Thursday, December 13, 2007

OH Christmas Tree!!!

So here it is ladies and gentlemen...our first Christmas Tree !!


Last Saturday after we went to the market, Micah took me to a tree farm and we picked out this beautiful little guy! It was a prefect size for the space we had in our living room and for the Aveo. We didn't even have to tie it on the roof because with a little rearranging it fit right into the back seat! When we got home Micah cut the bottom off and put together this lovely tree stand that my parents brought up for us last weekend when they were here visiting. We let it sit over night so the branches could fall down and take a nice tree shape.

On Sunday we started the decorating process. Micah put all the lights on while I started the popcorn garland. Once he was finished with the lights he and Weiwei helped me do the garland. They did a great job stringing the popcorn. I tried to provide other snacks for them to eat so the popcorn would make it on the string instead of in their bellies.


When we had finished with the popcorn it was time to put on the decorations. I let the boys do this part as I made some hot apple cider for them to reward all the hard work they had done!



So now we have been enjoying our evenings sitting in front of our beautiful lite up Christmas tree and fire place. We are very excited to be spending Christmas here in our new home with "God willing" our new family!










Saturday, November 24, 2007

Baby Peterson's room is finished

Hey everyone! Sorry it's been such a long time since we last posted anything but things around here have been pretty busy. Since we moved into the house we have been working hard on getting some things done before winter. One of the major projects that needed to get done was the nursery. With only 3 weeks to go we have been under some pressure to finish it.

The theme we wanted to go with for the baby's room was Noah's ark, so we asked a family from our church, who are very talented artist, if they would be interested in doing a mural on the walls of some animals and the ark. We were thrilled when they decided to do it for us!

Before we started we had to do some work in the room. First Micah worked on fixing a hole in the closet and putting primer on the walls to cover up the preexisting baby blue paint.













When the primer was all on the walls we had some help putting the two base colors that Micah choose for the room. Our friend Weiwei and his sister Shiloh.





When Shiloh came up to paint the artist had already been here to do some sketches on the wall so she needs to be very careful to paint around them.







Each week the artist and his family would come over to do some painting and more drawing. It was such a blessing to have this family in our home week after week.


This picture was taken after the first night of painting.



After 6 weeks and a few extra visits in there the nursery walls were finally finished!!! However before we could move the baby stuff back into the nursery we needed to put some stain on the floor to protect the hardwood. Micah worked very hard getting this done in two nights so now we have a complete nursery...all it is missing is Baby P!!!


Here is what the nursery looks like from the hall way as you are about to enter.


Looking into the nursery this picture is on the left hand side. The three big animals and Noah will be looking into the crib, while the ark is above the head of the crib.



This is a close up of some of the animals coming out of the ark. It's Micah's favorite and if you look closely you can seen two little mice coming off the boat.


The ruler is on the conner of the wall as you are leaving the room. I think this has been the funnest feature of the room as all our guest love to see how tall they are!



This picture is on the right hand side of the room as you walk in. I love how the hippo is right beside the rocking chair!!


The scroll is located behind the door. These verses from the Bible are part of the story of the flood.

Monday, October 29, 2007

Weiwei's Birthday

This weekend we celebrated Weiwei's birthday! Micah and I decided to cook up something new for this special occasion; so we dug to the bottom of our freezer to find the crown roast we had bought this summer. For all of you who don't know what a crown roast is, its like a bunch of pork chops tied together with the bones sticking up to make the shape of a crown. Here is the king of the kitchen himself with his crown! hehehe....


With a little bit of advice from Rhonda on how to cook it our roast was a success. Weiwei was very excited to dig into this work of art!




Micah who is a gravy lover decided that this would not be a feast without making gravy from the drippings. So after getting some advice from his aunt Carol (who he believes to be a gravy master) he was hard at work mixing up gravy for the special meal. It turn out to be really flavorful, however it was a little bit thick as it wouldn't even pour out of the gravy dish we had it in!




We ended our meal with a delicious Crapple Crisp (Crapple is a combination of apples and cranberries) and ice cream! We ended the evening with a couple rounds of a new game that Stephen and Maria purchased this weekend called Sequence. It was a lot of fun to play!

Thursday, October 25, 2007

Pumpkins at Pauls

This past Saturday we went over to our friend Paul's house for Pizza and Pumpkins! First we enjoyed many different kinds of pizza for supper before we got down to work; carving our pumpkins.


Micah and I worked together as a team. I got to do the dirty work and clean the pumpkin out while my artistic husband carved the pumpkin.


While Micah was busy creating a pumpkin master piece I was hard at work in the kitchen cookin up the pumpkin seeds. They are so yummy baked in the oven with a little bit of olive oil and of course lots of salt. Everyone was very creative with their pumpkin creations. Here is the outcome of ours!



You might not be able to tell what that is so here is a better picture we took the following day at home in the light.



Maybe you can tell better from this picture that its a stork carrying a baby! What a creative husband I have.

Monday, October 22, 2007

New Blog

Hi everyone!

Just wanted to let all you wonderful readers know that I have started a new blog called Kate's Kitchen


It's something I have wanted to start for a while now and with some free time on my hands I decided to give it a go. This blog will have lots of nutrition information along with yummy delicious recipes! Feel free to check it out as I have already posted some stuff!

Sunday, September 23, 2007

Settling In

Sunday morning we started off with some praise and prayer in our new home before heading off to church. When we got home from church we were all so tired from the late night before that everyone needed a rest.

