“Mooey Dooey!”  That is Gracie’s way of saying Merry Christmas!  What a fun Christmas this year!  We had so much fun celebrating the birth of Jesus as we gathered with the church Sunday morning for a time of worship and then as we opened gifts later that afternoon.  Here are some pictures from this wonderful day!

Here is Gracie doing her “Happy Christmas Dance” before church.

Gracie posing in front of the Christmas tree wearing Daddy’s tie.

And now for the presents…

Gracie “helping” Daddy open his present.

The Mickey and Minnie Gracie painted for us.

Now that the presents are done and Christmas is over we are focusing on New Year’s Eve, the day we will celebrate our sweet new baby into this world!  We hope you had a blessed Christmas and have a happy new year!

Well, we have officially adopted a new tradition for Christmas Eve, acting out the nativity scene with our children.  Thanks to our friend Natalie for the adorable idea, we decided to transform our little sitting room into a manger, complete with baby Jesus, animals, Mary (Minnie) and Joesph (Mickey), and the most adorable shepherd I’ve ever seen!  We had a blast watching her interact with baby Jesus (wrapping him in his blanket, rocking him, giving him kisses) and determined we would make this a tradition each year.  We hope you enjoy the pictures and we hope you have a blessed Christmas!

So, the marshmallow creations started out sweet and innocent enough.  We had been talking about how God had created all of the animals and so this little craft was a fun way to bring the story to ‘life’.  So, here you see we made this adorable little elephant….

…and sweet little piggy…

…and their buddies, little bear and Mr. giraffe. And then….out of nowhere……came….

..The Marshmallow Monster!!!

And after a cynical monster laugh, the monster proceeded to destroy all of the sweet baby animals, one by one, until all that remained was….

the monster.

Victorious.

Christmas is definitely our favorite holiday! This year our Christmas tree went up before Thanksgiving and we have already done our Christmas shopping, completed four Christmas puzzles, and watched several of our favorite Christmas movies.  It has been fun decorating the house this year, but not much fun keeping Gracie from touching everything.   We did let her help unpack the ornaments and decorate the Christmas tree. She loved to look at all of the ornaments and decide where they should go (of course the Mickey Mouse ornaments were her favorite!) *By the way, that is marker on her face – we got a little out of control that morning with our coloring*
After decorating the tree we had some fun family time dancing to Christmas music and playing with Gracie.
My attempt at a Christmas centerpiece.

Another Christmas craft that I attempted this year was the no-sew ruffle tree skirt my sister found on Pinterest.   Thanks to Nicole’s belief in my ability to do this craft, I actually finished it!  It only required $8 in fabric, a lot of hot glue, and quite a bit of time to finish, but I do actually love the way it turned out! (in the pictures above you can see what it looked like before I refashioned it)

Another thing that has made December so much fun is watching Gracie do the advent calendar I made for her.  I made  a scavenger hunt advent game with numbered tags from 1 to 24.  On the backs of the tags I put pictures of items in our house that she knows well.  Her present for the day is hidden in the item pictured on the tag.   She is so cute as she finds the correct number on the tag (with our help), looks at the picture, and then throws the tag down and runs full speed to find her present.  In this case her present was hidden in her mickey mouse clubhouse toy.  She got a baby bottle ($1 at the dollar store) which she loved as you can tell.

I praise God for this time to celebrate Christ’s birth with my precious family!  Soon we will be celebrating the birth of Silas – crazy!!!  God Bless!

Halloween 2011 proved to be the most fun one yet!  This was a Halloween boo-nanza!!  Ha!  Ok…I know enough cheesy jokes lets just get straight to the pictures right?  Well, I wanted to start out by showing how Jackson and I decorated the house this year.  My favorite thing this year was the chalkboard of halloween sayings.  I just love this chalkboard and how useful it will be for each holiday.

We had some home made decor too, done by my little man.  Such beautiful work.  The skeleton we made was good but in his words, ‘wasn’t quite right.  It needed some spiders on its head!’  Well, I have to admit it adds a nice Halloweeny touch.

We started the sweet eating a little early on Halloween by making some fun ghost cookies.

After I filled my son full of sugar cookies I sent him off to consume inhumane amounts of candy. Mother of the Year!!! He decided that he wanted to be a fire breathing dragon, and although he ran around acting scary, I think he is the cutest doggone dragon I have ever seen.  

Before we went out trick or treating, we stopped by to see some sweet neighbors and friends.  Are these little girls not just the cutest EVER?!!!

And….my favorite picture of the day.

We had such a good time with our friends Zach, Lacey, and their precious daughter Ava at the pumpkin patch on Saturday.  A hayride, petting zoo, pony rides and lots of pumpkins made for a fun-filled day for our families!

What a fun day! We decided to begin the day with a photo shoot in the park. We dressed Gracie in her Sunday best, grabbed a few props (including the precious tea set the women of Wilcrest got for Gracie) and headed to the park for some photo fun. Gracie loved hosting this impromptu tea party for her bunny and for her Daddy (who earns Daddy of the Year for willingly and joyfully attending)!

What do you do with a desk that you pick up for cheap at a thrift store?

Answer:  Why you let your 3 year old paint it of course.  No seriously, here are the three reasons why we did this little ‘project’.

1. We were bored.  No Rangers on this day.

2. We were lazy.  I was NOT wanting to renovate anything.

3. Why not at least see if he could make something cool out of it. (lets be honest…it was one big fat eye sore to begin with! What do you expect for 15 bucks?)

So, we gave him a paint brush and lots of colorful paint and he went after it.  He started with the paint brush, and quickly moved onto the finger painting method.  He squirted paint, splattered paint, even used marker on this thing.  It is a master piece if I do say so myself.  I think it is going to look perfectly lovely in his playroom. Lots of messy fun for sure! And needless to say, afterward we had one rainbow colored bath.

First of all I need to say that we are WAY behind on our blogging, whoops!  We have been quite busy with  lots of other things lately so the blog has definitely been neglected.  However,  there are many things that we want to show and this wedding is one of them!  I would like to say that we had such a great time with this bride and groom and their families.  The wedding was outside at the beautiful Belgium House in Longview Texas, and the weather was gorgeous.  Take a look at this couples special day.

We have FINALLY gotten our christmas cards ready for YOU!  We have the newest and hottest trend in holiday cards…the LUXE cards!  These are not your usual cards,  they are die cut in various shapes.  Your christmas card is  sure to stand out among the rest! Check out our latest collections and contact us to get yours for this holiday season!

Vintage Christmas Die Cut Cards