A quick February post

Sadly, I only snapped about a dozen pictures during the month of February.

The week before Valentine's Day, Whitney helped me teach a lesson for Family Home Evening on love.... particularly focusing on loving each other in our home. At the end of our lesson, we had everyone write "love letters" on paper hearts with things we love about each other. Whitney took off with the idea and made an official "Love Wall" where we could display our hearts for the month.

We really enjoyed this and will probably have to do it again next year.

Our biggest highlight was having Tyler's parents come for a quick visit over President's Day weekend. The weather could not have been more beautiful. Grandpa Nelson took advantage of the lovely weather and fixed up bikes and took the kids walking almost every day around town. On school days, Grandma Nelson helped me walk with the kids to take Whitney to school; with 2 on bikes and one in the stroller, this is not something I brave very often without another pair of hands! Unfortunately, I have no pictures of us enjoying the sunshine. :(

But here is the crew on Valentine's morning before chuch. Linda beautifully braided Whitney's hair!

I wish you all could know Linda, a.k.a. Grandma Nelson. These blog posts just don't do her justice. She is an animal that doesn't sleep or stop working--EVER. After church we enjoyed a turkey feast Betty Crocker-style. Really, the meal was perfection... as were all of the other culinary creations Linda provided us during her stay.

Linda worked on lots of projects and helped improved our little place. I had made some polka dot curtains for Whitney's room (literally!) hours before our guests came in town last Thanksgiving. I whipped them out crappily sewing the polka dot fabric with the heavy "black out" material behind it. It did the job of keeping the room dark during nap time, but the curtains just looked a bit sloppy. 

After explaining to Linda that I wanted her help sprucing up the curtains, she suggested adding more clips to the top of the curtains so they wouldn't be so droopy. DUH!! Such a simple solution that didn't even cross my mind! Nice that we didn't have to sew for this project. Here is a picture of the final product... imagine the "before" picture in your mind without the netting and ribbons and 1/2 the amount of silver clips at the top. Hard to explain, but really, the curtains look much more finished now. Whitney LOVES her girly-girl room.

Another project without a "before" picture... Imagine these little kid chairs with shredded vinyl covering them. Yeah, they were bad. Linda recovered these chairs just hours before her plane took off. What a difference!!

And yes, Linda is also a master beautician! She cut Tyler, Cole, and Whitney's hair while she was here. As you may have noticed in the picture above, Whitney's "do" was the most dramatic change. She absolutely LOVES it. It's fun for her to have something new, and she loves feeling like a big girl doing her hair herself.

The biggest project that Linda completed was re-covering this rocking chair. When she came in town, this thing looked so battered and worn out. She thought we had no use for it (obviously we aren't rocking any babies to sleep these days), but we told her that the kids use it in their little reading corner in Cole's room. Instead of tossing it, Linda just made up her own pattern and whipped this out: 

Not only did Linda complete this in a day, she made it REMOVABLE with Velcro, so I can just take the covers off whenever I want to throw it in the wash. Amazing!! It is a great little chair, and I'm so glad Linda was able to resurrect it. The kids love their spruced up little reading corner.

So that's February in a nutshell. March has been busy with birthdays; more posts to come! :)