Trash picked piece finds its home in our home!

About a week or two before we left for China I was driving out of my parent's neighborhood and I spotted a delightful piece of furniture someone had left out for large trash day. I was rushing to get someplace but called my mom and begged her to pick it up for me... (with her larger vehicle)


This gorgeous cabinet, armoire, leggy thing, lived on my parents' back porch for our two years in China and just recently found its way back into our home. I adore the colors... sea greeny with peach on the inside. It's perfectly me...

note: the handmade bamboo birdcage I bought in our little town in China is not a permanent decorative element on there... I want it hanging in our living room at some point... whenever we get there! :)

dining room re do

We do not have enough images of the amount of wallpaper I peeled! I let the chair rail live... though the living room chair rail did not meet such a pleasant end... but the wallpaper HAD TO GO!

We bought our dining room table and chairs for only $199 at a thrift shoppe near our birth center! Even on craigslist we couldn't find anything this low priced or with this much personality... (the end chairs have a little more personality than I prefer... chair slipcovers are officially added to the list of things to make!)

We started our painting... grey above and grey below... an Ani Difranco line comes to mind.. the sky is grey the sand is grey and the ocean is grey... not sure which is which but I'm happy thinking of any... the names of the paint we found were "intellectual grey" and "annonymous"
I HATE sherwin williams' paint names the same colors in behr were: "Elephant skin" and "toasted walnut"
Come on!

In all of these images you are supposed to not see the boxes in the bookshelf behind the couch... or the big piles of plastic drop cloths and cardboard from painting/moving... hopefully they will be out of our lives very soon! :)

family room re do!

Our "blank slate" which had a little too much wallpaper to really qualify as "blank" if you ask me!

Dan working on our second coat of what we were afraid was going to look like FLYERS ORANGE... it turns out it is much more pumpkinny and much less flyery than we feared!

Putting up bookshelves... who knew we had this many books!

Ta-Da!!!! our "not final but getting close enough to put up pictures" living room!

We were originally looking at painting the room the same color as our "Aunt Edith" chair, but decided a camouflage chair is bad taste! :)

a little behind...

... and no, I can never refer to my own as such! Baby is making sure of that! These past two weeks have been a whirlwind! We've been working to get our living areas set up for daily life. We painted our dining room!!!! And as I speak my dear dear husband is hanging a bunch of hooks in our entryway that I found on sale at anthropologie... Since our delightfully old home has a decided lack of closets we need a place to hang our coats... and what cuter way is there to do that than dreamy little hooks in our hall? (I figure we can hide all our coats whenever we have company so they will not have to wear theirs in the house!)


Today was our 4th baby doctor appointment and though we didn't get to see our baby we did get to hear little baby pea's heartbeat. It gets me giggling every time! And of course baby pea takes my laughing as a cue to get some wiggles out and turn all elusive so the midwife has to slime my whole growing belly to find the little heart beat again! What a goofster! Like its parents I guess! Always gets me giggling more... 


I've been working on expanding my pregnancy wardrobe this week in the quiet moments. I haven't finished anything yet but I'll take pictures as soon as I can make things look good enough.


Life is too crazy these days even though I'm spending a good deal of my time working on peeling wallpaper (only one tiny little nursery left to peel!) and trying to get things in livable order... We're both ready to have our evenings free to sit, talk, read together, listen to Christmas music... (ok, that's mostly me, I started mid september -late for me... so I have to catch up!) We'll get there. Our house is beginning to feel like just that - Our HOUSE! Ours!


So... I'll post some pictures of our house in process here in a bit but first...


some belly pictures

late week 21... this is actually like 21+3... I know, unacceptable! sorry! 

22 Weeks! (today)
You can see the color is a bit different from the one above... the first picture is the actual color of our dining room... I had to change today's a bit because of my red, blotchy, just out of the shower face!

Like my shirt? get it? baby was made in China??? ha! I dusted off my screen printing skills and whipped up this little number... I printed it on a onsie too!

Pumpkinny Walls...

19 weeks

So, Dan's fab stepdad came this morning to help us make this home a bit more ours looking! He worked hard transforming our pink ceiling into a white one... (I know, tell me about it! Who has a PINK CEILING??? NOT US!:)  He also turned our pink and formerly wallpapered walls into a perfectly pumpkinny orange. After only the first coat they are a little funny but after he- the professional he is- finishes coat 2 they will be a dream! Makes me want to make some spiced cider!




 Also, today baby is 19 weeks! The size of a large mango! Im able to feel our mango rolling and kicking more everyday. Dan has even felt a little kick or two! This whole baby thing is beginning to feel real! 

New Side Table

So, even though we have to wait to really get our place set up until we're done painting, (we're picking up baby friendly paint at the store this afternoon!!!) I couldn't help pulling over when I passed by a perfectly good end table sitting in someone's trash. Dan helped me (somewhat begrudgingly) carry the table to our car. It took him a bit longer to see what I see in this particular item- unparalleled personality. The table was not, however, allowed to come into the house that night. It needed to "air out" and get thoroughly cleaned before it was to be accepted as a part of our living space. After a thorough cleaning I fell even more in love with my trash picked endtable, and Dan, well... he's warming up.

more images of home

Home.

Home

I'm not exactly sure what that means anymore. My husband and I are back in America after our two years in China.

Returning has been so complicated for us. We feel like we were never gone, picking up with old friends and family and life like we took a weekend away to the beach. At the same time it is impossible to get through a day without yearning for home-China. Yearning for our life there, our dear friends, our students, the food, and of course the challenge and wonder of learning a new culture everyday. It has been an adjustment and we are still struggling with it.

To make things just a little more complex, after saying goodbye to our dear, dear friends and trying to get as much time with them in before we left, we took our normal 17 hour train ride to the city where the Peace Corps office is and found out that what I thought was giardia was really........

A BABY!!!!

Dan and I are overjoyed and excited and scared and exhausted and more excited and and and...

Needless to say him having a job is an amazing blessing and it gives us more peace about the stability of our situation. Our search for a house was expedited because of our growing family. On our second day looking our realtor heard my dream of a "farmhouse" and showed us our dreamy 124 year old farmhouse. With room for a garden, lots of light and a kitchen with a counter that is above knee level it is everything we wanted in a house and more.

All these transitions are stressful and painful but having this house gives us a place to create our home here in the USA. Our hearts ache and dream of our home on the other side of the world, but we are learning what home is and how wonderfully rich we are to have "home" in more than just one place.