Boo at the Zoo

Yesterday, Katie and I went to the Fort Worth Zoo for their Halloween event. It was so much fun. Katie loved all the carnival games and of course the candy. 

 

 

Her first shot went right in!

 

The zoo has a new area called the Texas Nature Traders. It is awesome. Here is a description of the program from their website:

 

This formalized program encourages kids (age 3 and older) to explore the outdoors and bring to the building fossils, rocks, bones, plants and other artifacts in exchange for points. Traders can redeem points (or save them for future use) for items in the Nature Trader inventory. 

Katie loved this area! She was in heaven looking at and touching all the different rocks and other items. We will now be on the look out for fun items to bring in.

 

 

Check out these fun pumpkins:

 

 

 



We've Moved

At the end of summer we made a change in our lives. We moved! (hence, the neglected blog) When we put our house on the market it only took three days and three showings to get it sold. We could not believe it sold so fast. Thankfully we found a new home that we were able to close on two days before we had to be out of our old home. It was a stressful couple of days but thanks to our good friends the move went smoothly. 

5678 Dance

Katie had her first dance performance this past weekend. It was at a local festival. She and the rest of the kiddos had lots of fun. It was so fun watching them dance! I am so proud of Katie for trying something new!

She has only had four classes. I think everyone did a great job for such a short amount of class/practice time. I was really amazed at how well she did at the end of the Chihuahua dance. She missed the class where they taught the last half of the dance so she had never seen it before. I would never be able to tell that by watching her. She did a great job following her teacher. Katie had a blast and that was the best part for me!

Look who turned four!

Wow! Time is flying by! How is it possible that our baby girl is now four!

Birth Mother's Day

Happy Birth Mother's Day! Thank you to all the wonderful women out there who made such a brave and selfless choice to place their precious babies in the arms of another. 

A mom once told her daughter, "I don't know how you can do this. I could never give my child to another!" The daughters response, "Heavenly Father didn't ask you too!" Through God all things are possible!

Adoption is not the right choice for all who have an unexpected pregnancy or for those who can not bare children. However, if this is the path Heavenly Father has asked you to take please know that He will help you through this hard but amazing journey!

Even though our adoption journey with K has been bumpy at times we would not change anything about it. We know without a shadow of a doubt that just as much as Katie was always meant to be a part of our family so was K. We love her very much and are very grateful for her!

Random pictures

Sometimes I notice that a person from the same area looks at our blog over and over again. I always wonder who it is that is looking, what brings them back to our blog and if they have any questions for us. 

Soooo, to those looking at our blog let me say to you, HI! If you do have any questions for us we would love to hear from you. Contact us at kenandkim2004@yahoo.com

And now for the random pictures promised by the title of this post. :)

Our first Ranger's game of the season

My neighbor invited me to her monthly craft night. This is my attempt at sea glass.

The Texas tradition of taking pictures in the bluebonnets.

My Refurbished China Hutch

My husband and I decided that this was the year that we were are going to redecorate our home. For us, that meant that we wanted a lot of new pieces of furniture. I started doing my research on how much a new china hutch costs and oh my! We were definitely not willing to pay that much!!!

I have a friend who makes her own furniture and refurbishes old pieces. Her and her husbands work is incredible and she inspired/convinced me that I could do it too. 

FYI: I think I picked one of the hardest pieces to start with! It took almost two months from start to finish. I only worked on it while my daughter was at preschool. Which only gave me about 10 hours a week. Then from those 10 hours I could only work on it when we had nice weather. Rain and wind are not your friend when you are painting and it seemed like it was always windy on those days too. Very frustrating! 

But at last I am done! I am so proud of myself for not only completing this project and doing a great job on it too! Yea me! :)

Here is how it all came together:

First, I spent a lot of time on Craigslist. I knew exactly how I wanted the china hutch set up and it took awhile to find one at the price I wanted to pay. We negotiated down to $250.

the picture is from the Craigslist ad so it isn't very good

Here are the before pictures (that we took after we started taking it apart)

I love all the simple details!

The first step was to sand, sand, sand! Actually with the primer we used we didn't need to sand that much but we still did for the for the first layer.

I am not a very tidy painter

I put 2 coats of primer on the inside and 3 for the outside pieces. It is very important to sand between each coat!

after 1 coat

2nd coat on the inside 3rd coat on the outside

Finally it was time to paint! We choose the color Peacock Blue in a spray can. I ended up using 18 cans of  paint which was not cheap but well worth it because I didn't have any brush marks. I used a satin white for the handles. We sealed it with a spray satin poly (water based) finish. We used satin so it didn't have a high shine to it and water based because it won't yellow over time. (I am not showing any paint pictures until the bottom)

The hardware was so gross. Years and years of nasty caked on. It took a lot of elbow grease to clean them up.

look at all that stuff coming off, yuck

before and after

Now for the finished (and awesome) china hutch!