Sean, Shell, and Cadence

Well, it's been a WHILE! Sorry about the big gap between posts. Since Cadence hasn't become any less cute I'll need to post a lot of pictures of her to catch up...
Here's a brief summary of the last few months for us.
After FINALLY closing on our house, we began work on the basement right away while we waited for our tenants upstairs to find somewhere else to live. They were able to move out by Nov. 15 which was great, then we began work upstairs. Basically, the basement was updated recently and looked pretty good at first glance but it was really kinda grimy when we got to cleaning and sadly a lot of the work that was done was very sloppy. But, the basement was still in MUCH better shape than the upstairs. We spent a few weeks driving from Roy to clean the basement before we were able to start working upstairs and at that point almost everything was already taken care of downstairs. Then my cousin and her husband moved into the basement and have been wonderful renters since.
(Sorry, I didn't take any pictures before they moved in.) Now for the upstairs... Well, we really had no idea how much work we had ahead of us. Every time we walked through the upstairs before, the tenants were there and we just walked through pretty quickly so we didn't really notice a lot of things and the tenants left it pretty gross when they left. So, we started cleaning, prepping for paint, ripping out some carpet, shampooing then ripping out some other carpet, and shampooing and cleaning some OTHER carpet. We put in laminate floors in part of the house, wired a light in our front room, (thanks to the smart designs of the 5o's that didn't include any ambient lighting in living rooms) then we textured a few of the ceilings and did some painting. All in all, we had to move in way before all of the work was done. So we're not really all of the way moved in and there are tools and construction junk all over. BUT, the changes we have made have made such a difference and we're excited about owning and improving our own home.

This is the hallway before we did anything, obviously the carpet was the first to go...

Now we're working on tearing out the paneling. Also, the door on the right is a closet that had no shelves and was a lot of wasted space so my amazing husband and I built shelves into it so we could use it for a pantry.

Ok, now we'll start with the front room...

Now the kitchen...

Not much has changed in here, but there are big plans for the kitchen.

Cadence's room/ laundry room

The nasty blue carpet that was first to go.

Here's Cadence's room after we replaced the floor but before we really got it cleaned up and painted it.

This is where the washer and dryer were... no pan to catch water, no proper drain... after pictures of this to come. (if you haven't seen them on facebook)

Bedroom
Now this is the carpet that was in our bedroom, didn't look awful, but we couldn't really get it clean so we tore it out and we were glad we did. The bottom side of the carpet and the pad looked and smelled horrible!

Still our bedroom, without the carpet and before we painted.

The lovely hole that was in the wall...

This is how our room looks now!

Now for the fun stuff, US!
I'll try to post these as close to chronological as I can...

Eating the toes and reaching for them.

Cadence ALWAYS sleeps in weird positions now.

First ponytail Yay! (they're easier now that her hair's grown more.)

So, during this time, Cadence started crawling. The picture below was taken before she started crawling. She would lean forward in this funny frog position and act like she was going to crawl, it was pretty cute and pretty funny. Now she crawls all the time and goes up and sometimes down our two little stairs. She stands up whenever she can and we think it'll be a matter of days or weeks before she starts walking.

Valentines day in our back yard. (ps the tree behind us has a trunk that's 5-6 ft in diameter)

Our Valentines Day feast. I made Sean's two favorites, chicken Parmesan and Fettuccine Alfredo.

Valentines dance at the institute...

Note how her legs are positioned, she loves pulling her right leg up and sticking it into the slot between the pad and bar.

Love it, the daddy daughter dance.

Aunt Holly reading Cadence a book.

Here are some pictures from Halloween and the few weeks leading up to it.

This was our family on Halloween. We had a little party with the Chapman family.

While we were at Grandma and Grandpa Sjoblom's house (on Halloween) Cadence's aunt Kaylee put this silly wig on her head and I thought it was pretty cute. Cadence didn't seem to mind.

Here's her flower costume. Isn't she just a little ray of sunshine?

Cadence and her cousins Aryana (princess) and Josie (chick).

The traditional doughnut's on a string...
My hat was wanting to fall off.

Here we have our lovely vampire pumpkin family. Cadence did help by sitting on my lap while I painted her pumpkin.

We went on a picture scavenger hunt and here are some of the pictures from it. (All taken at Walmart)

In this picture we were supposed to find Spongebob underwear. We found were they should have been but apparently they were out of stock so we took a picture with the rack where they went.

Just a few pictures of Cadence and Mom.