Christmas

Bill and I spent Christmas vacation in Wisconsin this year, at his parents house. It was a really great break and time to rejuvenate, relax and remember how many people we love and miss here in the Midwest. I didn't do any lesson planning until the last day of vacation, which might be a big mistake, but I am starting to get comfortable enough in front of a classroom that I think it might not be the end of the world if I am a little less prepared for one day. Bad idea? very possibly but we'll see. I just can't keep up.
Other news, we finally got a bedroom set and have the trim done! Well it might need some touch up paint still but all the trim is up and nail holes are filled. The room is so near done and looks really great! I'll get pictures of it up in a couple days. Now I get to decorate and try to get curtains up!
I never thought it would take us this long to get our house how we want it, but so far, only one room close to done...

Life got in the way

Yeah, Remember how we were so gung ho on redecorating our house, starting with our bedroom. Still not done...I think we have been "putting up trim" for 2 months. So much for buying a house stuck in the 70s and redoing it, I guess we just get to live in the 70s too. Although the 70s weren't that bad of a time, I hear...
Bill has been super busy at work lately and I just have been too. I absolutely absolutely love what I am doing. I love teaching the kids and it's even easy when I am prepared and get into a rhythm with them, I love every second, well almost. And I love planning too, but this year, my first year teaching, I have to make all my unit plans for the art projects we will do and it takes and INCREDIBLE amount of time. So I love planning, I love teaching, I just don't have time to love them both at the same time. Then I end up hating them because I don't have the time to do it as well as I want to.. BAH
Anyways, Happy Thanksgiving to everyone! I've never thought a ton about how amazing Thanksgiving is. When I lived at home it was just like a nice one day affair where we ate a lot. But earlier this week I was reminded why Thanksgiving is really really amazing. It doesn't involve presents, no stress there. It's not super religious so people don't get confronted by how good or bad they are at that. It's just about being thankful, so simple and so beautiful. And they give you lots of time off to be with all the people you are thankful for, and at this point in the school year, I am so thankful for that!
My Grandma recently passed away and it was pretty horrible, but to avoid all the horrible, I made a slide show for the visitation. Here is a picture that I think is just breathtaking, taken between my grandparents engagement and wedding, about 1945-6.

Blogging

I've been wondering a lot lately about if it's weird to blog. I mean I'm not a super computer-ish person who has time to tell a story about every day of my life, but I love reading other people's blogs. I blog stalk people who I don't even talk to anymore and I don't know why. It seems a lot of people in my generation do this, at least I hear a lot of people admit to it? And I like the idea of having a record of stuff. I like the idea of contributing back to that large sphere of random information and stories that I like to read when I blog-stalk other people.
Mostly I'm curious if anyone even reads this blog. It's so anonymous and I feel like I'm talking to outer space, and that makes me feel a little pathetic.
Putting up my wedding pictures on here was a good excuse for a useful purpose, but now I won't have any new wedding pictures. So I'm kinda wondering, is anybody out there? I'd like to know if anyone actually ends up here and reads it. So if you wouldn't mind, respond, and then I'll know!

All the rest of our wedding pictures

THE REST OF OUR WEDDING PICTURES ARE HERE-CLICK ME

We got the second and last package of our wedding pictures end of this week and are thrilled. They are up in my Picassa album at the link above. Here's a few previews

WEDDING PICTURES

The first look about to happen.

During our ceremony, it was beautiful!

Blessing our rings

Bill's pretty proud of this one. He looks very skilled at dancing, and he is!

So these are just a teaser... if you want to see all the pictures I have so far click:
here: LARA AND BILL'S WEDDING PHOTOS FIRST BATCH
It's a batch of the candids from the very talented Chris Hagen, more formal pictures to come when I get them.

Better, almost finished, bedroom

Our bedroom still does not have trim, although we bought the trim last night, other than that, it is done. We do still want to buy a bedroom set. We have it picked out-it's this one: Stonewater by Kincaid.
But we have to wait until after the cats get de-clawed the middle of September, then we can have a couch, and a bedroom set and anything else our hearts desire... well...

So here is the bedroom currently:

Redecorating the bedroom

So the above three pictures are our master bedroom when we moved in. Not many people have seen  because this was the first project we started. We ripped off all the pink flowery wall paper the first two weeks we moved in and it took the whole two weeks. The closet was blue, the trim is something like antique white, it was pretty bad.

These two pictures are the room as we lived in it from November until July this summer. Note the lack of wallpaper as well as the lack of paint.

So finally, at the end of July, after I got a teaching job, we decided our lives will only get more busy from here, we better do this now. The wedding planning and day of was over, we were back settled into our place, we moved everything into our guest bedroom and started work again.

But it turned out to be a bit more work than we had planned. We bought a sander and smoothed out all the walls; cleaned off the last of the wallpaper paste residue.

 

 We ripped off all the ugly trim and Bill even did his best to brake as much of it as he could, because he hated it so much. We decided we would buy new trim and keep it wood stained.

