Madison turned 2!

While all the moving and renovation madness was happening our cutie pie turned 2! It was great that my mom, dad, brother and Sean's mom were able to be here for a little pizza party to celebrate! I had planned on getting really creative this year with having a whale/ocean theme since she is obsessed with Shamu, dolphins and anything that swims, but this year plans changed and I ran out of time with our move, so I decided on getting simple little cake toppers/banner, balloons and easy decorations from etsy.com! With all her loving family here with her I think we pulled off a fun little birthday treat for her. She knew it was her special day, loving all the attention :)
I think part of what made the day fun was just watching her come down the stairs after her nap to see the huge Mickey mouse and #2 balloon along with her Mickey mouse pinata outside! Yes, that is right pinata for a 2 year old :) Grandma Kalub was so creative to make baggies of tiny marshmallows and graham crackers special for the birthday girl that we stuffed into the pinata, toddlers snacks ready to eat!

Here is the birthday Pinata! Madison likes to watch Dora the Explorer and for Dora's party she had a pinata so I thought it would be fun to get one for Madison. The only issue is she didn't like hitting Mickey with a stick, which I guess being 2 and liking Mickey, hitting Mickey is a little confusing..so the pinata idea did backfire a little, hopefully she isn't scarred for life and doesn't take up hitting kids at nursery. 

Cupcakes from a bakery in San Clemente called Sugar Blossoms, these are yummy gourmet cupcakes that we gobbled up quickly! 

Grandma Kalub with Madison on her real birthday, the 20th of September and another cupcake!

Its been so fun to see Madison change and grow these past 2 years and I am blessed to be able to be with her all day, every day! We pray she will grow up to love the Lord and of course obey her parents! Her favorite thing to say now is "ready, set, go!"

New house =lot's of work!

A lot has happened in the last few weeks! For starters, we bought a house in San Clemente and moved in officially on September 14th. We had originally hoped to move labor day weekend however our list of projects to do before we moved kept getting longer and longer! A few of the projects we  decided to tackle before we moved in order to be able to keep Madison out of danger was to complete 90% of the painting, we painted almost every wall surface in the house, installed hardwood downstairs (after demoing the travertine floor), painted kitchen cabinets, tear out the awful rock wall in our living room and put up dry wall, paint our banister, and install our pedestal sinks in our master bathroom that were in boxes when we purchased the home! We were able to complete almost everything. This weekend we finished hardwood in the hallway and put in a few baseboards. Here are a few photos, I'll post more later!

Here is a before and after photo of our family room :) Didn't like the yellow!

 

This is the rock wall we took out which was a ton of work for Sean!

We still need a mantel and surround, hopefully that can be done this week!

Here is Sean working hard on installing hardwood :)

We are so grateful for God's blessing with our new home! Our house is the first house we looked at when we started our home search and our first offer, we didn't know at the time that we would need to wait 3 months before things lined up for an accepted offer but God did and His plan is perfect. We are trying to take projects on a little at a time and not get overwhelmed, I guess buying a fixer upper has its challenges with the amount of TLC needed but its been a fun, exhausting process and its nice that Madison now has her own room! 

Our next project, besides putting in a mantel is the downstairs bathroom, we had to take out the drywall and reinforce the wood beams because we found a bathtub leak upstairs a week after we closed escrow. In one way its disappointing that we didn't catch it at inspection but on the other hand we are happy we found it now before more mold and dry rot were caused, possibly causing more problems down the road :) God is good and once we get this fixed we should be home free with major projects! The backyard is still brown and full of weeds but that may need to wait until Spring!

We are so thankful for our family who all came down from Nor Cal to help with all these projects! There were a few days of major physical labor and I know a lot of sore muscles but we couldn't do it without them. My Dad did a lot of the projects which we are grateful for, now next time they all visit we promise not to put them to work!!!!

Moving!

We closed escrow last week and are moving as soon as the house is ready! (should be next week) We are moving back to San Clemente and very excited! Its been fun and very exhausting getting the house ready. I have painted the last 4 days in a row and my arms are feeling the fatigue. The house has been vacant for about 8 months before our purchase so the grass is brown and the layers of dust and dirt have taken awhile to get clean...in fact its still a work in progress :) Its going to be an exciting time for us next week, one that I have anticipated for awhile now. We feel so blessed to be able to move into our first home and for Madison to finally have her own bedroom once again. I will post photos very soon! Here are a few random pics, (Sean didn't really appreciate our matching shirts and jeans in these photos but I'm glad he played along with my cheesy-ness!)