A peek!

House Tour Continued!

So first things first.
Well, second since I have already shown you the home decor of much of the house....lol-you can tell what I'm most excited about huh?
Anyway-this is the front of our house....you cannot see is the little landing and a paved path that goes almost out to the street but not quite.
I don't really get that part...why pave up until there is two feet and leave grass?
We have big plans for the front of this place. See that planter area? We're going to rip it out and put up a lovely front porch complete w/a porch swing.
When Mr. Gill and I were dating I lived in a great house w/a screened in porch w/a big wicker swing and a lot of our memories of falling in love happened on that swing....*sigh*.
Yea-we're planning on putting up another gable and making it a nice big porch....maybe even wrap it around to the side entrance....which is the one we use most often anyway.

Here is the living room-see the front door and fireplace!

This is probably one of my favorite paint colors EVER!!!
Oh its just so great. It's the mud room/laundry room....the laundry room was um....being used...by all my dirty laundry so I didn't take a picture.
Next time.

Anyway this is where the door off of the driveway leads-and this room also connects to the kitchen or the hallway.....

This is our old-timey backyard patio-
I couldn't help but put an old filter on it and let me tell you why.
The awning (I had to look up how to spell that) is Soooo old store-front style. I kinda want to print out Life in the Fish Bowl in vinyl letters and stick 'em up there.
Also-notice the steps to the back door...they look like steps for the shallow end of the pool! It patio is totally great though, its nice and big and we'll be able to have lots of dinner parties out there w/out being cramped like we were at our last place. And that tree has the perfect bend of branch for a rope swing! :)

This is the view from the patio-our big backyard. What you can't see is the trash heap of yard clippings the previous renters left for us. We're working on getting rid of it slowly.
I'm planning on having a garden this year-our yard gets lots of nice sun, and I hope to be able to grow something to eat. We'll see how it goes-I've enlisted the help of people who know what they are doing and I've spent some time reading up on it. I'm not quite ready to start composting yet....
Expect updates on that throughout the summer.

The house tour has not yet concluded, but will take some time as we're still finding boxes we shoved into the spare bedroom a couple of months ago :/

*Jenny G

Traditions

Tomorrow is Dec. 1st.

Which means.....Christmas is just around the corner!

I feel like is was just labor day-I mean, for real.

But as a *relatively* newlywed, Mr. Gill and I have been trying to formulate what our Holiday Traditions will be.
Growing up my (Jenny) family would always do the tree and on christmas eve we'd come home from church and have a little buffet and watch silly christmas movies. We'd also get to open one present before we went to bed to hold us over until the next morning.
For Mr. Gill and I though we haven't had much time to start traditions. Our first year of being married we had a christmas tree that was filled w/teal and silver ornaments from our wedding only weeks earlier.

Our second christmas together we didn't have a tree because we packed up our little apartment to move across the country the morning after the holiday and decided that dealing w/a tree would be just too much work.

This year, we will probably put up a tree, but as we are in the process of purchasing our first home (!) we'll wait until we're all moved in. While waiting for that fun event, we have something that we've been participating in for a couple of days now that we think we'll keep as a tradition for our family-an Advent Wreath!

The wreath has been great because we get to take time right before dinner and light a candle, read the scripture for that day and remember the waiting of people for thousands of years and then we get to eat by candlelight! It's fun for us as a couple, and we've been inviting friends to join us! It makes for great conversation and who doesn't love eating around a tiny little table by candlelight with their friends!
It also kind of forces us to eat at the table together (which we don't normally do) and we really like it. We might even keep the candlelit dinners as a norm!

What are your Christmas Traditions? Are they new or have they been passed down in your family for a long time?

Happy start o' the holidays!!

*Jenny G

This time

Two weeks from yesterday Mr. Gill and I will be married for 2 years!

Crazy.

Two years ago this past weekend I was attending a sweet party put on by the beautiful ladies in my house church....which now one has a baby, one is pregnant and one is moving to Morocco in just a couple of months!

One year ago from last weekend Mr. Gill and I decided to have a little date.

Look at that HAIR! Oh man, if he wasn't all professional-I'd beg him to grow it out again :)

How fun to look at what was going on in our lives this time last year.
What about you? What were you spending your time doing last year, or the year before?

Newlyweds?

Mr. Gill and I flew from Indiana to Idaho a couple of days ago.
On our way to Indiana AND on our way back to Idaho there were a couple of flights where it was too full for us to sit together....which was a bummer.
I thought about telling people that Mr. Gill and I are newlyweds-and wouldn't they scoot over so the newlyweds could sit together? Brilliant I thought, and I told Mr. Gill that I was going to say this next time we were going to be forced to sit apart to spare myself the sitting next to a stranger so I'm afraid to fall asleep for fear of drooling-ness.....and he told me that we were no longer newlyweds!

What?!

Of course we are....we haven't even been married 2 years....and then we started discussing the finer details of what constitutes newlywedness.....which I'm still not sure we totally agree, although he's now convinced that we are indeed still in the newlywed phase.

So after having Mr. Gill agree with me we had a happier flight!

Some of the flight happiness may be due to the fact we got to sit together and that my new purse and the sweater for the iPad (my first try at cabling) got to have the window seat!

I want to know what you guys think though, when does newlywed-Dom end? With kids? But some people have babies before they're married.....
Is it a time frame thing or a certain shift in behavior? Cause all I know is I want to spend all my time with Mr. Gill....and I don't see that changing anytime soon.
Let's have a poll.....when/how does the newlywed phase end?

Looking forward to your answers!

Jenny G