We even had to buy wire mesh and caulk and fix a whole where bees has tried to invade our bedroom. Bill did a VERY nice job with this repair. BUT it meant we also had to paint the ceiling in this whole process....

We even took out every single window. We had at least one of the double hung strings broken and we got the repair kits from Anderson Windows. While we had all the windows out, I took the time to paint them all white, nice fresh and clean white. We also painted the window frames edges and the window sills. Note the walls are also primed at this point.

SO, this just paint our bedroom project turned into a three weekend two week every day job. It was so exhausting, and to make it even better, today on August 15th, we still aren't completely done. We got a lot of it done, we patched, sanded, primed, painted the ceiling, painted the closets, all trim that was staying, the inside of all door jams, painted the windows, painted the walls, painted the closet doors, painted the bathroom door. We thought we were done painting but we realized the heaters needed to be painted, and our first attempt at that was with water based paint and they re-rusted immediately (we had just spent 2 hours sanding). So we bought metal paint and painted the heaters. Then we painted the short amount of wall under the heaters that looked bad bright blue in a now light tan brown room....
Right now, we've moved back in, but the trim isn't up yet and we are trying to pick out a bedroom set. I think that is our wedding present to us, either a bedroom set or a couch, not sure yet... anyways, I don't actually have a picture of the walls painted yet, but I'll get one tomorrow when the light is good.
In other news, I've started my teaching job, one day of new teacher orientation under my belt, yipee! :)

I got a job!

Lara got a teaching job!
It came completely out of the blue, there were no predicted openings in my school district, but I got a call for an interview, had the interview and got offered the job the next day! eek yay! So much excitement.
So that means, this coming school year, I will be an elementary art teacher in Carroll County, my preferred school district. I cannot contain my excitement. No more subbing for me, I have my own classroom and a schedule and kids to get to know. It's a K-5 school and all the teachers and principals I've met have been so nice. I think it will be a really great year!
But on the flip side, now I am suddenly very very busy.

more pictures

So I still don't have my professional pictures back, but I thought I would put a link up on here to my picassa site with pictures from friends.

http://picasaweb.google.com/112000859535817391694/LaraAndBillSWeddingPicturesFromFriends#

Eventually I'll put up my professional pictures here too for everyone to see! :)

Back to Maryland

We drove back to Maryland on Monday the 5th and it was a LONG drive. It's supposed to take 18 hours and we left at 5 AM but it took us 20 and we only got to our house in Maryland at 2:00 AM. Bill was very very mad about driving that late into the night, er next morning.

But we got home and Bill went to work the next day, I cleaned the house pretty much all week and am still not done. Apparently leaving two boys a house for about 4 weeks involves them doing absolutely no cleaning. But for good news, a lot of my vegetable garden did not die from the weeks of drought we had here. I've made Pickles twice and had more strawberries and green beans. We did loose all our peas and the carrots and lettuce are getting eaten by rabbits everyday. Next year we will have a fence.

We also have a new kitten we brought home with us. So Kirby met Spree and now they love each other. The first couple days there was a lot of hissing but with the extreme heat we had, eventually they both just fell asleep. Today, Kirby was cleaning Spree and they chase each other around the house and play like kittens all the time.

Boundary Waters

We spent 5 days in BWCAW leaving the monday after the wedding. It was NOT a honeymoon, I did not take my honeymoon with all of Bill's friends from high school, it was just a yearly trip we always do and since we were home for the wedding, we took it the week after. It was fun, nice, relaxing. We didn't go very far like we have in the past but we got to spend an entire day at the same nice campsite swimming and fishing and relaxing in a wonderful hammock someone was smart enough to bring along. We also became a sailboat, which was pretty cool.

The crew BWCAW 2010

Our wedding

We got married on Saturday, June 26th and it was wonderful. It all flew by and I feel like I can't remember most of it, just little snippets are clear to me, but I know I enjoyed it all.

Bill's mom did all of the beautiful flowers for our bouquets and she did such an amazing job. Bill's sister made our wedding cake and it could not have been more beautiful. She learned how to make fondant daisies for this occasion and we used Bill's parents cake topper. To the right is her with her finished masterpiece. If you can see it in the back of this picture, the grooms cake was a masterpiece as well; red cake dressed up like a tuxedo. It was adorable!

To left is me right before we got to come out of the girl hiding room, it felt like we were in there forever! Below is my dad walking me down the aisle, the only time I almost cried during the ceremony.

Saying our vows. We both said them loud and clear and no one dropped any rings :)

Cutting the fabulous cake on my front porch back at the Farmhouse. My hand was pretty much useless in this process. We even behaved ourselves and fed each other two very small, no frosting, no frosting pieces of the carrot cake. Bill was determined that if I got frosting on him, he would throw the whole cake on me :s  So we behaved.

And below is a picture from our first dance. We danced to "Bei mir bist du Shoen" a swing song and Bill did VERY well. I think he must have been secretly practicing...

So that's our wedding in a nutshell. Professional pictures are still to come and I don't have any good pictures of the dinner as of now. But it was an amazing day and I couldn't have asked for anything more. We both felt so blessed to be able to to celebrate with all our loved ones.