Thanksgiving in Seattle!

Tomorrow Jason and I head for Seattle to have Thanksgiving with the family!! I'm so excited to see my parents and my sisters. I have missed them soooooo much!! The things I'm looking forward to the most is waking up Thanksgiving morning to the smell of cinnamon rolls baking in the oven, snuggling out in the living room with Jason and both my sisters to watch the Macys Thanksgiving parade (one of my favorite things to do!), watching mom fly the turkey through the house, putting together puzzles ALL DAY LONG, eating a big ol turkey dinner, getting sick on eggnog and then finishing the day by watching dad meticulously bag all the leftover turkey for turkey sandwiches!! I'm pumped, pumped, pumped!!! Once I get off the plane, the vacation begins!! Yippee!!! But until then, there's new clothes to be bought, laundry to be done, tidying of the house, lovin of the cat, Dancing with the Stars results show and packing!!! A full night at the Keith HOUSE. I just like to say that word...HOUSE.....our HOME.....love it!

We wish you all a wonderful Thanksgiving!!!

The Keiths

Is the weekend over all ready?

So our weekend was jam packed with stuff to do. We were unpacking boxes, teaching 4th grade Sunday school, Jason worked on Saturday night, there were runs to Home Depot, grocery shopping...you name it we were trying to cram it all in. However, we did make a lot of progress on the house, which was great. I could literally feel myself being able to breathe a bit easier when I could finally see the living room floor and the furniture started to fit into place. We now have our living room all set up and its so cute!!! Just seeing how everything is coming together and how great it looks is just so exciting! We're dog tired - but loving how everything is turning out.

To keep ourselves sane in the midst of the chaos, we've been entertaining ourselves in some pretty unusual ways. You try disconnecting all communication to the world for a few days and surround yourselves with cardboard and see how crazy you act! Around 2am on Saturday night after a very draining day of unpacking and a long night of Jason working, we were getting ready to head to bed, when my night-owl of a husband got an idea in his head. Let's turn Kim into a Mrs-Potato-Head and see what happens!

Thus, the following pictures that came as a result of his inspiration:

I know they're not the most flattering pictures, but come on now, its 2 in the morning! I'm sure you all can picture Jason in fits of laughter every time he put a new pair of shoes under my chin. It really started out very innocent. He was tucking me into bed to say goodnight, when he got this silly grin on his face and reached down to grab the first pair of shoes....and there it just continued till we both almost peed our pants.

The other little game we created for self-amusement was a "Where's Waldo" but with Banks. It seemed wherever we went to unpack or move something Banks had found a way there first and was able to squeeze her way into some pretty unusual places. We did not stage any of these pics, she did it all on her own.

Dining Room on top of the bookcase.

Where's Banks is this picture?

Or maybe in the bedroom in our temporary sweater shelf.

The Pantry off the kitchen.

Under the dining room table.

On the shelf of our new coffee cart.

Or maybe they won't find me if I go inside the coffee cart.

Ha! Not so fast Banks! We see you!

A cat after my own heart :-)

Is it bedtime yet? I'm in the middle waiting for you two.

Surrender with your paws up!

Finally - sleeping peacefully under the blankets of our bed with me until Jason found her.

Moving

So Monday night was supposedly our big moving night. We had borrowed our friend Jeff Batson's trailer and Jeff Hooper was coming over to help us out. I left early from work and it was unusually warm outside, like over 70 degrees! I called Jason and told him, 'you know the weather is acting a bit strange and this would be perfect tornado weather'. We both laughed a bit and didn't think much of it. Just before I left work, I received this email from my local news station, which by the way, I didn't read till the next morning:

"The NWS in nashville has issued a tornado warning for: southern davidson county in tennessee, this includes the city of nashville, Until 530 pm cst At 452 pm cst, national weather service doppler radar indicated a severe thunderstorm capable of producing a tornado 6 miles west of belle meade, or about 11 miles southwest of nashville, moving east at 45 mph. The tornado will be near, oak hill and 7 miles south of nashville by 505 pm cst, and will also cross other southern suburbs of nashville by 530 pm. Do not use your car to try to outrun a tornado. Cars are easily tossed around by tornado winds. If you are caught in the path of a tornado, leave the car and go to a strong building. If no safe structure is nearby, seek shelter in a ditch or low spot and cover your head. The safest place to be during a tornado is in a basement. Get under a workbench or other piece of sturdy furniture. If no basement is available, seek shelter on the lowest floor of the building in an interior hallway or room such as a closet. Use blankets or pillows to cover your body and always stay away from windows. If in mobile homes or vehicles, evacuate them and get inside a substantial shelter. If no shelter is available, lie flat in the nearest ditch or other low spot and cover your head with your hands."

So that was the first time I've ever received one of those emails! Thanks but I'll take an earthquake over a tornado ANY day! We had no idea any of this was really going on, we just thought we might get some rain. HA!! I get to the apartment and we finish boxing some things up and get the couch ready to move into the trailer. No sooner do we get it to the front door then the heavens opened up and the rains came in a torrential downpour! There was all this intense lightening and thunder - it was nuts! The thunder was so intense it shook our building a couple times! Between the sheets of rain coming and going, Jeff finally was able to help us load up the trailer so we could head over to the house to unload. I later came to find out that the Tornado sirens went off throughout downtown Nashville and in surrounding counties. Niiiiccee. We didn't even hear them! And my friend Brooke at work told me that they were evacuating stores and that people in the office went into the stairwell for protection.

When we finally got our stuff into the house and had picked up Banks - we decided to camp out in the guest bedroom (since our closet is STILL being worked on in our bedroom). Well apparently the storm had knocked out our HVAC unit and we ended up losing our heat!! So we've had no heat for the last two nights, freezing in our new little home and surrounded by boxes. I woke up Tuesday morning to Jason snuggled up tight next to me on my right side and Banks snuggled up to me on my left. We were a cozy little bunch with our little space heater on full blast wrapped up in all our blankets. Last night dropped down to high 20's and it was so hard to climb out of bed and face the cold air. But Jason was so sweet and tried to make getting ready as painless as possible and completely blessed me by running down to the nearby coffee shop and buying me a Cappuchino and muffin for my drive into work. The heater was fixed today thank goodness, cause we're expecting another night of below-freezing temperatures!!

I'm SOOO looking forward to this weekend when I will have more of an opportunity to get some things organized and unpacked in the house. I'm going to do whatever necessary to get these boys motivated to finish the repairs on our house, even if means bribing them with chocolate chip cookies!! I need to feel settled soon or I think I might start losing my mind.