A Tiring Weekend of Homemaking

This weekend was wonderful, but I'm pretty sure I am going to need a few days to recover from my weekend.  I looked at Chris tonight and said "I'm really not sure when in the future we can relax... maybe in the car ride to see our family over Christmas..."  :-D

This weekend Chris was working like crazy on grad school to the tune of 30 hours.

Meanwhile, I tried to get our house a little closer to ready for Thanksgiving company, which meant doing the following:

• clearing the "dining room" part of our family room to make room for our new dining room table
• moving our new dining room table into the dining part of the family room
• clearing our guest room
• putting up a bed in the guest room
• making the bed
• arranging the furniture
• clearing our sun room
• setting up a China cabinet in the sun room
• unpacking EVERY beautiful, fancy dish we received as wedding presents
• removing the bar code sticker from each piece (the glassware had two stickers per piece)
• hand washing every piece of China, crystal, bar ware, serving dishes, glass bowls and holiday dishes
• organizing the dishes in our new China cabinet
• beginning to organize our basement -- where I put everything that had been in the guestroom and sun room... its coming along

Our beautiful China cabinet from Craig's List

Everything is gorgeous and I can't wait to use it for company!

Yeah, anyone would have to admit -- those are A LOT OF
STICKERS to peel off and dishes to hand wash

 

Our seasonal dishes and serving dishes don't fit in the nice
China cabinet, but they're also in the sun room

Our new dining table and our bookcase filled with
books - instead of paperwork

Just look at how much cardboard we had to recycle this week.
Our garbage can is overflowing just beyond the cardboard.
If this doesn't say a productive weekend, I don't know what does!

 There are still things to do before company arrives -- including menu planning, shopping, and preparing for Thanksgiving dinner.

Chris and I feel so blessed for the family coming so far to see our little home and share Thanksgiving with us... but I have to confess I'm nervous and a little tired just thinking about the company.  :-D

This is when I remind myself I am blessed to be this stressed.  I can't say "I'm too blessed to be stressed"... because I get stressed and I will be stressed -- but I am so blessed to be in the position to be stressed this Thanksgiving.

 In other news, our puppy has learned to lay down.  It took awhile and he would sort of pounce forward toward a treat on the ground in order to lay down and then he would pop back up like a jack-in-the-box.  Tonight, Lloyd decided he would be glued to my hip, and every time I stopped, in lay down at my feet ... literally his front feet were on my foot.

Lloyd decided to lay at my feet tonight

In addition to working on our home for company, we're trying to teacher Lloyd how to ring a bell near the door to let us know when he has to go outside.  This will be all well and good when we have it down to a science -- but right now, we have to let him out whenever he rings the bell.  When he's in the mood to play, that can be 5 times in 20 minutes.  Lloyd and the bell training did not make the homemaking projects any easier.

On my slippers, he lay

 He is such a sweet heart -- an ENDLESS SUPPLY OF ENERGY sweetheart.

Its like he was trying to hold my foot down

Chris' mom sent him a fun out-of-the-blue gift yesterday -- a tee-shirt about the Cardinals being World Series champions 2011.  Chris is pretty excited.

Yay Cardinals!