Disclaimer aside, here is what our room looked like before we stormed in with paintbrushes, sloppy sketches and Adele.

Then we got to work and it began to look like this:

Then I got to work, and it started to look like this:

And now it looks like this:

And now we sleep there (that’s my favorite part). We’ve since added curtains, snazzy lamps and some art. We have more to do, but it’s lovely now. I love being there.

That, my friends, is an accordian door. A pink, clunky accordian door that didn’t close all the way and that, when combined with the regular door, meant that this tiny room had two entrances (and as a result, very little wall space). So, we did what anyone would do and said, “Let’s close it up! I mean, how hard could it be?”

As it turned out, Mitch has mad sheetrocking skillz. You’d hardly know that there was ever a door there (until you looked at the other side of the wall, the side that we didn’t bother to paint, or wondered why in the world there’s a light switch in the middle of the wall). So, that is where Sarah sleeps:

The walls want decorating, of course, but we’ll get there in good time. The rest of the room required significantly less construction:

I didn’t get a good photo of the hobbit-sized closet, the one that my step-mom lovingly painted yellow, but it’s there, behind the regular door. If you come over some time, I’ll show you. It’s sweet.

You see, blog skims the surface of a life and brings up the things that inspired that harried, multi-tasking author to pause, recollect and write. Occasionally, it’s a trial or confession that spurs an author on, but more often than not, it’s something fun, some small victory, that we bloggers just can’t wait to share.

So I dedicate today to a few of those often glossed-over moments. In the interest of honesty, I’d like to share a few things with you:

a) In the midst of the already-significant challenge of fixing up a house and moving into it, we’ve found ourselves keeping company with death and illness, serious stuff, as well as  the everyday inconveniences of life in an unfamiliar home, where the faucets are always backwards, the light switches never where you expect them to be, and the furnace loud and strange. I love so many things about this house, but it’s strange quitting a settled home and resettling in a new space, where our routines need rewriting and our days need adjusting. We’ll figure out where everything is and we’ll establish where everything goes, but for now, we bump our toes in the night and grope along the wall for a while before we can turn on the light.

That said, we have a dishwasher for the first time in eight years. It’s amazing. I mean, really incredible.

b) Sarah started walking, so she’s a whole new lovable force to be reckoned with, one that toddles around, babbling to the cats and answering “Yeah!” to any question she’s asked. Lydia, too, is surmounting milestones left and right, and she’s asking a lot of Big Questions these days. On the way to Value Village today, we tackled how babies, you know, come out of the old belly. Her response? “That’s funny.” It is, kiddo. It is.

c) And now, I’ve kept you waiting long enough. Here are some pictures of our house. Here is the kitchen before we got our grubby little hands on it:

I really regret not taking a close up of that wallpaper before we tore it down, but if you picture a repeated theme of pots and pans and assorted produce (a bell pepper seated prominently in the center), you’d be close to understanding why it had to come down.

Now, the kitchen in progress:

Why yes, that is yellow. “Sundance” yellow, actually. And one day, that door will be Ruby Red. (And the trim will be white, not dusty cream.)

Now, I wish I had a pristine photo for you of our kitchen, completed. But today we’re all about honesty, so here’s what it looked like on Tuesday:

Please note that I didn’t even bother to adjust my camera settings – that’s where I’m at right now. To put things in perspective, though, that’s bamboo: I get to look out the window at bamboo while I cook. It’s glorious.

Until last Advent, I had never even heard of the Jesse Tree, but the minute I did, I knew that our Advent celebration would center around one. If you’re not familiar with the Jesse Tree, here’s a summary: you pick up some branches and put them in a jar. You collect 25 ornaments, each decorated with the symbols for various Bible stories and prophecies. Then, each day, you read a story and place the accompanying ornament on the tree.

Except for the part about finding 25 ornaments bearing 25 very specific symbols, the whole process is fairly easy. We went through this book, though I also purchased this one and look forward to trying it out next year (I’ve also heard rumors of a free ebook floating around the internet, but those rumors reached me too late to be worth investigating).

In case it's not obvious, that's an ark, in the water, with a rainbow overhead.

As for the ornaments, we used a cheap set of tiny ball ornaments from Michael’s that I tackled with a gold paint pen (and let it be noted: drawing  a camel with a fat-tipped pen in a half-inch of rounded space is exactly as difficult as it sounds), and they worked swimmingly.

And yes, that's a cluster of grapes on the red one. On the green ornament you'll see half of Joseph's many-colored coat.

Adding an ornament to our admittedly awkward and long-legged tree every evening at dinner gave us a chance to talk with Lydia about Jesus, and the various ways that his coming was alluded to throughout Scripture. Santa isn’t a big deal at our house (or a deal at all, really – we talk about him, but don’t give gifts in his name), but Jesus is, and doing the Jesse Tree together was a great way to bring a hectic season back to Christ again and again.

And that, my friends, is a sheaf of wheat - represented by a single stalk of wheat. (Because who can really draw a recognizable sheaf in such a small space?)