Meanwhile back in St. Stephen my parents were not resting as they were trying to pile everything they could onto the back of Dad's truck to bring up to us. I think they managed to get more then we excepted to come on the truck.


Mom arrived late in the afternoon. We once again unloaded all the stuff that she had brought up. Before we knew it the boys had the tree trimmers out, that she brought up, and were working on the back yard. For the next hour or so everyone was cutting branches down and hauling them off to a conner in the yard. Mom and Rhonda were a little intense as they were right up on the ladders using a hack saw to get at some pretty big branches.



The next day mom and I were off to the old apartment to give it a good cleaning. We did make some time to do a little bit of house shopping. We purchased some curtains and when we got home mom put them up before she headed out side to mow the lawn.


While mom was outside doing work I was busy inside taking pictures of our new home !!


This is my beautiful kitchen. Its the first room you enter when you come in the back door. I really love that its yellow; it makes it very warm feeling. My second favorite thing about the kitchen is the mugs that are hanging!!! I just love the idea to have our mugs hanging over by the coffee pot.



This is a shot of the living room, which was taken from the kitchen. This is what sold us the house, we just love that the kitchen opens into the living room through an arch way.

This is the washroom. We really like the color blue in this room and I love how our old shower curtain from our first apartment made an excellent bathroom curtain when we cut a lot of the length off of it.




When Micah came home from work him and mom were hard at work putting the crib together.





It took a little bit of time to figure out where all the parts went and to figure out the length of the screws that we needed but they continued to work at it.




And then finally...they had figured it all out! It looks great! The nursery still needs a bit of work before we show the real final pictures of this room. A creative man from our church is working on a mural for the baby's room of Noah's arch, its going to look so cute!



Even after all the work that we did with our parents there was still more to be done this weekend. Micah's grandparents decided it was their turn to come and put there expertise to work.

Dora is a great painter so once the boys had the doors off and outside she was hard at work. She painted three doors for us that didn't have any paint on them and even did a touch up job in the spare bedroom closet.


The boys were busy at work scouting out the landscaping stuff early in the morning and then getting right to work building shelfs. Micah took a quick run to the hardware store to pick up some boards and he came back with this pretty cool stud finder!





Gramp did most of the cutting while Micah was busy inside finding the studs; so the shelfs would be strong!





They worked hard all day and by the end of the day they had put 7 shelfs in the spare room closet for our books and one longer shelf in the baby's room closet.




We feel so blessed to have had so much help getting us settled into our new house. There is still work that needs to be done but we feel we are well on our way of making our new house a home!

Saturday, September 22, 2007

Moving Day!

It was an early morning on Saturday as it was moving day! Micah and his dad took off around 8:15 to go get the U-haul truck that we rented. They arrived back to the apartment a little before 9:00; it just so happened it was the same time many of our good friends had shown up to help us. Once the truck was in place the boys started packing it up. Within 1 hour the truck was packed and they were on there way to get some stuff that we were storing at our friends house. By 10:30 the truck was at our new home and it was being unpacked.



The boys had great team work as they unloaded the truck, brought the items in and received direction from me as to where to put stuff...however there was so much stuff it was hard to direct everyone where to go with it.




While the boys were unloading the truck our girl friends where also very busy. They were helping put away all the boxes that were coming in, making the beds, re arranging the furniture in the bedrooms, cleaning out the cupboards and cleaning the bathroom!



Rhonda was also hard at work cooking seafood chowder for our helpers.


Before we knew it the truck was empty and everything that we own was squished into our new home. It wasn't even 11:30 when Micah was pulling out of here with an empty U-Haul to take back. When Micah arrived back home I was told to meet him outside with the camera. I went outside to find my husband sitting in the trunk of our friends car with a rocking chair that he had just picked up at a yard sale for $5.00! It was just what I had mentioned that I wanted for the baby's room earlier that week!


After enjoying a delicious lunch of seafood chowder, biscuits and banana bread for dessert it was back to work as we tried to make the house look like we lived there.



Our two friends Jamie and Stephen put together our conner computer desk,

We tried to orangize the food and dishes in the kitchen,


And Micah and his dad decided to clean out the attic so we could put some more insulation up there....they ended up finding some wacky and cool things! (this is Micah inside of an old TV)


The rest of our day was filled with more cleaning, putting up shelfs, getting a curtain rod for the bathroom and putting things away in the basement. By the end of our first day in our new home things were looking great!

Sunday, September 02, 2007

Labour Day Weekend


After finishing up my internship, Micah and I decided that we needed a vacation to celebrate not only my graduation accomplishment but also our two year anniversary. So on Saturday Sept 1st we headed to Nova Scotia for a wedding. After the wedding we headed into Halifax to spend the night at a hotel. On Sunday we decided to get up early to attend a lovely church in Lower Sackville (Yeah Gateway!). After the service we went back to the pastor's house with his family and 2 of our close friends to enjoy the yummiest craziest salad ever made! It was such a beautiful day that we decided after lunch to pack into the Aveo and head out to Peggy's Cove.


It was my first time there; I couldn't believe how amazing the view of the ocean was.








We had such a fun afternoon taking lots of pictures,


Climbing through the rocks,

And even taking a break to stop and chit chat for a while


Once we were tried out from all the rock climbing we decided it was time to head back home. What a great vacation!!