Movin' On Up!

(sing that title to the tune of The Jeffersons' theme song)

So, looks like we are moving soon.  I am crawling out from under boxes to write this post because we are now in the packing stage!!

Brad and I spent all weekend unloading everything out of our attic, and we ended up throwing a ton of stuff out and sending six huge trash bags full of stuff to Goodwill on Sunday and three bags today.  We have moved on to the kids' rooms and are trying to go through all of their stuff to organize it into what to throw out, donate, and keep.  It amazes me to think of the junk we had hanging around in this house...

This is what our living room looks like right now (this is our "goes to the new house" pile):

It kind of makes my blood pressure rise every time I look at it, but I know the mess will just get bigger before it gets better, so I am trying to be okay with it.  This is the hard part for me, also, because this is the packing up of the smaller stuff, and even though we seem to have a bazillion boxes stacked up everywhere, we still have most of the house left to pack.  It is a bit depressing.

We plan to spend Thursday through Sunday doing our actual move if all goes as planned...wish us luck!

Prayer Request

Brad's cousin's child, Jasper, should be in surgery right now getting cochlear implants due to total hearing loss after complications from meningitis (I believe it's bacterial).  Except for a short stint at home last week, the poor baby has been in the hospital since before Christmas, and he is basically having to learn to do everything again -- swallow, eat, drink, walk, focus, and hear.  His parents have been very strong and have had a lot of support and prayers sent their way, but more prayer would always be welcome, I am sure! 

Please pray for Jasper as he undergoes this surgery, his surgeons, and his parents, Rebecca and Jim (both are Clemson grads, so you Clemson people may know them!).

You can read Jasper's CaringBridge page here.

Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding.  In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths.  Proverbs 3:5-6

We had our HANDS UP!!

For Christmas this year, I gave Brad tickets to the Luke Bryan/Jason Aldean concert in Greenville, SC.  We went this past Friday with our friends, Wes and Jeana, and had a blast.  It was one of the best concerts I have ever been to (I have to say Michael Buble still beats all).  Jason Aldean was the headliner, but my fave was Luke -- and not just because Gibson thinks he looks like his daddy.  He is pretty darn hot, though!

Random

I am getting ready to hit the sack for the evening, but I wanted to stop in and bore you with some randomness...

1. We thought we might get to move into the house this weekend (yay!!!), but those dreams were dashed this evening by the carpet people and the inspector (boo!!!).  Our carpet is at the store, but they won't install it until Monday, which means that the inspector won't come until after that to do our final inspection and give us our CO.  I believe we ordered this carpet at least a month ago, so we have been waiting on it for quite a while, and the fact that it is the last thing holding us up is irritating me.

2. Most of our furniture is in and will be delivered Saturday!  Unfortunately, they can't deliver it to our house, but rather, they will have to deliver it to Brad's packing house.  At least our living room won't be bare when we can move in...

3. My blonde roots are growing in big time, and the other day I had a panic attack that I was getting gray hair.  Thankfully it isn't gray, but I can't be going around with roots that are lighter than the rest of my hair, or other people might think it's gray, too -- not cool.  I may have to do like Gibson wants me to do, and go back to "yellow."

4. I decided today that my kids eat too many of the same things for breakfast and lunch, so I wanted to change it up a bit.  I made a batch of egg salad for sandwiches for tomorrow, and I was planning to make this Baked Oatmeal with Blueberries and Bananas from skinnytaste for their breakfast for tomorrow.  I got all of the ingredients out and started chopping up the bananas when I realized that I didn't actually buy the dang oatmeal at the grocery store today.  It is pretty hard to make oatmeal without the actual oats.  So, instead, I made these Baked Bananas.  If you like bananas, I would recommend these -- they taste like dessert but are skinny!

5. Brad didn't know what to do since I was doing all of this extra cooking.  He asked me if I was stressed out about something.  I guess that shows that I am usually pretty lazy with the kids' school lunches; he usually takes care of breakfast!

Y'all have a great night!

Happy 300!

Yesterday we had the opening celebration of our church's 300th year.  It was a fabulous service that started outside in our historic churchyard with some people all dressed up in period costumes from the 1700s, and a "town crier" who read proclamations by Queen Elizabeth, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and our governor, Niki Haley.  Following that brief ceremony, we all went inside for our normal worship service, but this time we had a special guest preacher -- The Lord Bishop of London, Richard J.C. Chartres, who preached the homily at Will and Kate's wedding (yes, the Will and Kate!).  His sermon was powerful as was the entire service; it really was a great opening to our tricentennial celebration.

I know that I have mentioned before how much I love our church.  I love it for the fact that the gospel is brought day in and day out in that place, but I also am a huge fan of history.  I love the fact that we have the second oldest church in South Carolina, and one of the oldest churches in continuous use in the United States.  I love the fact that the beautiful building that we sit in each Sunday was built in 1724 and that we often use communion silver from 1734.  I love the fact that my grandfather, his parents, and his grandparents are all buried in the churchyard, and that one day my parents, my children, and I will be, too.  That's a lot of generations and a lot of history!

But, it is just a building, and as beautiful and special as it is to me, it is the actual clergy and congregation who make St. Helena's such a special place.  As I said, the gospel is preached day in and day out there, and God is alive and moving in the church.  It can be felt when you walk in, and it can be felt the entire time you are at St. Helena's.  I am so thankful for my church, and I can only hope that it will last 300 more years.

If you care to read any articles on the tricentennial, you can read them here, here, and here.  

I'm Christie, and I'm a Planner-a-holic!

I know we are halfway into January now, so most of you probably already have your planners for the new year, but I had to post about these anyway.  I realized that I have some kindred spirits in my love of all paper products with my recent post about the return address stamp, so I thought I would tell y'all about another product to which I am addicted -- my planner!

I love a new planner!  I love to get a new planner and write down everyone's birthdays and anniversaries and every appointment that is already set.  There is just something so exciting about a totally blank, new calendar.  

Right now I am using two -- one for home, where all family members can catch up on everything that is going on in our lives, and one that I use for my daily, take everywhere planner.

My at-home planner is the Home Office Edition by momAgenda.  It is 9"x11" and has both monthly and weekly formats for writing down all of your important info.  And, each weekly page has a slot for each child -- up to four children -- in your household.  I guess if you have more than four kids, you just need to hire an assistant to keep all of your family appointments straight!!

For my daily, take-everywhere planner, I am using the Erin Condren Life Planner.  It has everything you can think of in it -- monthly calendar pages, weekly calendar pages with slots on each day for morning/noon/night, notes pages, etc.  I am really liking this one!!

 I like that both of these planners are spiral bound so that my appointments on Wednesday and Thursday don't run into the crack of the page -- I have always hated that about regularly bound planners (and, yes, I have put a lot of thought into it).  I also like that they both give plenty of room for writing down appointments each day -- I don't like for everything to run together.  I have seriously gone through some planners in the past couple of years, and I really like these two!

If you haven't already gotten a new planner for this year, what are you waiting on?  Go out and try one of these!  And if you have, keep these two in mind for next year!

Ahhhhh!

We stayed at a Hilton this weekend, and all of the products in the bathroom were the Mega Rich line by Peter Thomas Roth.  I fell in love with all of them but especially the body wash:

It smells sort of grapefruity and has micro beads and all sorts of vitamins in it.  I think I will making this purchase ASAP!

Theme of the Week: Business Trips

This past week (starting last Friday) has been full of trips for the farms -- both mine and Brad's.

Friday we started out in Savannah, Georgia, for the SE Regional Fruit & Vegetable Conference (click on the link, and see if you can spot Brad!).  Hunter, our Uncle Mac, and I attended Friday classes at the conference, and Brad and his family were going to classes all weekend, so we stayed the weekend at The Westin right by the conference center.

