Birthday Chaos

Yesterday was the CoraBunny's birthday! One year (+1 day) ago this happened,

and the seriously incandescent joy I felt in that moment carried itself through the vast majority of this year. She has brought 95% pure joy to our house and about 5% of glorious, giggling chaos and I've loved just about every minute of that too (there was that brief period when JP was coaching late and Cora was 5 weeks old and hadn't yet realized her mission in life was to love everything except cake, so she cried anytime she was put in some horrid plush baby entertaining device while I cooked dinner, but thankfully that phase didn't last long).

After a dinner of random items scavenged from the hastily packed boxes all over our house, we made a second attempt at birthday sweets with a simple, un-iced vanilla cupcake. Cora loved the singing of the birthday song and enthusiastically clapped for herself after each round. She also enjoyed her bite of the candle.

But she remained skeptical of the cake.

Because she loves and trusts us, she gave it a try and basically, cake is still terrible.

SO TERRIBLE.

She's so glad this birthday business is over and delicious sugary treats are no longer forced upon her.

In other big news today, besides Cora being 1 and me crying when I put her to bed last night, our kitchen renovation has begun! We packed on Tuesday (thank God for the midweek federal holiday), progressing through the three stages of packing: optimistic (superficial progress in one small area that seems bigger, with carefully packed items in labeled boxes), overwhelmed (hours and many boxes later and realizing you're only halfway through the kitchen and you don't know where the cheese slicer is or those other two utensils you need to make lunches and omg we still need daily access to so many things that usually live in this room), and f-ck it (just throw it all in the remaining two boxes, no labels on anything in the last 3 hours, stash it in various corners of various rooms in the house, we'll figure it out tomorrow). I did carefully set the wine in an accessible place in the TV room only to realize the wine opener was at the bottom of one of the miscellaneous throw-it-all-in-there boxes.

My mantra of "it's going to be so worth it" began early yeesterday morning as we tried to make breakfast from boxes in Cora's room to eat at the kitchen table in the living room and then packed lunches in the hall bathroom. Kitchens are really important to the daily routine.

But big progress was made! See this big blue wall?

Gone! Or mostly gone. As gone as we can make it and still have a fridge and coat closet. It's going to be so great! We're re-working the whole footprint of the kitchen and it's going to make SO much more sense and have SO much more storage (hello 10 x 5 walk-in pantry to the left) and be so much more open. Instead of a wall there will be an 8-foot peninsula with raised counter and stools. I can come home from work, cook a big healthy meal, AND talk to my kids at the same time. I've come to really enjoy cooking and chopping a million vegetables at the end of the day, but I hated how closed off I was from the kiddos; now they can sit and chat at the soon-to-be created island bar and I can chop vegetables to my heart's content. And by "now," I mean in about 3 weeks.

I'm still picking paint colors for the cabinets. Our counters are white/grey granite and our upper cabinets will be white (probably Benjamin Moore Chantilly Lace). The peninsula cabinets will be dark grey, still working on the exact color (I really don't like light greys, but I don't want to be too dark... Benjamin Moore Hearthstone is my favorite, but Pewter and Shaker Gray are in the mix), and I'm flirting with making all the lower cabinets the dark grey color. The floors are a chocolate brown long rectangular tiles with grey undertones and the back splash is Carrara Marble 1x4 subways. Walls will be the Kelly Moore Bird Bath Blue that's already in the living room. Still picking cabinet pulls and finalizing back splash, but we're on track for completion the week after Thanksgiving- it would be earlier except we and our contractor will all be gone for the whole week of Thanksgiving and no elves will remain behind to finish it up while we're gone. Something that will be very sad when we get home from Steamboat at midnight after a 16 hour drive to a dusty construction site.

But it will be worth it! (I chanted as I vacuumed up the living room after the team left today and then made dinner from random things in the fridge, even more random things from boxes, and the microwave currently plugged on top of a dresser. It will!) Last night we were all in coats and hats because it was 29 degrees out and we had three doors open to let some of the dust in the air out. Renovations are so fun!

In the meantime, we're scavenging food from boxes, keeping Cora out of the nail-filled construction zone (she's SO FAST!), and spending a lot of time in the TV room. Pictures of the final design choices, and the return of actual recipes for dinner, are 3ish weeks away!