Mission: Accomplished!

With Maryland's biggest snow ever, I was bound and determined to finish the baby's bedroom! There were a few roadblocks (literally) along the way, but we made it happen! Here's our week in pictures:

For starters, it was a while before we could get out of our court. The snow started Friday night into Saturday. On Monday morning a plow finally came to our court... and quickly turned around and left.

They came. They saw. They said, "Forget that!"

They didn't even make it far enough to clear behind any parking spaces. The one car you can see cleared off in the picture above is our next door neighbor. Our car is just to the left of his, still buried and completely snowed in. I mean the Subaru is tough and all, but even Su can't make it over 3 feet of snow!

Below you can see how that kind plow truck shoved what little bit of snow he did plow right in front of our mail box. Guess who hasn't gotten any mail for about a week now??

Just below the stop sign you can see the a silver box that is our mailbox. This time, the mail did not go through.

It snowed again Tuesday night into Wednesday, but not before a plow came back and cleared one lane around our court on Tuesday morning. That was good enough for us! Josh had a doctor's appointment at 10:15 in Westminster so we took care of that first. After that it was a quick stop in Babies 'R Us to pick up a little pillow that goes with Carsen's bedding collection so we could match up paint. Then we headed over to Home Depot for paint and a myriad of other supplies we needed to complete the bedroom!

We started Tuesday night by painting the ceiling. It was dingy and off-white to start with and I wanted nothing less than clean and fresh! Wednesday morning we got up and did the purple paint on the top half of the walls. It looked so perfect :]

The next step was to cut and hang chair rail. None of us had done that before, so it was a little bit of a learning process, as well as a group effort. Between cutting, leveling, and attaching it to the walls we spent a lot of time getting it right. In the end it looked great though!

Once the chair rail was up, Jennie and I started measuring out the interior squares. This proved to be a little more of a challenge than we were prepared for. After many markings on the walls and three measurements with two different tools, we finally had it perfect.

Jennie and I used the miter box and cut each piece ourselves. Those babies were not easy to get up on the walls. We managed to hit just about every stud there was. After several hours and some trial and error, we had them all up. Josh came in to spackle our nail holes so they were ready to be primed before we called it a night.

While Jennie and I primed, we told Josh that we were in the mood for something chocolate. Sadly, we had already made our box of brownies earlier in the week, and since it had snowed again it was pretty impossible to go back out for anything. All I had was a bag of Dove chocolates, and yet somehow Josh took on the challenge and was able to have these delectable little desserts waiting for us when we came downstairs!

All I could say was, WOW!

When the snow clouds finally cleared out it was a beautiful sunny day. We had these unusually huge icicles hanging off of our neighbor's roof outside our bedroom window.

It was time for the final coat of paint to finish off Carsen's bedroom! We spent most of the day going over the bottom half of the walls, the baseboards, windowsill, door frames, and the closet and main doors. We did two coats for nice even coverage since the primer underneath was kind of patchy in terms of covering the dark gray. By late afternoon we had a perfectly painted baby room!

What else do you do in a perfectly painted baby room?? Put furniture in it! Josh and Michael (and Sheppie) put the crib and changing table together in a snap.

And not a minute too soon...

Yesterday we had to get up to take Josh to get his ACL surgery at 8 am. I was so glad to have the baby's room all finished before he was, well, more or less incapacitated. His surgery went very well (he had his ACL replaced) and we were on our way home shortly after. At home he has two exciting contraptions working on his leg just about all the time. One is an ice pack but instead of putting it in the freezer, you fill a cooler with ice and water and it cycles the cold water constantly through the pack that is on his knee. It's not quite as cold as ice so it can stay on all the time and you don't have to wait for it to get cold in the freezer, you just keep enough ice in the cooler. The other machine kind of cradles his leg and gently bends and straightens it all day long. So far, no complications and relatively little discomfort. He did ask for some Aleve this morning but that's been his only complaint.

For the next few days we'll pretty much be at home. I'm thinking we'll get some sort of take-out for Valentine's dinner tomorrow. We don't usually go all-out for heart day so I'm sure this year will be the same considering Josh's condition. I like it that way though, quiet and simple can still be plenty romantic :]

I'm supposed to return to work on Tuesday but they are calling for more snow Monday night into Tuesday. Right now the storm is just a "clipper" which doesn't usually give us much accumulation, but I've heard two different sources mention that it has the potential to shift and leave us with a little more (though nothing like the 12+ inches we've seen in the past two storms... I don't think). But I guess only time will tell!

Hope everyone else has a great weekend and those who have had snow days got to make the most of them! I think I'll spend the rest of today cleaning around the house while Josh works on his Guitar Hero achievements! Love that kid...