Friday night we rode the ferry over to River Street to meet up with Hunter and Joe and some friends, Molly and Joe, to go out to dinner and drinks at The Bohemian Hotel. The Bohemian was a really cool place, and I would love to go back and stay there sometime.  The food was good; the rooftop bar was really cool -- I liked it all!

Saturday Brad went to classes, and then the two of us had a little time to ourselves, which was really nice.  We went out to eat Saturday night at Leoci's, a great Italian place suggested by the concierge, as an early celebration for our anniversary (January 12) -- and as we were walking up to the restaurant, we ran into my parents' best friends!  Small world...

Sunday we headed home to find:

Turquoise!!!

On Tuesday, Hunter, Graham, and I headed down to Sarasota, Florida, to meet with our new sales team for the farm.  Although our farm is a family business, our sales is outsourced, and we decided officially in December to make a change in our sales department that had been a long time in coming.  We will probably be making some software and other changes to go along with our sales changes, so we went down to Florida to learn about our new sales team and how they do things.  However, we made a little stop along the way:

To the happiest place on earth, of course!!!  We went for a short detour to Disney, and after wearing new shoes and walking around for three and a half hours, I have the worst blisters you have ever seen.  I am about crippled, not to be dramatic or anything.  But we had a blast while we were there and got in some great family bonding.

We got home late last night, and today Brad, the kids, and I are off to our state watermelon association meeting...the business trips continue!  Have a great weekend!

New Mailbox

First of all, I don't even want to talk about that train wreck that was the Orange Bowl last night.  It is almost comical we were so bad.  I don't know this girl, but I saw this link to her blog on Facebook, and she said a lot of what I feel in this post -- however, I would like to rant and rave about football, and I did watch.  I care a lot about how well we Clemson does, so I've been in a bad mood today.

But that's enough about that.


The real reason for this post is because I wanted to talk about lettergirl.  I saw her Etsy shop on another blog probably a couple of years ago now, and I committed her to memory because I knew one day I would want one of her cute return address stamps.  Now that we are going to be having an actual mailbox (although Brad told me tonight there might be problems with that because our mailbox will be a mile from the closest mailbox on the route...lovely) and a permanent address, I want to buy one of those stamps I have been holding off on.

Now the problem is just going to be deciding which one to get!

I also really like the "From the Library of" stamp:

Hmmmm....decisions, decisions...any favorites??


**all images via lettergirl on Etsy

What About the House?!?!?

Well, I am glad you asked!!

Okay, so you didn't, actually, but I am going to tell you anyway...

We obviously didn't make our goal of being in the new house by Christmas.  And we still aren't in the new house a week after Christmas.  In fact, I have told some friends that I am beginning to think of it as this nice house in the woods that we visit daily.  We nod our heads at things that we like and correct things that we think should be fixed.  We discuss how much it costs and where we could cut costs.  We plan where furniture will go.  We measure things and remeasure things.  We ooh and ahh and love the house, but it isn't our house.  It doesn't feel like we will actually ever live there.

But it is our house and we will actually live there if we can ever finish the durn thing.  And the end is maybe-kinda-sorta in sight.  It should hopefully be just a few more weeks, but here is what we are working on now:

-- Re-painting the kitchen and laundry room cabinets.  Yes, I said re-painting.  I had a discussion with my cabinet builder about the fact that I wanted a white white kitchen, and I even had a white picked out for my cabinet color.  He had painted everything his white without discussing it with me, and he assured me that his white was plenty white enough.  It wasn't -- especially when we got the cabinets installed in the house and compared them to the trim in the kitchen, which is the color that I wanted the cabinets.  So we are re-painting.

-- Vanity tops are being installed in the bathrooms tomorrow.  Once they are finished, they should be able to start on the countertops in the kitchen and butler's pantry because the cabinet paint should be dry!  Marble for those tops is ordered and in the hands of the countertop people.

-- Once the countertops are in in the kitchen, subway tile has to be installed.

-- Stairs to the bonus room and our mantel got a coat of poly yesterday.  All hardwood floors need one more coat of poly.

-- Carpet should have been ordered today and will hopefully be here in the next week.

