One of my favorite sights to see

Occasionally, I will walk into a room and see this:

I love it!

New Closets!

We love our house and are planning on living here a good while, if not forever.  However, there have been a few major drawbacks to our house.  I guess every house has them, right?  Anyway, among other things, our house does not have a coat closet and does not have a pantry (but it does have a nice, large kitchen!)  Anyway, we used this little portable coat closet ever since we moved in (shown in the corner in the picture below):

Several months ago my sis-in-law Brooke had the idea to put closets on either side of the window in our "dining nook" and then put a window seat in between.  Alan and I hired our amazingly-talented family friend Brian to build these closets for us.  (See Brian's website here if you would like to hire him to do a project for you, too!)

Here is the "before" picture:

And here is the "after" picture:

The closet on the left is a coat closet, and the closet on the right is a pantry with shelves:

And there is the amazing storage bench in between the two closets!  

We couldn't be more thrilled with the result!  We still aren't quite finished yet.  The closets need to be painted, and we are going to paint our whole kitchen a new color while we are at it.  I'm excited for the new look of my kitchen!!

Kindergarten!

 In August Jared started Kindergarten.  These pictures are from his first day.

In front of his school door

 Parents were allowed in the classroom for a few minutes, but Jared could hardly wait for me to leave.  He kept saying, "Ok, mom, you can go now!"  He wouldn't pose for a picture at his desk but just rolled his eyes and then finally looked away. (Sorry about some random mom's bum in the picture below.)

No, I did not even tear up once.  Jared has been so bored this summer ever since preschool let out, that I think we were both so excited for school to start again.  He has continued to love it every day!

End of August

We went to see the Gardens on one of the 2-Buck-Tuesdays.  Unfortunately my batteries on my camera ran out after I had snapped only two pictures.  It was a lot of fun, though.

 We celebrated my birthday, too.  Alan surprised me by buying me two things I had really wanted (don't mind the Christmas wrapping paper on the bottom present!)

Maggie wore her birthday cupcake shirt in honor of my birthday

My new shoe rack and stock pot

We also had a lovely birthday party for me with Alan's family and my family.  And, I got something that I was really wanting for my birthday: a Yonanas machine!  It makes a delicious frozen treat out of frozen fruits.  I have loved it.