Coming Soon…

We bought the materials to complete our kitchen backsplash today, hopefully we will find time to put it up this week. I can’t wait! 

Trying to get an idea of what it will look like when it is up. I am excited to see how it turns out.

 

 

Here is a Christmas present from my parents, can’t wait to put it out in the front yard!

Here is a picture of me and my kitty Flower in front of our tree on Christmas Eve. We tried to do a family photo with the timer, but it didn’t turn out too well ;)

Hopefully I will be able to post pics of the finished backsplash by the end of the week!!!

Baby It’s Cold Outside (and inside…)!!!

Brrrrrrrrr! I am now wishing we would have put in the heated mats underneath our floor tile in the kitchen…. this room is cold!!! We saved over 1800 bucks by not doing it, and since this is not our forever home, so we skipped out on it. Maybe someday we can insulate the very narrow crawlspace underneath and that will help. I’ll put that on the To-Do List.

Well, I was able to find our third tree. Garden Ridge to the rescue! I found a 7’ skinny tree on sale for $35, originally $149. I almost bought two, but I held back. This is the tree for the middle room that will have our traditional Christmas ornaments on them. By traditional, I mean the ones that we have brought from home, the ones we receive as gifts, and the ones that our future children will make at school and display proudly. Someday. Not soon. Haha. The number of ornaments on this tree will grow year by year. Right now, I think we only have 11 ornaments on there.

Mom bought me two neat wreaths at Alco earlier because they were on sale, I was going to hang them outside under the windows but it didn’t really work out. I have one hanging on the bathroom door (below, and yes, still no trim) and the other is on the inside of the front door.

 

If you’ve driven on North Main Street in Red Bud lately, you’ve driven past our house, AND our Christmas light display. I had a lot of fun decorating this year. Of course I wish our house was bigger and featured a wrap around porch and dorm windows up top (wouldn’t that look cute? I’m trying to convince Craig to put them in when we fix up the upstairs), but this is what we have to work with for now! We are planning on getting rid of our birdhouse of a mailbox soon. Any takers?

 

Here is my St. Nick’s Day present. It went from a $100 dollar bill to this, but I love it just as much:

We have a new member to the Hick Household, my cat Flower!

Flower is almost three years old, and was one of my farm cats at my parents. Last fall, after he was attacked numerous times by tom cats and several vet trips, I decided to make him an inside cat, even though my parents didn’t agree at first. They soon began to love Flower and didn’t mind him being inside. Just one catch, this cat didn’t use the litter box. He went outside, just like a dog. I tried leaving a litter box in my room but he never used it. The day after our wedding, I brought Flower to our house to live with us, but after he “held it” for 36 hours I felt sorry for him and took him back to the farm. First thing he did was go to the bathroom. Anyways, I missed him too much and we bought a “go here” spray from Petsmart, worked like a charm! Just spray the “go here” spray in the litter box and he started using it within 12 hours. The spray works for cats and dogs, so if anyone needs or wants it, you can have the rest of our bottle, I have only used about 1/100 of an ounce!

Remember Annabelle, our bottle baby? She will be 8 weeks on Thursday and she is getting big. I let her play in the snow tonight, it was cute!

 

School is over for the semester, I’m glad. I got straight A’s! Yay! Only three classes left next semester and my comps to pass, and I will have my Masters. And I will never go to school again. Ever. Seven years is enough. Bring on the student loan payments…

Have you heard of duck hunting? It is quite possibly the reason that our middle room and laundry room still have no trim, or that we do not have a backsplash in the kitchen yet, or that we do not have a banister on the steps. Just sayin. Hopefully that will change soon.

However, have you ever cooked duck? I cooked about 15 duck breasts in the crock pot Friday. My father in law gave me directions. Put in the duck, then put in brown sugar, salt, and pepper, and then cover all of the breasts with apple juice. Cook for about 6 hours, drain everything, shred the breasts, return to the crock pot and smother in Sweet Baby Ray’s barbeque sauce! It turned out pretty good! George and Alex came over and we had a nice supper.

