Christmas Joy!

So after all the flooring issues Patrick and I traveled to Louisville for Christmas, we were able to make it to Mass at Patrick's home church, which is his favorite family tradition and then we were able to spend Christmas morning with my dad and the evening with my mom. We had a wonderful time and I fell in love with my mom's Christmas decorations. I am so lucky to have such a wonderfully creative mother, hopefully I have gotten some of these talents.. I thought Id share some of my favorite pictures with you all!

The big tall huge Christmas tree which I love love love!!! Its decorated with dark red brown and white... So gorgeous. Also my mom hung her Christmas lights on her patio vertically, suspending them from a cable. It was soo cool and when the wind blew it looked like snow a little!

Here's the handsome husband reading his new Christmas book! And one of my favorite things, magnolia leaf garland swagged on the stairs.

The built ins where every nook and cranny is filled with something Christmas!

And my mom put Christmas all through the kitchen too. Nutcrackers, and reindeer, and snowmen oh my!

I just love all of my moms decorations!! She will probably be mortified that I took these pictures without straightening everything first.... Anyone who knows her knows how weird she is about stuff like that! I also wanna brag on her for a minute because she is designing a house for the up coming Southern Indiana Home Show. Congrats mom I love you!

Cassie

IM BACK!

So sorry for my absence, but my life has been complete chaos since the last time I blogged. Patrick and I were so so looking forward to a nice and long relaxing vacation. It was supposed to start on the 20th and end on the 27th. Well nothing in life goes as planned and now I'm just so used to that!

On the 19th I started some laundry, you know getting everything nice and clean for our trip we were supposed to leave on the 20th and spend 4 days in Crawfordsville with Pat's parents and then to Louisville Christmas Eve for Mass at Pat's home church and Christmas with my family... so I threw in the load of whites and because I wasn't feeling well all crampy and such I laid down to nap while the load was running ( I turned on the buzzer to wake me when it was done). Well I woke up 34-45 min later and noticed my light "express wash load" wasn't done???? I got off the couch and took one step toward the hallway and the carpet smooshed and water pooled around my feet. The closer I got to the Laundry room the more water there was. In the laundry room itself there were two inches of standing water!! There was water everywhere. Our house is not that large and probably half was covered in water. My washer had never shut off! The water just kept running! Thank goodness for my neigh boors they ran right over to help, what a godsend!

Over the next day we kept sucking out the water with the new shop-vac, running the commercial size de-humidifiers, and running tons of fans to keep the air circulating. The bedrooms seemed to be drying ok, but they were not that wet, but the hall way and the living room were still really soggy. So on the 20th we decided that we needed to rip up the carpet in the hallway and living rooms (see below).

Well the hubs and I went to Menards (the best store ever) and picked out some flooring and decided to install it ourselves. We thought it would be simple click together flooring... NOT After 3.5 days we were finally finished with the install. It looks great now but we missed all our time with Pats parents and our lives were completely upside down for days!! Here are some pictures from the carpet being ripped out to completely finished! And my new rug!

Completely done~ Don't mind all the wires to our new theater system we still haven't had time to install!! Tomorrow Ill share the next phase of my Christmas vacation!

God Bless,

Cassie R.

Not So wonderful words this Wednesday

Ok so today my post is dedicated to all who shop at the Jasper Indiana Walmart, what a special group of people, and not special in a good way but special in the stop eating the paste kinda way.

Dear Lazy lady who changed their child somewhere in the Walmart store and left the poopy diaper on the bottom of the cart,
Thanks for sharing the joys of children with us this Holiday season. You really gave me something to look forward to.

Dear Amish/ Mennonite People who are bussed in by the hundreds,
Be Nice!! Thanks for reminding us that simplicity includes Walmart electronics inclusive of portable dvd players and pre-paid cell phones, oh yeah and one more thing BE NICE!!

Dear Checkout girl who proved ignorance is true bliss,
Thank you for giving me an opportunity to practice my Spanish and for the reminder that just because you don't speak English you are still human and do deserve as much respect as any other customer. Perhaps when your checking out Hispanic people you should remember that!! And also it wasn't their fault that you didn't know what cilantro was. Have a blissful holiday!

Dear Crazy Man in the parking lot driving a huge truck with the Confederate flag decal across the back window,
You may have wanted my parking space and your impatience was made crystal clear when I went three spaces down to return my cart to the cart receptacle and you threw your hands up off your steering wheel and mouthed a few choice words at me.... I'm going to choose to think you were just wishing me a Merry Christmas.

It just amazes me how much the Christmas Season has lost, we are so afraid to not offend someone that we have stopped sharing the true reason for Christmas, the birth of our Lord and Savior. Truly when walking around Walmart for one hour today I couldn't find Christmas Spirit anywhere, it was sooooo upsetting. People are so focused on giving gifts that they have forgotten why were giving.
So now I am gonna go plug in our tree lights and watch Eloise at the Plaza, hopefully I wont be such a Scrooge after this dose of Christmas spirit!
Cassie