Such a long time since my last Makayla update

I guess I left off my last Makayla update post saying that we had gone to the Thomas the Train show. Here are some pictures from that show.
Here Makayla is with our neighbour's son Hayden at the Thomas show.

Makayla had 2 costumes to pick from this Halloween. I got her the Princess Fiona costume which she wore to her preschool Halloween party, but she chose to wear her Jojo the Clown costume when she was out trick or treating. Here she is with her friend Jessi.

We got home Halloween night and only got Makayla to bed around 10pm. By 4:30am she had woken up with the stomach flu. Here she is feeling very sick the next day. She is the best sick kid in the world since she never complains. Her dad could take some lessons from her!!

Since we missed out on our fall pictures that I intended to have done, we settled for some homemade Christmas pictures. This is one that I took to use on our Christmas cards.

At the last minute, I bought Makayla and me some tickets to go see the Franklin Christmas show. She was pretty excited to see it. She should be thrilled with the Doodlebops tickets that she is getting in her stocking this year.

She loves to colour and write her letters and numbers. She can now count as high as 50.

We wrote her letter to Santa last week so we could give it the letter carriers during the Santa Claus parade. I asked her what she wanted Santa to bring for her and she decided that she wanted a computer game and some cars. This girl is definitely not much into dolls. She has an advent calendar that she gets into every night before bed. She loves to find the chocolate that she is allowed to eat that night. She knows that when she gets to 24, that is the night that Santa will come.

She is hardly shy at all. Since the renovations have been going on, she understood that some people would be coming into the house. Well didn't she surprise me when the painter arrived on Saturday morning and I was in the shower, she went downstairs to chat with him. I would have thought that she would barricade herself in the bathroom with me, but that wasn't the case at all.

I think preschool and tap dancing have helped with her shyness. She is still loving both activities. They have learned their first dance for the tap show - "I'm a little teapot". They have been measured for their costumes, now we will have to wait and see what cute outfits they pick out for the kids. There are about 12 kids in her tap dancing class and she is one of about 5 that pay close attention to the teachers. Some of the other kids dance for a bit and then like to do their own thing. Some just stand there and watch. But Makayla is taking it all in.

I'm excited for Christmas this year since she is going to be so much fun to watch. I'll be sure to take lots of pictures.

Renovations in progress

We are right in the middle of more renovations. We had taken a break after the furnace was installed but we wanted to get some more stuff done before Christmas was upon us. We decided to hire a crackfiller/painter to do some minor wall repair and major painting, as well as a carpenter to put up some new drywall in the basement where the wallpaper refused to come off easily. We also picked out some new laminate flooring for the carpenter to install.

Here is our living room before. The walls were a light grey colour that was long overdue for a paint job.
Here is the living room after with it's warmer beige walls that match the dining room and kitchen.

This is the hallway with the light grey again.

Now with beige.

Here is the before picture of the foyer. You can't really tell because of the lighting in the picture but the top part is light grey while the bottom part under the chair rail is where I removed pink wallpaper.

Now the foyer is completely painted in beige.

Here is the basement family room. The brownish bottom part is wallpaper which was put right on after one coat of primer. It pulled off the sheetrock paper as I tried to remove it. No crackfiller would have been able to smooth that wall out properly.

You can see the job on the wallpaper removal that I did.

The is the family room with the new sheetrock installed and the carpet removed.

The flooring will be installed today and the painter should be able to get back in there by Tuesday.

We also had our bedroom painted. I guess I didn't take any before or after pictures of that but it looks very nice now.