Merry Christmas from the Fredericksens!!

Thanksgiving 2013

This year for Thanksgiving, we were lucky to get to see just about everyone in our families at some point. 

We spent from Wednesday night until Saturday afternoon with Trent's family. We hung out and ate a lot of good food, the kids (including Trent and Chuck) had a fun time playing with their Nerf guns and we watched some football, including watching the Hawks beat the Huskers. We also did a tiny bit of shopping during the time we were there and went to see Catching Fire in theaters. (Which I loved!) All that mixed in with some lounging around made it an awesome holiday! I was sick over most of the long holiday, which wasn't fun, but being sick at home (or someone else's home) is better than being sick and having to go to work!

Then on Saturday evening, we made the short trip to Norwalk to attend the baptism of Brady Charles, my cousin once removed. (I know that's officially how we're related because I googled it!) The baptism was followed by a Thanksgiving meal with my mom's side of the family and then we started on the road to stay the night at my mom's house.

Sunday morning, Trent went to a gun show with my Grandpa Kock while I went to church with my mom. We then all met up with my sister and her husband and Uncle Dan at Grandma and Grandpa Kock's house for a delicious lunch. I think we could call that our third Thanksgiving meal of the weekend even if it was "unofficial".

Like all of our holidays, this one was full of lots of travel, but it's a small price to pay to get to see almost all of our family for the holidays! The first of our Christmas festivities begins tonight when my family all arrives at our house for our Christmas celebration! I'm VERY excited to kick off our "official" Christmas events and then enjoy all the fun that is to come over the next three weeks!

Have a great weekend! 

DIY Christmas Art for Living Room Frames

I had mentioned in this post from a few weeks ago that I had planned on changing out the new frames in my living room throughout the year. Right before Thanksgiving, I got them updated for Christmas and I'm very happy with the way they turned out!

  

As I had mentioned, my inspiration for the stars came from this Pottery Barn picture. I still love the way the wood ones look, but I just had to do what I could with what I had!

I started by just using the star shape that is in the Shapes in Word. I saved it in a Word file on a flash drive and brought it to Office Depot to have it printed. They made it as big as it would go to fit on a 16" X 20" paper. I also bought some poster board and then used the star as a stencil to trace out where my star would go on the poster board. (I made 2 of these, so I did everything twice.)

I then used  a scrap piece of a cut up T-shirt to rub some Inka Gold Metallic Rub that I had picked up at Jo Ann's, on the poster board to fill in where I had traced the shape of the star.

After I had the stars filled in with gold, I replaced the star stencil back onto the paper and secured it with some blue painter's tape and then spray painted around the star with dark red spray paint. The gold rub dries very quickly, which was nice, so I didn't have to wait long at all between rubbing on the gold and then spray painting the area around it.

After I got the first one spray painted, I realized I had a slight problem. Since I wasn't careful to stay in the lines when I was putting the gold onto the paper, you could see where I had stopped with the gold through the spray paint, as it had made a dark border around the star.

See the darker red border around the star.

So I had to go back and put the gold over the whole entire paper that I had spray painted and then spray paint over the whole thing one more time so that it would have a consistent background under the spray paint.

After I went back and put gold over the whole paper.

Since I hadn't spray painted my second star, I could just cover the whole paper before I did any spray painting on that one.

My stencil is in its place and ready to be spray painted

After they were both spray painted, I let them dry flat for about 24 hours so I wouldn't end up with specks of red spray paint on the inside of the glass. I then put them into the frames and hung them up. For very little money, I now had new art for my frames. And I love them right next to our Christmas tree.

They are very imperfect. You can see where the spray paint got under my stencil and there are places where the spray paint ran on the corners because they were curled up when I was spraying them, but I kind of like it that way. I'm just going with the mentality that I meant to do it that way!

Now I'll have to be on the look out for inspiration of what to change them to next!

Remember when... (The Great Flood)

Remember that one time when a pipe in our apartment burst and covered our entire apartment with an inch or two of water?

I do! :)

I can still remember walking in to our apartment over lunch that Thursday and hearing the loud gushing of water being shot across the bathroom and then finding Mattie in our bedroom as far away as she could get from the loud noise and in the only dry spot left in the apartment!
 

The hole in the wall across the bathroom from where the pipe burst caused by the pressure of the water gushing out!

 I can remember Trent having been out of town at that time and him having to try to facilitate from afar getting some staff members to come and help me.

 

 I remember sleeping on the island that was our bed that night alone with Mattie, knowing that when I stepped out of bed, I'd hear the squishing of wet carpet underneath my feet.

 I remember spending my Thursday night piling boxes from our spare closets into the kitchen and living room so they didn't sit on the wet carpet rather than spending the whole night studying for my CPA Exam that was coming up that Saturday morning.

 I remember eating a bowl of cereal in our apartment by myself the morning before my test while standing in the kitchen amongst the piles of boxes because there was no where to sit down.

 

 I remember finding out that next Monday morning that we'd have to move absolutely everything out of our apartment by the end of that day because it was going to take more work than they thought to get our apartment dried out: meaning drilling holes in the drywall and replacing all the carpet, etc.

This is what happens when you leave your clothes on the floor, kids!

  

It was 2 years ago this week that we finally were able to move back into our apartment after living in a hotel for three weeks and calling our room at The Residence Inn "home."

 

 

It was in that hotel room where I found out I had passed my first CPA Exam test (That I had to take 2 days after "the incident" and after sleeping on an air mattress in one of the extra rooms on UNOs campus). It was where I laid on the bed and read a majority of Catching Fire on my new Kindle Fire (that I also received during the time we were staying there) while Trent played Skyrim on the XBox. It was also where we first decided, while we were watching the TV channel that scrolls through local house listings, that we were going to pursue buying a house the next spring.

 

As much of a hassle as it was to have to deal with packing everything up and moving it out of our apartment and living out of suitcases and laundry baskets for three weeks, it wasn't all bad. We made some good memories and we'll always have this story to tell. We also got a pretty nice hot breakfast every morning and didn't have to worry about cleaning our own bathroom or kitchen or even making the bed! I am just very grateful that it happened when we were living in an apartment and not in a place that we owned so we didn't have to deal with the expenses of getting it all fixed or paying for it all!