Mah Birfday

When December rolls around, we've entered the "birthday section" of the year on both our sides of the family.  Of those family members with whom we celebrate and have parties, we've all got birthdays that are through the winter/spring/early summertime.  My birthday seems to kick everything off, and it's been particularly hard for us to find time to celebrate it over the last few years because we've just been getting busier and busier the closer it gets to Christmas.  But I love me some birthday cake, so I had to make sure we fit it in somewhere!

December was a really hard month for us (more on that later), but the celebration was pretty fun.  I wanted to keep it low-key and we invited our parents only, but since my parents were living it up on a cruise (lucky ducks) that week, my in-laws came up from Indy to help us have a good time.

We went out to dinner at Teppenyaki for some Chinese and then to the Nativity open-house at our church.  It's always such a good event to attend at the beginning of December to get you in the mood for Christmas.  The entire building is decked out in different nativities to celebrate the coming of Christ.  They have different rooms for different types of nativities--handmade, commercial, foreign, white/gold, and black/silver.  We loaned out three of our own nativities for the event, two of which are here:

The three wisemen that my father-in-law Gary made for us a few years ago.  They went into the handcrafted room.

The Guatemala nativity that Gary brought back from his mission trip this fall.  You could find this in the foreign room!

Minnetrista also held its annual Luminary Walk that weekend, and we decided to take Gary and Michele to see the sights!  Minnetrista holds a special place in our hearts because we got our engagement pictures taken there.  Every year they decorate the Ball brothers' mansions for Christmas and open them up to the public.  I love seeing the interesting trees because they change them up every year.  Three of my favorites:

The Music Tree

UPSIDE-DOWN TREE!  How cool is that?!

This tree was decorated by the Dance Department on campus, I think.  It was done in a Broadway Musical theme.

These were set up along the walk between the houses.  We just couldn't resist!

Telling some story or another...

It was pleasant out, but I still thought it was a little cold!

Minnetrista also has a cultural center/museum/gift shop that they open up to the public as well.  They were hosting a dinosaur exhibit!  Since Kyle loves dinosaurs, we decided to see what it was all about.

Probably my favorite picture of the night...Kyle got photo-bombed by this little kid who was trying to figure out what he was doing!  It was too funny!

Making dino prints

The dinosaur Christmas tree!

 They also have an Indiana artist gallery in the center.  I thought this painting was owl-fully cute (see what I did there?!) and I couldn't resist taking a picture of it. 

Finally, after walking off our buffet, we were ready for some ice cream cake.  I got out the biggest knife to cut it and we devoured that thing!
 

It was a good day.  I couldn't ask for much more!

New furniture!

So here I am on a Sunday evening with a clean house and all (that I'm willing to care about, anyway) of my school stuff done.  Downton Abbey doesn't come on for a few hours, so I've just been bumming around the house spending time with the hubs, mostly.  Then I had this nagging feeling at the back of my mind that I should update the blog.  *Sigh.  Alright, alright.

So before I do backtracking over the last few months, I'd like to update with something a little more current.

We've added some legit furniture to our living room!  Call them heirlooms, call them rustic, call them SOLID (which is what I call them)...whatever you want.  All I know is these bad boys are AWESOME.

So my grandparents who passed away last spring had this buffet/china cabinet combo in their dining room.  My mom and aunts and uncles did a pretty good job of selling or piecing up the furniture and house stuff, but no matter what, it seemed this set just wouldn't sell or fit in anyone's home:

The mirror attaches to the back of the buffet

My mom actually asked us in the fall if we wanted them.  I turned her down because I had nowhere to put them, although I truly did want to find a place for them in my house since they were my grandparents' and all.  We even had them up in Muncie for awhile to try to sell them for my mom's family, but there were no takers.  They went back to my mom and dad's house after a few unsuccessful weeks of sitting in our driveway with a cardboard sign.

Then, the unthinkable happened...

...we got a new and much larger TV for Christmas...

...a TV that wouldn't fit in our current entertainment system!

Here's what we had before:

This picture was actually taken a long time ago.  We since added ANOTHER bookcase on the opposite side to hold all our movies.

Small bookcase holding all our decorative and literature-y classic books.  The perfect decor for two married English majors!

Our new TV was too wide to fit into the old furniture.  So, back to mom and dad's I went to check out the buffet to see if it would make a good refurbished entertainment center.  I thought we could make it work!  I didn't want to split the set, so I got the idea to use the china cabinet in place of one of the bookcases, and Mom and I began to scheme out a plan to refurbish.  I spent a Friday night after school out at their house sanding all the furniture with Mom and Dad and then Kyle and I came back the next weekend prepared to paint, but Mom surprised us by having those steps knocked out!  I'm such a lucky kid :)  We distressed that night while Dad and Kyle put some handles on the buffet and attached wheels to the bottom of it to make it move more easily.  Mom and Dad brought them up to Muncie the next day and we went out to Chinese together and lived happily ever after.  

Here's the new look:

Takes up a lot less space!  Our living room looks so much bigger now!  And can you believe ALL our DVDs and Blu-rays fit into these little drawers?!  They're two deep, but they're all in there with room to spare!

I truly do love this look!  We still have space below the books, too!  The only bad thing is we had to lose the lamp.  It's upstairs in storage, but it's a bummer since our living room doesn't get a lot of light :(

I feel very, very happy with the change and it was so worth the work.  The furniture is heavy and will last and I'm glad Grandma and Grandpa's furniture came home with us instead of being sold to a stranger for way less than it was worth.  Smiles all around!