Our Redecorated Bedroom

After 6 years in our house, our redecorating activities have finally made it to our bedroom! It was quite the project, but when Spike and Sharon announced that they were coming out for a visit and intended to paint, we knew it was time to get ourselves in gear and figure out what we wanted to do with our bedroom!

It took weeks of paging through catalogs, scouring websites, and dozens of consults with friends (ok, that may be a little exaggeration, but it's a very good thing that we have such wonderful friends because lesser women would have thrown me out of the circle after I passed around the 5th set of paint chips) but in the end we have come up with a warm and spicy (that was the look I was going for) bedroom that's not too girly (that's the look Steve was going for) and I love it!

There's still a little more work to do... the books are still all over Ben's floor instead of on their new bookshelf, we need to repaint my night stand, and Steve desperately needs a new bureau, but the hard part is done and it's simply fabulous!

In the spirit of all good home decorating shows, here's the reveal:


Boring old bedroom


Gramma and Poppop come and paint the ceiling, walls, and trim


Steve and Jamie apply the final coat under the chair rail - a crackle coat!


Here's the crackle up close


Steve assembles some new furniture (we have lots of books)


Jamie assembles and arranges decor


Tah dah!


It's like a whole new room!

Adoption Update

We don't have a ton of news about our dossier, which isn't too surprising since we're only in week 1 of the anticipated 2 months of waiting for it to be translated into Russian. We talked to our adoption coordinator, Susan, with World Partners Adoption today and she confirmed that our dossier has arrived in the World Partners office Kazakhstan and is all ready for translation! So, at least a little part of us is in Kazakhstan already :)

Now we wait for translation to complete and then they'll send our translated dossier to the Kazakhstan consulate in New York. We'll keep you posted as we get further updates.

A Wonderful Week in Oregon

Happy Spring Break! We just got back from a delightful 5 days on the Oregon coast, made possible by the fabulous Thomas family. Cindy's family has a condo just a little north of Cannon Beach that they invited us to share for a few days... I think that someone in our family should buy a condo/mountain cabin/beach house for us to use a few times per year :) I'll admit that the drive was long, but it was well worth every hour for in the car our few days on the beautiful beach!

It'll come as no surprise that the weather was a little cold and rainy (April + Oregon + coast), but since flying kites was high up on our list of things to do we didn't mind much at all. Sam really got into flying his kites on this trip, doing tricks with several of the kites that my grandfather has given him over the years and taking delight in helping Steve assemble and disassemble each creation. They even invested in a new Delta and three spinners - quite the lovely souvenir from our trip.

It's tough to pick out my favorite part of the trip, but I think it's a toss up between the tidal pools at Cannon Beach and playing on the shipwreck of the Peter Iredale. Ben and I had a ton of fun discovering shellfish, sea anemones, and starfish in the tidal pools and learning a little about ocean ecology. The Peter Iredale was a three-masted trading vessel that ran aground in 1906 on the beach about 15 minutes north of where we were staying. As you can tell from the photos, we all enjoyed climbing around the wreck and stomping in the puddles around it (ok, Mr. Shark Boots Ben technically did most of the stomping, but we all enjoyed the wreck).