I tried another crock pot recipe tonight with pork tenderloin. It was amazing…. pork tenderloin covered in 24 oz of applesauce with 1/4 of brown sugar and 1 tsp of cinnamon, cooked for about 6 hours. Craig definitely approved!

I don’t know if I will update before Christmas, I will only if we get anything done around here. If I don’t, I hope everyone has a safe holiday season!!! Enjoy the time with your families and be thankful!

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year!

YAY! I love Christmas so much!!! I think I began to appreciate the holiday season much more when I was a junior in college in 2006. It was my first time being away from home for a majority of the holidays because I had to work. I was left in Carbondale, alone, in an empty apartment, with nothing to do but go to work and watch movies all by myself after I was off. Not fun! I would listen to “Please come home for Christmas” on repeat, and then cry. Haha. I hated knowing that my family and Craig were home back in Red Bud and I was stuck in the Dirty Dale.

Most colleges and universities have finals week the first or second week of December, depending on how early or late Thanksgiving is that year. Our semester breaks also lasted about 4 weeks, but if you were lucky to have all of your finals done in the first few days of finals week, you could go home and have a longer break. My roommates and I would always decorate our apartment for Christmas on Veteran’s Day so we could enjoy it longer, rather than only for a week or two after Thanksgiving. From there on out, I always get into the Christmas spirit right after Halloween is over. I love it! Craig on the other does not. He would rather wait until after Thanksgiving to put up all of the decorations. I know marriage is supposed to be about compromise, but I didn’t listen to him this year. I started decorating the inside on the 15th of November. And then I did the outside (with the help of my mom) on the 19th because I wanted it done for the whole Holiday Happenings weekend. I am still not done decorating, because I don’t have very many decorations yet. Some of the decorations I have from college are cheesy and I’m not putting them up! I am still looking for another tree for the middle room (9’ and skinny) and we still have to finish hanging lights outside. So here are a few pics of our house at Christmas time!

Oh yeah and we got a new couch. The other one was too small, and this sectional really helps utilize space in our smaller sized living room that doesn’t have very many options for a layout! It is so comfy!!! It is in 5 pieces so if we ever need to move it we can put it in a different shape.

Here is the tree in our bedroom. It is dinky, I know. This was the tree I bought to go in our apartment back in 2006. It was 25 bucks pre-lit, I was a poor college student… it was perfect back then!

I bought these branch things from a home decorating party that Nicolette had, I twistie-tied them together and had Candace’s mom make the bows that cover up the loops I tied together. I think they look awesome! They are on both in the living room, on the doorway to the master and the doorway to the middle room.

And here is our first Christmas tree!!!

Ignore the clutter, not everything has found it’s place yet here!

This nativity set was a gift from my Grandma Koch when I was little. She gave them to all of the grandkids. I have always put it up in my bedroom, I love it! This is all we have for now, hopefully in the future we will be able to get a bigger one, but this will work for now!

Next year should be MUCH better, since we will have a banister on the steps and I can wrap it in garland and light it up and hang our stockings from it. Oh I can’t wait! I wish it was done this year! It would be nice if our upstairs was also done next year… wishful thinking!

Hope everyone is enjoying the holidays with their families!

Wedding pictures

If you would like to view our wedding pictures, click here!

Username: Hick Wedding

Passcode: 21248

I love them all, except for the ones where my hair is falling out and no one told me (looks like I have a rat tail), and the reception pictures are awfully blurry and orange for being taken by professionals, which I am very disappointed about, but oh well its over and there is nothing that can be done about it. I just have really, really high standards I guess.

We’re Hitched!

