Us.: recent fun domestic moments on monroe street.

Recently, some specifically fun domestic moments have been occurring here at our house. Of these events, only a few were caught on film. Or...err...digital....okay. Few were captured. Here's some of the highlights:

First: Casserole madness. For some reason, we realized my mom had given us a stoneware casserole dish and we were obsessed with making a casserole in it. I was thinking of falling back on mom's classic chicken casserole, but we decided to be daring and choose a recipe we found online for something called 'Texas Casserole'. I don't see what was texas about it at all, but we had fun making it and it tasted pretty good. I think we might tweak the recipe a bit next time. And by we, I mean Christian. FYI: that adorable original ancient gas stove works like a charm, believe it or not. Had that casserole cooked up in about 40 minutes.

Next: Fix the empty wall. That wall, that I decided from the beginning would be our main picture wall, happens to be a block wall. :/ In lieu of ruining the freshly painted walls, we found these crazy 3M wall stickies that act like super tough plastic velcro strips. Those bad mama jamas have been holding up six decent sized Ikea frames and the precious memories within. I'm so happy they're sticking! We used the 3M wall hooks at first and had two different instances of pictures falling off the wall and shattering on the floor (once while no one was home, once while Chris was home). After sweeping up lots of glass and bumming over my broke frames, we decided to double up the hooks on the big frame, but use the velcro dudes for the smaller ones. So far, success. I have another print on its way in the mail. I'm looking forward to finding it a perfect spot.

Next: We have a cat friend. Well, four cat friends to be exact. Christian's family kind of adopted (ie: started to feed) these two wandering neighborhood cats who now are super friendly and hang out at the Dameff's all the time. Christian saw a cat wandering around our house like the third day we were in the house and decided to do the same. My only problem is, he has an owner...right across the street and one house down. I watch him sit on the porch and let the owner pet him (which he will NOT let us do). Regardless, we've been having fun feeding (occassionally) and hanging out with these adopted, responsibility-free pets. The one in the picture is BMB (Broken Mew Box, he meows like a broken kid's toy). Then there's a tough, grey cat with one eye (One-Eyed-Willy), and a tan one and an all grey one (unnamed).

Porch Before

Now: Best of all, and most recently... we bought a vine! I know, not horribly exciting to some, but Christian's folks have beautiful vines all over their house and we used to have vines on our old Mary Drive house (Uncle Mike and Aunt Veronica's house) and we both loved the idea of getting vines to grow along our front porch rail. So we went to the Moon Valley Nursery today to pick up a vine! We did a little research and the nursery guys were awesome. They really knew their stuff and helped us pick out a carolina jasmine vine. We planted the little guy and hopefully it will lay out and grow the right way pretty quickly. The guy said it grows fast and blossoms pretty yellow flowers in the spring. We're really stoked and had a good time getting it situated.