Christkindlmarkt and Temple Square

I LOVE the Christmas traditions we are creating with our little family.  We drove to SLC to participate in the Christkindlmarkt with the Bingham family.  The kids loved the booths, smells of food, and ambiance of the market.  We bought some Lebkuchen to share.  

Then we were off to Temple Square!  We ate at the Food Court at City Creek and then enjoy roaming around (with 200,000 of our friends) seeing the beautiful lights.  It was the perfect weekend experience to kick off the Christmas season.

Happy Thanksgiving From The Lindsays!

 Since Dave was on call for Thanksgiving, we knew we would be staying in Utah County for Thanksgiving.  My nephew, McKay, had sent me a few messages and even called me from Texas to ask if I was hosting Thanksgiving Dinner since he would be in town and wanted to spend time with his Hatch cousins.  I was on the fence about it since I was so exhausted from all of the work on our house in addition to teaching, raising kids and two online classes I have been taking.  So when Jeff also asked if we were doing Thanksgiving at our home so he could spend it with McKay, I told him of course we were.  

It ended up to be a blast!  Cousin Doug and his family, Justin and Jana and their family, and Jeff and his family joined us to celebrate Thanksgiving.  We ate at 1:30 and loved our dinner.  With everyone contributing to bringing the food, it was easy and delicious.  We spent the afternoon visiting, playing games, and just enjoying being together.

Lindsay student #2 Eagle of the month: Alyssa Jean!

Imagine our excitement to see that Alyssa had been chosen as Eagle of the Month at her school by her teacher.  She is a hard-worker and goes the extra mile.  We love her dearly and are so proud of her.

Taylor in Concert!

 We loved Taylor's 9th grade combined choir Christmas concert at MRJH.  She had the opportunity to sing in a trio in between choir numbers with some of her cute friends.  We are just proud of our girl and her accomplishments in music!

Eagle fo the month: JAXITO!

We are so proud of our Eagle of the month, our Jaxson!  He is the greatest young man and we love him dearly.

A New House for the Lindsays! Project: Basement FInished

 I didn't post once on my blog to document the events of November.  Why?  Because the entire month was dedicated to getting the house ready for carpet in the basement.  And it took 3 weeks to get it installed.  

Why?

Let me explain.  On November 2, the carpet installers came to put carpet in the basement.  They told us it would take 2 days.  We couldn't believe how great the carpet looked at the end of the workday on November 2nd.  We could hardly sleep that night in anticipation for our house expanding.  The next day, driving excitedly on my way home from work, Dave called me practically yelling!  "Jody, the carpet isn't flush with the wood floor!  It is too low so the kids will bust a toe open."  I was sick about it.  I quickly came home and noticed it was a huge problem, a problem we had addressed with Aaron, the owner of the company that laid our carpet, when he came for the estimate.  As I walked around the living room, I glanced back toward Taylor's room and noticed some cuts in the middle of the room in our carpet.  It didn't look right.  I called Aaron and asked him to come over to see the problems.

When he came, his face was mortified.  Yes, the carpet wasn't flush to the wood and that needed to be fixed.  And yes, when the installers had cut the carpet for the stairs, they had laid it on the newly-installed family room carpet and the tip of the blade had gone through and sliced the top of our new family room carpet.  It was estimated that the piece was about $900.  He said he would order one immediately but it would take about 2 1/2 weeks for it to come.  He also said that with the huge piece of carpet that would have to be taken out of the family room, it was probably enough to re-carpet the two upstairs rooms if we were interested.  Of course we were!

So the wait began.

 We had almost three more weeks to wait.  Dave and I were so completely exhausted from late nights painting, touching up baseboards, cleaning windows etc late into the night every night for weeks.  I still had to paint the boys' upstairs bedroom for Alyssa so that was my next project to complete.  The good news was the kids' bedrooms were ready for furniture!  During our wait, we moved the kids into their new bedrooms.  It was exhilarating for all of us!  Taylor's bedroom became a beautiful oasis with her newly-stained bedroom furniture (our first set we purchased when we got married).  Jaxson spent hours in his room decorating and arranging every little detail.  Austin had so much fun in his new room too.  

The Monday before Thanksgiving, the carpet installers came scheduled to come back.  At 8:30am, Aaron called to say that his installers had had the flu so he was going to install by himself.  A few hours later, Dave called me at work to say that the huge tree I had next to the piano had been leaking water for years and had rotted the subflooring underneath it.  Dave had to spend the next 4 hours cutting out the rotted wood and replacing it with subflooring.  Seriously- could anything else go wrong?

 (Our upstairs brown carpet)

Aaron promised us he wouldn't be leaving until the upstairs was finished.  And he kept his promise!  Before he left, our upstairs had new carpet and it looked amazing!

Here is a picture of Alyssa's new bedroom, formally the "blue boys' room" for the past 11 years!

 I had wanted a pretty chair in the front room.  Meredith had come by and said she said she saw one that would match the turquoise in the painting above my piano when she had been shopping at Ross's in AF that day.  I drove right over and fell in love with the simple chair.

I will post some more pictures of our downstairs in a few weeks after our granite is installed on the bar.  We LOVE our new downstairs!  It is so much fun to be down there already.