Well we have been newlyweds for a little over 2 weeks now. It has been great so far, but still very busy! We can’t wait for the day where we can just sit back, relax, and do nothing! I have been busy photographing weddings with Travis (Broken Flash Photography) on the weekends, so my Saturdays are shot. Every night it seems like we are running here and there to get stuff done. We still have a bit of work to do on the house, but not much considering what we have done so far.

First off, I want to share a few pictures from our wedding day:

Our wedding was wonderful, everything went as planned, and the weather was great!

Now on to the house updates:

The night after the wedding:Haha, not much there!

Mom and Dad were off work on the Monday after, and helped me move some more stuff up to the house, including all of the shower and wedding gifts. Yes, my shower was in August, and everything was still in the box! Candace came over and helped take everything out of their boxes to get ready to be washed and put away (which wouldn’t happen for over a week). Here is how far we got (my living room looked like this until this past Friday night): Halloween: STILL waiting for countertops to be installed. We walked down to the craft shop and picked up some place mats and matching napkins and valances for the window and back door to the laundry room.

Last Tuesday- Countertops installed!  This is the desk area that is in our kitchen. The bottom drawer has space for hanging folders. I can’t wait to organize the bills! HA!

We had to wait a day for my brother to install the sink because he has apprentice school on Tuesday nights. So, Wednesday he came over after work and was getting ready to install this sink:

Well, turns out there was a small crack in it where the faucet hole is, so we ran up to home depot, returned it, and bought a different one. Since the one we had before was special order, it would have taken 3-4 days to come in, so we just got one in stock, and we actually like it better! Finished product! Well almost, the sink that we ended up installing has 4 holes, and we only bought a 3 hole set, so Josh is going to order us a matching soap dispenser to fill the last hole on the right. Right now I have a bottle of hand soap sitting on top of it and you can’t even notice the hole.

The Friday after the wedding, we had Dish network installed. I was browsing through the music channels last week and found the Country Holiday station (FYI its channel 94 and 965 on Dish)! YES! You can guarantee that this station will be blaring in our house until New Year’s!

While listening to Country Holiday, I got my closet all put together, finally! I love how big my closet is, but it goes back quite a ways beyond the doors on both sides so some of the stuff is hard to get to.

 

I had a visitor one night last week. My BFF Candace and I were planning our big shopping trip on Friday to shop for Christmas decorations. Good thing I didn’t take a picture of everything I bought! Christmas decorations pretty much consume the “baby” room right now!

  

Here is one of the wedding gifts from Craig’s mom, a bench with “HICK” burned into it, and it has an “H” on each side. It was made out of old barn wood. We love it and it is going to go in the laundry room, right by the back door, once the room gets cleaned!  

Candace and Lisa both helped me wash dishes yesterday, I’m glad they did because I wouldn’t be done if they hadn’t helped! All dishes are washed and put away in the cabinets! Here is what the kitchen looks like now. We still need to put the backsplash up and put the cabinet door on the pots and pans cabinet, it had to be fixed when we bought the house. Oh yeah, I guess I have to fill that wine rack in the corner for when visitors come over, too!

Craig finally had time to put the living blinds up yesterday morning before we went to church. I’m really excited about this because our neighbors are pretty close, and we live on MAIN STREET. Still need to put the bathroom, kitchen, and laundry room blinds up, then buy curtains. Someday.

 

Last Thursday we made a big purchase, at a small price. We got an “open box” deal on a really expensive TV from Best Buy. It came from the home theatre section of the store, and it was on display. Nothing is wrong with it and we really got a steal! I guess it pays to know people who know people!

I wanted to share a few pictures of our baby lamb Annabelle! She was born the Thursday morning before our wedding, so she will be three weeks this coming Thursday. We are bottle feeding her until she is old enough to eat normal sheep food, then she will go back out to the farm.

Here she is the day she was born:  

At a week old:

And here she is 2 days ago, she is starting to follow me around when I let her out, and she followed me up to the house, so we fed her inside.

Hopefully we’ll have more updates later this week or next!