It’s Finally Done!

After several months of hard work by Mark (and with help from Aliyah and another good friend of ours) our dining room is finally complete!  It looks so cool and so different.  It used to be extremely dark and gloomy.  Now it is anything but. 

Here is how the room looked before.  These were taken at Isaac’s birthday party almost 2 years ago:

We went with a Caribbean theme.  Here is the inspiration for the colors in the room (my mom gave me these a few years ago):

We also bought these colorful prints from a local Tobago artist when we went there on vacation a couple of years ago.  Mark bought the frames and matted them himself:

And here is how the dining room looks now:

Last night we had a small dinner party to celebrate Ben’s first birthday, and to thank our good friends who helped us so much in those difficult first weeks after Ben was born.  We got to use the brand new room for the very first time!  Ben was content for most of the evening and watched us eat from the vantage point of his swing.  We did have cake and ice cream.  I put just a tiny amount of ice cream on his lips.  He wasn’t fond of the temperature (turned his head away as soon as the ice cream touched him), but he didn’t complain about the taste.  Among our guests were twin girls Isaac’s age – the kids entertained themselves the entire evening.

I am SO glad that we no longer have to sit in the cramped kitchen for family meals anymore.