Nilsson News

The snow has finally decided to fall!  The kids were all excited to wake up this morning to a white blanket.  Christmas was up and down for us.  The kids all started off well, but by the afternoon, Henry had a burning fever and Emerson soon joined in.  Lauren, it is a huge blessing when everyone is well.  This has definitely not been our year in the health department!  Oh well.  We got to hang out with the Hart family and Emma on Christmas Eve and that was a blast!  We again got to see them the day following Christmas. 
Right after the festivities, we hit the cleaning and organizing pretty intensely.  It has felt so good to get rid of so many things that have piled up and made us feel guilty for various reasons.  All the kids have seemed to get excited about a clean house and helped sort out each of their own bedrooms.  This surprised me!  It feels like an altogether new house!  I know we still have a long way to go but we are peeling back the first layer anyway and getting started.  Garrett said he thinks this is the cleanest and most organized our home has ever been.  I just hope we can keep it that way and really shift our way of living.  It has been interesting the few times I've gone shopping since thinking about minimalism and nothing really draws me in or tempts me.  It is wonderful! 
I am looking forward to starting the new year!  2020!  Isn't it great that there are always new goals to set and ways to improve ourselves?  I was looking back through my temple journal and in 2018 I went to the temple 14 times.  In 2019, I made it a goal to attend every week and I counted 42 times that I went.  Not a perfect goal but much improved from the previous year.  Maybe 2020 I can make the every week attendance happen.  Hopefully we can plan an epic Belliston gathering and unveil our time capsule from twenty years ago.

 Emerson's bedroom before and after pics

 This one is a little harder to tell the improvements, but this picture only shows one corner of the room.  It was a mess in every corner and by the end, this was the only corner left with stuff!

A few pics of our donation piles!  (Sorry for all the cleaning photos, but we are pretty excited and proud of what we have accomplished!)

 Addy, Emerson, and Eliza preparing for their Christmas choir concert with Jenny Oaks Baker.  It was was quite fantastic!

 A surprise visit form Santa!  Does it remind you of our surprise visit from Santa Dan Balls?

Christmas morning!

Oh, and in addition to our cleaning out and organizing, we are going to start our big kitchen renovation!  Woot woot!  It was kind of a last minute thing but I'm pretty stoked!