The Halloween Dress Up Spirit has continued to overcome sweet Cate. Over the weeekend she was "Super Woman" and today she's in this sweet hand-me down red dress from Abigail. This is a very versatile "dress up" dress -- earlier today she was "every Princess in the whole wide world" in this dress, but now with pony tails, she is magically transformed into Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz in it. The dress-up closet is getting so much use these days I'm thinking some new dress up clothes may be on Santa's list, since she's beginning to grow out of some of her others. I just love the creative, pretend play the clothes inspire in her.

On kitchen news, we heard a "for sure" date on our countertops -- Tuesday AFTER Thanksgiving. Bummer. Guess we won't be hosting this year. This weekend we're told we'll have all of our appliances installed (including the new oven, which had to be ordered in since they sold us the wrong model). The stainless steel portion of the countertops should be ready this week but I'm not sure about install -- our GC is supposed to install those but will also have his hands full with the appliances. The sink apparently will get installed with the countertops since it's going to be undermount -- so another 2 weeks without a kitchen sink. Think we'll be hiring out the hardware install -- we got a good referral from somebody who will be returning at the end of the week into town and says he could get started right away, but we don't have a price bid yet on that wonderful news. Our new sectional couch for living room arrived and is beautiful -- sometime this week hopefully Greg will be able to set up the TV again in the living room so that we will get more use out of it. We're supposed to be hosting a DVD series bible study on Friday, so it would be nice to have the TV set up again to do that. All in all, it's coming together, just more slowly than I sometimes would desire. I want to just nestle in, bake a pie, make a nice hot pot of tea, and enjoy our good fortune and bounteous blessings. Soon....just not yet.