Home for the holidays

We all slept in our very own beds last night.

Well, all of us, that is, except Bronwyn, who joined Gabriel in his bed sometime during the night hours, preferring the closeness and companionship of her big brother (who all of his own iniative just so happens to keep an extra pillow on his bed for nighttime visitors) to the space and solitude of her own mattress.

Still nursing a cold, I went to bed early after getting all four kids to bed and unpacking their suitcases. Daniel stayed awake several more hours (he's like the Energizer bunny these days, I kid you not), painting trim in the new mudroom/laundry room, hooking up the washer and dryer, moving tools out of our dining and living rooms, and utilizing the shop-vac on every surface in the kitchen-family room. I woke to a house that was considerably more pulled together and starting to feel like home again.

I also woke to a pounding headache and achy sinuses, but that's another story.

With the house looking more like our own, it only felt right to set about making it ready for Christmas. And so we bundled into hats and mittens, boots and scarves, and tromped over snow-crusted field to pick out a Christmas tree. I wanted something smaller this year, something simpler and easier and cozier. We quickly settled on a nicely rounded, 6.5' tree that looks perfectly quaint in our big dining room with 9' ceilings.

I love it and can't wait to decorate it this evening.

Yes, the tree is in the dining room again. Our family room space is not quite ready to be inhabited, though it sure is warm and sunny and tempting. There is additional painting to complete, a cable to be run (a long ways from its current location in our current family room), built-in cabinets salvaged from the space prior to demolition that need to be sanded and painted and re-built, an area rug to be picked out and bought, and furniture to be purchased. We have known for a while that the room will not be done instantaneously-- after all, we don't live in a Pottery Barn catalog-- but instead something that we keep chipping away at little by little. And really, it's a fun process, if one that occasionally challenges our my patience.

We're home, in a house that is bigger and more functional and even lovelier.

Home for the holidays!