Home, Sweet Home

We have The. Best. Friends.  

You might think your friends are pretty awesome, but we've got you beat.  Truly.  Our friends are rockstars.

We got home last night about 7:30.  Our trip was long.  (Two-hour train ride + fourteen-hour flight + three-hour drive + thirteen-hour time change = Half-dead mommy and daddy)  We were excited to be home but ready to crawl under the covers and sleep for three weeks.

When we walked in the door, we found this.

That would be our living room floor.  When we left our house at the beginning of the month, it looked a lot more like this.  (Except I think it was actually covered in even more paint.)

Really?  Someone refinished our living room floor while were gone?  No. Way.

Then we went into the dining room.  The floor in here used to have a gigantic rectangle of paint right next to the table.  (Picture a painter thinking, "Hhhmmm, perhaps this floor should be tan to match the walls", painting for a few minutes, and then changing his mind.)

Not anymore.

I'm really not OCD enough to set my table for Christmas before leaving my house on November 1.  This lovely setting would be courtesy of our rockstar-wood-floor-refinishing friends.

Just wait.  There's more.

Check out Li'l Miss's room.  It was definitely blue when we left.  And the picture of the nasty floor above?  Yup, totally her room.

Could it be any cuter?

And, no, our friends didn't just do the big stuff.  (You know, like painting entire rooms and refinishing our downstairs.)  They totally added all these fun little touches: parenting and adoption books on the coffee table, sweet little decorations to match the birdhouse theme in Li'l Miss's room...

...Christmas ornaments on each place setting...

...and super gorgeous wood trim.

(You're totally rethinking your friend choices, right?  It's okay; I'll share mine.)

Oh, wait, still not done.  Check out our 'fridge.  I'm so not going to have to make that day after vacation crap-there's-no-milk-in-the-house-and-the-kids-won't-eat-mustard-on-their-cereal shopping trip.  Because my friends seriously rock.

The food even came with sweet little notes and labels.  (Be still, my OCD heart.)

There's still more.  They repainted and decorated our bedroom.  I now have a sweet teal-and-tan room with way fun curtains, an awesome reading chair (that Jer was oh-so-stoked about), and this very cool teal toss pillow from Target.  (Which one of you caught me drooling over that pillow the last 27 times last time I was there?)

Our bathroom has also been repainted (love you, Mom & Dad), our yard straightened, and our Christmas lights hung.  (Sorry for the total picture fail on the bathroom and our bedroom.  Blame the jet lag.  Oh yeah, and the three kids that I now have to feed.)

We left on this journey feeling so loved and blessed; I had no idea we'd come home feeling a thousand times more so.  I don't have the words to say how much we love everything that was done while we were gone or to express how thankful we are to have friends who truly are our family in Christ.  Our friends love Jesus, and they love us.  A. Lot.

We are blown away.  (And you thought your friends were cool. :)

I used to worry that our three bedrooms were going to feel pretty tight after the boys got home.  But I've changed my mind.  

I'm totally living here forever.