-- The plumber has to come to install all toilets, sinks, and faucets, but they are all on site.

-- My front door is waiting for its coat of turquoise paint.  The original color I was planning on was looking like more of a gray-green, so I picked out another shade that is definitely turquoise.  I cannot wait to see it up.

-- All doors need doorknobs and doorstops installed.

-- All exterior doors and shutters need a coat of Urbane Bronze.

-- Appliances must be installed.

-- My chandelier needs to be installed.

-- The decking on the porches needs to be stained.

-- Knobs and pulls need to be installed on all cabinets.

-- Cabinets in my office need to be finished and installed (will probably be finished after we move in).

-- Vanity needs to be installed in powder room.

-- Brick on the fireplace needs to be painted.

-- Power should have been turned on today!

-- Phone is in the works.  The phone company came out last week and freaked out that our house is so far from the road, so they sent our order to engineering.  Engineering has since okayed the order, so now we are waiting on installation - again.

Um, off the top of my head, I think that's it...as you can see, it's mostly piddly stuff.  I hope it won't take too long to get it all finished because I am SO ready to get in the house.  I really can't wait to enjoy that place-in-the-woods-that-doesn't-really-seem-like-ours!

Christmas Recap

Brad and I both come from big families, so Christmas is always a time with plenty of opportunities for celebrating.  Add to that two birthdays -- my dad on December 17 and my sister on December 26 -- and we are busy all month!

Our first Christmas celebration actually came on Daddy's birthday but didn't involve celebrating for Daddy's birthday.  We always celebrate Christmas with Brad's mom's family the weekend before Christmas.  It used to be on Christmas Eve day, and I am so thankful that they moved it; it is so much easier this way.  I don't have any pictures from this particular celebration, but Brad grilled more meat than you have ever seen, and we ate and ate and ate.  Tyler read Jesus' birth story from Luke aloud, we opened presents, and had a grand old time.

We celebrated my dad's birthday on the 18th with a dinner at my sister's house.  It is really fun to get together with everyone these days because the kids are all old enough to play together, and they are all really cute together.  Of course, taking a picture of all six kids is an impossibility!

                          

A couple of nights before Christmas, we had to finish up our shopping, so Brad and I took the kids out for a night on the town to shop, eat dinner, and pick out gifts for each other.  Brad is usually not one for shopping, but we all had a great time together, and he said that he would love to make that a yearly thing.  I was shocked!

On Christmas Eve we went to our church's evening service which is one of my top two favorite services of the year.  It always puts me in the Christmas spirit if I am not already.  Usually we go to my Aunt Lea's house for dinner after church, but this year we decided to come on home instead.  I hated to say that we weren't going to Aunt Lea's.  I have been going to Aunt Lea's house after the Christmas Eve service for over twenty years, so it is Christmas Eve to me.  However, it is a late night for the kids, and they always fall asleep in the car before we get home, so we decided against it this year.

And, except for missing my cousin's engagement, I ended up being really happy with our decision.  There is so much that we have missed out on over the years by dragging the kids all over the place on Christmas Eve.  We got to put out reindeer food and cookies to Santa.  We sang Happy Birthday to Jesus.  The kids couldn't wait to get in bed.  We got to see the kids excitement over Santa's impending arrival -- seriously, all things we haven't experienced before because they have always been asleep when we have gotten home!  Brad and I were more excited than ever for Christmas this year, too!

And by the next morning, Santa had come!

After opening presents at our house, we went to YaYa and O'Daddy's house to have breakfast.  We then headed down to my parents' house to open presents with my family, then went to my aunt's house for our big family meal.  After we had stuffed ourselves and had a short time to rest and play with our cousins, it was time to go celebrate with Brad's dad's side of the family and stuff ourselves again.

We spent the night at the beach house with Brad's family and opened presents with them the next morning.

But, wait!  The celebrations were not over yet!  That next day was also my sister's Big 3-0, so we ate dinner at my mom's house that evening to celebrate.

And NOW I can officially go on a diet.