Thankfully Bad Mommy

Happy Thanksgiving. I sold out Mr. Turkey and started in on our Christmas projects last night. I had a good reason and my reason was this:


I did that to Poor Patrick and felt so guilty I started throwing restitution offers on the table. So this is the story of how I did that to my son's face and the restitution. Patrick's version of his injury, as told to his dad:
We were putting the big back on the bookcase and my mom wasn't paying attention to what she was doing and hit me in my nose and eye. It hurt, I cried.

I picked up this bookcase at WalMart because I need more display space in this house. I also want more color so part of the project was painting the wall. I did this one night last weekend after the boys went to bed and Patrick was beside himself in the morning when he realized I had worked on a project without him. Anyway, I generally like the bookcase but the (guilty) backing is really cheap looking. We'll fill it up with Christmas stuff and see what we think then Kevin will probably configure something else if we still don't like it. All in all, happy but bloodied.

Here is what it looked like before. This alcove is really a waste of space, it could be more pantry space but instead it is dead square footage. And there is no real lighting in the area even though we have 8,000 lights downstairs.

Besides finishing the bookcase I still have to touch up the wall paint. Someone had the grand idea of putting semi-gloss over flat paint to touch up the house before we bought it. I have Sherwin-Williams hunting down the correct flat paint so I can finish the wall. Apparently the only custom design in this house is the off-white paint.

So, my offer of restitution was to put up our first Christmas tree. Patrick immediately stopped wailing and carrying on and went full force into Christmas decorating. Did you see the Pottery Barn butterfly tree? Patrick and I were in L-O-V-E with this tree. Of course our friends at Pottery Barn were charging an arm and a leg for these little beauties so we went to Michaels and bought some plain butterflies some gold glitter spray paint and went to town.


Ignore my not-quite Christmas side board. We'll add to the set up tomorrow. But we are quite pleased with our handy work. Keith and Dad pitched in too.

This project was so easy we still had time to finish our Humongous Initial Letter. Joanns has the letters. I used 3 of Michael's $1.99 nine foot garland ropes. The ribbon was with my gift wrapping stuff. Patrick put all of the berries on while I tried to convince Keith not to eat them. The whole thing was under $20.


I am not sure where we will put it, I don't want it to get thrashed outside. We'll take stock of everything tomorrow and find it a permanent home.

We are thankful for a nice morning together and are looking forward to a nice day with our family. God bless you all.