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!

New Frames for the Living Room

 A while back I saw these pictures on a blog and I loved the look of it.

 

 

I decided that was something that I could do myself, so I started hunting for all the supplies I needed.

 

I found these frames on Amazon and bought them with a gift card I got last Christmas and some birthday money.

 

 

For the mats, I purchased some poster board from a craft store along with an X-acto knife and a cutting mat. I measured out how big they needed to be and how big I wanted the hole to be and cut away. They aren't perfect, so someday I'll redo them to make them better, but they are good for now.

 

I created the prints using Page Maker, printed them out, and then assembled them.

 

 

 

The top one says:

"There is an endless song, echoes in my soul. I hear the music ring.

And though the storms may come, I am holding on. To the rock I cling

I know I am loved by the King and it makes my heart want to sing."

They are some words from the song "How Can I Keep From Singing"

 

The bottom one says "This is the day that the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad in it." Psalm 118:24 



Ignore the sad looking plant. It was just thirsty. Don't worry - It is doing awesome now!

I am quite happy with the way they turned out and am looking forward to changing out what's in the frames at different times. I am working on changing them out for Christmas and am currently making something inspired by these stars in the picture below. I hope they turn out how I want them to!

 

 

Fall Decorations and the Tree is Up!

Last night, our Christmas tree took it's place in the corner of our living room, where it will sit for the next six weeks or so. We are officially "those people" who put their tree up before Thanksgiving... Sorry!

 

 

I guess our reasoning was that since Thanksgiving is later this year, and since we would be busy all next weekend, we wanted our tree and decorations to be up right when we got back from Thanksgiving so we could enjoy them for the whole month of December. So the tree went up last night and the decorations will go on it this weekend along with all the rest of the Christmas decorations in and outside the house. It all makes me very excited for all the fun stuff that goes along with this holiday season!

 

When we started talking about putting the tree up, I realized that I never took any pictures of our fall decorations that we had up this year. So in true Kendra-style, I took pictures of everything at the very last minute before I took them down and the tree went up. (Trent actually had the tree up in the living room before I was even done taking pictures of the fall stuff in the family room, so I really waited until the VERY last minute. And he wasn't kidding around about getting that tree up!)

 

 

Since I waited until last night to take pictures, they really aren't that great since it was completely dark outside and my phone doesn't take the best pictures with all the lamps and lights on to light the room. I did the best I could, though, and hopefully I've learned my lesson and will take Christmas pictures sometime during the day light before it's time to take them down.

 

Although I didn't take any pictures of what the house looked like last fall (because it really wasn't much to look at, I'm sure) I know that this year was a big step up just because I had a lot more to work with in terms of decorations. We just happened to be at Trent's parents house earlier this fall right before Trent's mom was preparing to bring some fall decor that she didn't want anymore to a consignment shop. She let me look through it and pick out anything that I wanted, and I think I ended up taking about 90% of it. It was very exciting! She has a beautiful house so I was very happy to be able to decorate our house with all the things that she no longer needed!

 

So here are some pictures. Again, not the best quality (I think that every one is blurry...), and it's nothing fancy, but it's something to look back on next year and check out how things have changed! 

 

Trent thought he'd be funny and try to stand in all of my pictures for a while.
Thankfully he got bored with that very quickly!

 

And THIS picture.

 

 

This is from right when I was sitting down to have supper last night. Trent made chicken and noodles.

He really likes chicken and noodles if you couldn't tell by the mound of it on his plate.

He is very serious about it...

Despite him being a super dork, supper was great! (Just kidding, I love that he's a dork!) I'm very grateful to have a husband who has supper ready when I get home from work most nights!