Merry Christmas!

It’s the day after Christmas and I’m still in bed in my pjs at almost 10am. It’s so nice to just be lazy after the last minute rush to get to Christmas. Though this has been my best December personally in about five or six years. Somehow I managed to side step the usual unbearable pressure to “get everything done”. We still did quite a bit, but I didn’t feel stressed about it. My favorite thing we did as a family this year was play Secret Santa and do 12 days of small Christmas treats for a former neighbor. My kids loved ringing the bell and madly running to the car, I enjoyed preparing small treats and gifts, and overall I felt like we did something that reminded us of the best part of the season.

I should do a whole post about our Christmas celebrations, but I’m saving it for another day … haven’t uploaded pictures yet and there are some other things I wanted to talk about. While this was a good month for our family (relatively speaking), it was a hard month for many others. A distant cousin of mine lost her daughter in the school shooting in Connecticut. I can’t even imagine what her Christmas was like, though I pray that there has been some peace and comfort for her and for all the families involved. A dear friend of mine lost her college age student in an accident just a week before Christmas. There have been many moments when I have just hugged my college student tight, grateful to have him home and safe. My heart has been heavy with sadness for these losses. And I know there are others who have lost loved ones – not in dramatic, news coverage ways – and their sorrow is heavy. We talk often about the peace and joy of the birth of the Savior, but I have to hope that the gift that Jesus Christ offers all of us does truly heal sorrows for those who have lost loved ones. I think often of the gift of resurrection that I have to look forward to – a day when I will be with all those people I have loved again. When we won’t be separated ever again. Anyway, I have found myself offering up prayers as random moments of the day, frustrated that I can’t do very much in a tangible way, but wanting nevertheless to “mourn with those who mourn” and to offer comfort in anyway that I can.

Lastly, the promised pictures of Spencer’s room (and the upstairs bathroom that I re-decorated as well).

This give a pretty good view of everything I did in this room. Painted the walls and ceiling and the cabinets. Added knobs to the cabinets. Framed out the mirror. Hung a new shower curtain and painted some stripes to the small part of the wall that can be seen when the door is open. Didn’t take a super long time, but it’s a nice change from the former orange-y theme that I used to have happening in this room. You can see a small bit of that here.

And here’s Spencer’s new room …

Things we did: patched and painted the walls, built the window-seat/bookcase, hung boards behind the bed to serve as a headboard, hung photo boxes on the wall to serve as small display cases. Bedding is from IKEA – and we bought a new queen-size bed so we can put guests up in style now. By far the most time consuming thing was the bookcase. A few years ago when Haley was in this room I had the brain storm to turn the existing built in bench into a bookcase. So I cut some holes in the drywall and discovered that the underlying structure did not lend itself to putting shelves in. So with Tom’s help I tore the whole thing out, intending to replace it with the above piece. And with my Dad’s help, I did build a bookcase – but I didn’t allow any allowances in the measurements, and the bookcase I built didn’t fit (we built it in Utah for me to bring home). So then there was just a big hole in Haley’s room for pretty much the whole time she lived in this room! But Tom and I learned from my mistakes and this bookcase came together pretty well and fit perfectly. There was some debate about how to trim it out (since the space is awkward – the two sides join the walls differently) but in the end we love how it turned out!

1 thought on “Merry Christmas!

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      I love all the redecorating especially the the bookcase in Spencer’s room. Can’t wait to see it all in person. Yesterday was our lazy day as well although your dad couldn’t understand how we could just sit around in pj’s and “do nothing” We don’t understand him sometimes!!!

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