This year I stole Becca's idea to keep Christmas simple: something to wear, something to read, something you want, something you need. We have wanted to keep Christmas simple and more about Christ and less about presents but I still wanted it to be exciting. It hit me that the "something you need" could be A NEW ROOM - we needed to get him a new bed so we could take the crib back for the baby (he's slept in it as a toddler bed) and I thought if we did it for Christmas it would be exciting and not like baby sister is taking his stuff. So for the last two months I've been planning and plotting his room out but not able to execute anything since I wanted it all to be a Christmas morning surprise! So it finally came and it was so great!
In case you're curious the something you want was Ninjago Legos, something to read was a Children's Encyclopedia from Usborne books, and something to wear was snow boots.
So to make this surprise for his room happen we had a few things that needed to get done... first we bought a new dresser for our room so we could give Robby ours. Putting that Ikea dresser together was a BEAST of a project that took us from 10 pm to about 3:30 am... we did it Wednesday night... but it got done! Then we needed to move the 2 bookshelves out of the office into our bedroom so we had a place to put the baby's dresser and crib! We also bought another bookshelf so on Friday we had bookshelf night which resulted in this in our room:
Ok then on Christmas eve we put him to sleep in our room and started to get to work! I felt like I was on one of those TLC shows like "while you were out."
Before pics:
(dresser we'll use for baby, see the collage there with all the black & white pics - I made that about 3 years ago)
crib we'd had turned into toddler bed... he was getting way too tall for this thing! and we'll need it for little sister... see the little bookshelf... and his animal heads were on this wall...
Cleared out and cleaned out the room!
Thanks Andrew for coming and putting the bed together with Rob! Went way more smoothly than the dresser we put together earlier that week! And I could work on re-doing the photo collage at the same time!
The finished product:
he has our old dresser but it's new to him and he's excited about it! Moved toy organizer to this wall...
Close up of the collage I redid... I love doing stuff like this...
took this tall bookshelf from our room, gives us more room to put games and toys on shelves and helped us organize his closet better! Hung up cousins calender and this cork board - the cork board has already fallen off (it was a stick on the wall kind) and we need to figure out a better way to hang it! He was really excited about that part.
He slept on our floor that night. He thought we were just having a sleepover for fun!
We put up a sign and lights so he couldn't go into the hallway without us!
Surprise! He was so excited!!!!!!!!!
He loves climbing into his big boy bed! Up the ladder... and he came up with another way using his stool and the window sill. He was just so surprised!
I couldn't get the video to upload on here so I created a picasa web album and I think the video is the first thing! There's also a bunch of other pictures of our Christmas stuff that I may or may not get around to blogging about! You can watch it here if you're interested:
https://picasaweb.google.com/101513013890981584451/Christmas2011
I was so focused on this awesome Christmas present for him I didn't even think about what I was going to get! Rob still managed to surprise me and get me some fun stuff - including some coupons to get my car washed and detailed which I'm really excited about! I LOVE a clean car!
Mostly this Christmas I'm just so grateful for my little family! And my big family (brothers, sisters, in-laws, best friends...). And for this baby!! Oh my goodness! She is growing so big inside of me and feels like she never stops moving and even though it's not the most comfortable thing in the world it's still the best feeling ever! We are so blessed! We are grateful for our Savior Jesus Christ and for the Gospel! All these things bring us true happiness and I'm so grateful for that!
Hope you all had a wonderful Christmas!!!
love, The Parsons
