As many of you know, Carter and Shelby (our cats) are very much a part of our family. Over the past three weeks, Carter (a three year old male) has been suffering from feline lower urinary disease and then a series of very painful complications.

To make a very long and sad story short, Tim and I had to make the excrutiatingly difficult decision last night to have him put to sleep. We have a wonderfully compassionate veterinarian who cried with us as we held Carter and cuddled him for the last time. Here are some of my favorite pictures of our wild, friendly, mischevious Carter bug.

We've got him buried in the backyard with a small, pink flower and a ribbon marking his little grave. He was a wonderful cat and we will miss him very, very much.

So as most of you know, Tim and I bought a new house in April. From then until June we ripped up and replaced almost all the flooring, painted about every surface, replaced most of the lights and cleaned, cleaned, cleaned. We moved in towards the end of June and though it's still a huge work in progress, here are some of our accomplishments so far:

Living room:



Master Bedroom:

Upstairs hallway:

Laurel's bedroom:

Guest bedroom:

Upstairs landing:


Dining room: (I don't think I took a before picture).
Notice, there are no pictures of bathrooms or the kitchen, so like I said, we've still got a long way to go. But in the next picture you'll see a couple of the reasons we are loving our new location:
And just because it's so friggin' adorable: