Plants in the Sunroom

First: We were blessed with a nice, full rainbow a few days ago... Isn't it lovely? :)And here are a few shots of our updated sunroom... I LOVE plants, and so I love this room, which is perfectly suited to being the home of lots of plants. Dad gave me some hanging ferns when we were down there over Thanksgiving, and we finally got around to getting ceiling hooks for them. Jeff and Phil put them up on Monday. They've added so much to the feel of the room! Love it.




I even have some herbs in there ~ mint, cilantro, basil, and parsley ~ which I use regularly in my cooking. Well, the parsley I do, anyway. That seems to be the most popular.

Guest Room Makeover

We finally got around to repainting the guest room... Which really needed it. It was this awful yellow color, and had holes and things all over the place. We painted it a medium sort of coffee color ~ light enough to not be a dark hole, but dark enough to be warm and cozy. :) As usual, Jeff did the painting himself.
Where's Sylvie?
Here's the finished product. Love it love it love it! Soooo much better than what it was before. (Dad - when we get a queen size bed, we'll use the comforter you gave us in here. The comforter colors match the walls perfectly! But this comforter will have to do for now...)

Aggressive Bird, Part II

This bird comes around once a year, I've now been told..... And not only is he trying to get into the house; he's also trying to get into Phil's truck! What?!? These shots are from this morning...

The Bird That Wouldn't Give Up

So this morning, while Jeff and I were praying together in the living room before he left for work, we heard a light banging noise coming from the other room... No one else was around, and Allie was lying on the floor nearby, so we didn't know what on earth it could be. We finished praying and came in the kitchen, looking around. We couldn't see what it might have been, so he left for work, and I started my morning puttering around. I was sitting at my little kitchen desk when I heard it again. I turned around, but couldn't see anything. Weird, I thought, and returned to my emailing. It happened again... so this time, I got up to look, and I still couldn't see anything. Finally, when it happened yet AGAIN, I saw what it was... A bird was trying to fly through the glass doors in the kitchen! And it simply wouldn't give up. Even as I began writing this post at 3:45 in the afternoon, the bird was still trying to get in! Good grief!!

Here he is on our back deck, preparing for his attack:
SLAM!
SLAM!
SLAM!
You'd think he'd learn!! I suppose, however, that he only has a bird brain. So again and again he tried. He seems to have given up at this point, but he was really only taking a rest.....
SLAM!

Aunt Sylvie Meets Her Newest Nephew

My sister Jenny and her youngest, Jason Luke (well, the name isn't *final* yet... They think they might end up naming him Jason Paul... We'll see...), are on the east coast for a visit. They live in Texas right now, and it's been a while since we've seen them. Jason, who is 5 months old, is #14 of my nieces & nephews! We've got Sarah, Leah, Ben, Joel, Christie, Mark, Matthew, Bryan, and Jason in the Beamer family, and Grant, Autumn, Grace, Emma, and Maggie in the Schneider family. (Keeping up with birthdays is a full-time job!!)He smiles and laughs so easily, and he's very cuddly - love it!
And then he has this look ~ wide eyed, almost frightened, taking it all in.
He definitely has the "Beamer" look about him! And he looks a lot like his brothers Joel and Matthew. I can hardly wait until I have one of these munchkins of my own. :)

Christmas 2009

Pecan Jewels and Grandma Truesdale's White Christmas Cookies.... my two favorites.After the Christmas Eve service at church (in which Kiff and I sang in the choir and had a blast!), we had tomato-potato soup and a little family game of Rummy.

Christmas morning I was too busy opening my presents to take many pictures!! But here are a few...

Our afternoon family game of Scrabble. I do believe Phil won. I got stuck with a Z I couldn't use. :(
The entire day was all foggy and magical outside. This was taken out our back door.
Christmas night, Jeff and Kiff played a few 60s and 70s tunes together.
Allie enjoying the music.
The four of us in New Jersey, two days after Christmas. Notice my beautiful new purple Eddie Bauer sweater!!
Kiff with her Grandma ~ Jeff's mom ~ in New Jersey.
While we were with Jeff's parents, I grilled them about their ancestry... And came up with a little family tree and some interesting fun facts... Jeff's dad dug out a few old photos and an old wedding record book, all of which was so fascinating!! I think it's so important to have knowledge of our ancestry. I imagine someday my great grandchildren might not even know my name, or anything about me, and that makes me a little sad. So I like to find out about my ancestors as much as I can. As it turns out, Jeff has great-grandparents from Belfast (where my great-grandparents are from), and both Jeff and I are of German and English and Irish descent.

Here's Jeff grandfather, Edwin Elmer Case:And here's Edwin's mother, Jeff's great-grandmother, Martha Spoonenberger Case, whose husband died and who put her son through college by selling books door to door!!
Pretty neat, huh?

The Big Snow!!

I'm not sure how many inches we got here in Virginia... I think somewhere around 16-20. The bummer was that Saturday night (which was in the middle of the snowstorm) we had tickets to see Handel's Messiah at the Kennedy Center in DC! I had called on Friday to see if it was cancelled, and they said nope, it was still on. And the tickets were non-refundable. SO....... we tried our best to get out. Around noon, Jeff got my RAV4 to the end of the driveway, where it promptly got stuck... There was simply no getting out. And with Jeff's recent surgery, he wasn't in the position to do much shoveling. Phil had been snowed in at a friend's house, so we were on our own. I wanted to go out and shovel the car out, but my back had been hurting over the past few weeks, so we knew that wasn't very smart.... But in the end, the Kennedy Center did decide to cancel the show after all, and we were refunded. But I was kind of disappointed! One, because we really wanted to see the show, and Kiff was going to go with us (she was really disappointed too). And two, because I was gearing up for an adventure. :( But I know it would have been dangerous had we persevered in venturing out. They were saying there were accidents all over the place...

Anyway, it sure was pretty. Especially when viewed from the warm indoors. :)



Phil was home by Sunday morning, and he did a ton of shoveling. So nice to have a strong young man around. :) Jeff did a little as well. And he paid for it! He isn't supposed to be shoveling snow this early after his surgery.

And do you believe, the snow is almost completely gone now?? It's been above freezing, and then we had a couple days of rain, so almost all the snow got washed away. We hear more might be coming, though........ We'll see!