18.) Finish painting the whole house -- after knocking out a couple of rooms myself last January, I quickly realized that I really wanted to outsource the rest of the job. Mainly because of all the TRIM that needed painting throughout the house. I hated the cream/off-white color that was originally in the house and knew I wanted to replace it everywhere with a nice crisp white. {Simply White by Benjamin Moore, in case you were wondering.} Last fall, we finally hired some outside professionals to come and finish up the job for me. They finished everything so much more quickly (and obviously professionally) than I could have done and I was so glad to finally have paint samples on almost every wall FINALLY covered with a fresh coat of paint. :)
(Honestly, I don't really have "After" pictures. The rest of the rooms that were painted were all kind of just neutral colors, with the only BIG difference being the trim. If you want to see some more dramatic "Before and Afters" you can check out my posts from last year when I painted the piano room and dining room.)
(If you look carefully at the background of this picture, you can see the unfinished trim on the staircase and possibly a little bit in the front hall by the stairs.)
19.) Work on our landscaping -- I tackled this goal last spring, when I overhauled our front yard's flower bed situation. I also planted a TON of bulbs in the fall, so I'm anxiously awaiting the arrival of spring and the blooming of my new flowers. :) You can read all about my landscaping efforts in the original post HERE.
20.) Build up the bumper sticker collection -- another road trip accomplishment! The kids (mostly Ethan) REALLY didn't want me to sully our "new" van with bumper stickers, so I solved that problem by sticking them all on Stanley -- aka our third car that Ethan and Grace use to drive to school. Hahahahaha. I really, really love that. ;)
21.) Learn a new classical music piece -- I totally did this! Except I've already forgotten it. Womp womp. For some reason, I seem perpetually unable to be mindful that if I don't use it, I lose it. I set out to learn how to play Claire de Lune, by Debussy, and after a couple of months of practice I had it completely memorized and could play with a lot of feeling (in my opinion) if not necessarily a fast enough tempo. Hahaha. Unfortunately, just a few months later -- after not practicing it for a while -- I realized that I could no longer play it by memory. And some of the trickier parts were really tripping me up. I guess it's not a complete loss, though, because I can still play through the whole song if I have the music in front of me. But it's just really interesting to me how quickly I forgot something that I had spent a lot of time working on.
22.) Nail some yoga poses -- ummmm. So, yeah. Technically I've nailed some, but I'd never call myself a yogi. And honestly, I don't know that I'd ever do like a yoga class. But, I do really like a few different poses for stretching purposes and I like having those in my arsenal for when I'm trying to run more.
23.) See Hamilton -- honestly, I didn't think this one would actually come to pass. However, when the opportunity came up to see it over Christmas break while we were in Indiana with the cousins, I obviously jumped at that chance. And it was every bit as magical as I thought it would be. :) {You can read all about it, buried at the end of THIS post.}
We're getting so close!!! Only two more days to go!
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