This year, there’s talk of decorating our staunch little Christmas cactus (lovingly dubbed Count Duku). And for the sake of simplicity, I’m going to fill our Advent calendar with Jesse Tree ornaments – as well as Scavenger Hunt-style clues that will, once a week, lead to a fabulous new Christmas book – because, let’s be honest, doing two daily celebrations feels like a lot right now and I’d like to focus on just one. So, here’s to the quiet of Advent and to daily looks back at who it is, exactly, we celebrate.

The family that owned this house before we bought it lived here for nearly seventy years, so their hand prints and handiwork (and paint cans and paste wax) are all over the place. We’ve salvaged a ceramic raccoon from under the stove, unearthed an antique adding machine in the shop and discovered a pale pink comb in the back of the closet that set me thinking about mortality. And in the midst of all that, we’ve learned a thing or two about them.

They were practical people, prone to getting as much coverage as they could from a single can of paint. Hence the stairs, walls, ceiling, trim and hall fixtures, all painted a chipper mint-chip green. None of this accent wall and contrasting trim stuff for them (a fact that I began to envy as our paint budget began to dwindle).

They were deliberate people, the sort to wax those old wood floors by hand so that, a century later, they still shine. They were also deliberate enough to wallpaper behind the stove (a fact that I didn’t appreciate as much as the hand-waxed floors).

She must have been stubborn, for she never had a dryer nor wanted one (a fact for which I give her tremendous credit, for three kids in cloth diapers must have tried her resolve), and they never put an outlet in the bathroom.

They had an eye for natural beauty – specifically, agates. The front and back yards are both awash with them, souveniers of their fifth-wheeling days, and the patio and back step are studded with them. (Would you like some?)

They had a romantic streak, easily overlooked in the work of running a home and maintaining a workshop, but there it is, in that patio: their names, spelled out with white stones. Also, she grew roses. A whole bed of them. They’re beautiful.

You see, we knew this family. We bought this house from their daughter, and as we’ve been in and out of it all month, discovering its eccentricities and beginning to mark the walls with our own hand prints and handiwork (and murals), I can’t help but notice that we’re inheriting a sort of legacy.

To buy a house so well cared for, that has seen kids raised from birth to adulthood, challenges us to care for it well. I’ve never had the stomach for buying a house only to move out of it in a few years – neither of us have – so we knew, when we walked through these rooms for the first time, that we wanted to stay here as long as we were allowed. (There are stairs, but non-essential ones, so when we’re old, we can putter around on the first floor without trouble. I made note of that on the first day.)

It’s small, but we’ll make do (they did). It’s funky, but we’ll make it work (they did). It has possibility, and we’ll explore that (they did). But my prayer for us is that we would be content, that our home would be a resting place for a our family and that one day, when our girls are grown, they can come back here to rest. It may not be exactly the same as it was when they left, but I pray that it will still be home.

Why? Because my Uncle Dan passed away. He was the truck driver, the fireman, the oldest of my mom’s three older brothers and he died quietly, with time to say his goodbyes. When his pastor asked if he was ready, he said yes. He went to Jesus and his whole family resonates with the powerful truth that one day we will see him again.

But not yet.

Iowa in the fall was a new place to me: in the place of rustling cornfields sat harvested ground, golden and bare. The land looked beautiful in a new way, still a patchwork of farms as we descended toward the runway, but one worked in golds and autumnal reds. Familiar, yet strange.

But we visited with family, we held hands and told stories. Sarah was a ridiculously good traveller, so good and patient and amenable that we suspected she’d been prayed for specifically. She did not fuss; she went quietly to sleep in the Pack-n-Play, stowed in the corner of unlikely rooms.

One evening after the visitation, when we’d shaken hands with strangers and old family friends, all of my cousins and aunts and uncles and in-laws came back to my aunt and uncle’s house and ate leftovers. We talked over the chaos of many small children. We learned to love scotcheroos (it wasn’t a hard sell) and caught up with each other, having travelled from North Carolina and Alabama, as well as Washington, to be there.

My cousin Rachel and I made small talk, then fell silent for a moment and looked around. Everyone talked at once, animated, glad to be together. The kids raced cars over the wood floor, giggling. (Sarah, the trooper, slept soundly in an upstairs bedroom.) When Rachel spoke, she echoed my own thoughts: “This is a good party.” And then, “Dan would have liked this.”

I had hoped to open with a clever intro here, something that ended with the punchline “…and then we bought a house,” but I couldn’t help myself. I blurted it out: we bought a house.

We bought a one hundred and eleventy-year-old house with a claw-foot tub, an attic bedroom, a fantastic yard and no dryer hookup. It’s quirky, wall-papered and chock full of character, and it belongs to us.

Because we bought it. Because we are now homeowners.

Our house is better than we’d hoped for, a blessing on all counts, and if you knew me in high school, its location would make you laugh. (I’ll tell you about it in person some time.)

Why do we say “twelve” and not “twoteen”?

Why doesn’t “ballet” end with “a”?

And what is up with the letter “y”?

Without further ado, here is last year’s Origami Advent calendar: