resistant.

Priming begun

After a day of letting the primer dry and a few hours of decision making with a pile of paint chips.  The room got a nice fresh coat of paint, a new shower curtain and some odds-n-ends and by Friday we had a 'new' bathroom.

The paint is Behr "Cream Silk" and depending on the lighting is a soft yellow-y cream to pale cream color.  The shower curtain is BH&G "Tranquil Leaves" which is just white with a gray/black design.
Nothing tremendously fancy but it's all fresh and clean and makes me smile.

Our first project of 2014 and this is our 7th major indoor painting project since we bought the house.  I love the progress we are making!

A Window with a View

In the back part of our 'family room' is a bay window that looks out to the back yard.  It has a nice wide shelf which tends to collect books and other things.  It gets sun most of the day and has a terrific view of the bird feeders.  Both Saffron & Grace have decided it is a nice place to spend part of the day... and who could blame them?

Saffron (aka Orange Kitten Baby)

Grace

New Wall Art

Moving to a new house means new decorating challenges.  This house has many more walls than our old one did, so I'm going to have my work cut out for me in the coming months.
Last night I found this....

And it is now hanging above my desk/computer.  It makes me smile.