Vintage Post: Nonna's January Visit

In January, Nonna (Carnine) decided to take advantage of her long winter break from school and come up for a visit. We spent some time down in Santa Maria for Christmas, so her trip was just a casual one, but while she was here we did manage to squeeze in a big Italian meal with the Groener boys: Seth, his brother Matt, and *O (Di and *E were home sick). Matt had also missed out on Uncle Dave's traditional Christmas Eve feast, so we had a nice pre-dinner olive and cold cut platter to whet our appetites, plus lasagna and a tiramisu-inspired cake for dessert.




We also made time for a few major projects during her visit (foreshadowing for her April trip!): finishing babyproofing the house against our crawler-soon-to-be-walker, making curtains for Alton's bedroom with blackout lining, and putting up the alphabet border in Alton's playroom. In our house we are lucky enough to have an "office" space in the upstairs that is a perfect spacious playroom for Alton and his toys. The previous summer, Andy painted the lower half of the walls in that room blue (the upper half remained white) and we'd been planning on adding a wallpaper border with alphabet letters on it. But since we'd never done a border like that before, we were nervous about starting the project with Alton around: would we be able to complete it during a nap? A weekend? Would the glue be really smelly? How would we keep Alton out of the workspace and glue while we worked? The obvious solution was to wait until we had a full-time babysitter, so Nonna kept Alton occupied downstairs while Andy and I blew through the border installation. It was actually very quick, painless, and non-smelly, but definitely a two-person job! Here is the border in progress and complete in the room! (Click on pics to see detail of the border.)






Thank you, Nonna, for all your help!