merry christmas

Merry Christmas to you!  Wishing you a holiday of happiness and love! Joy to the World!

thanksgiving

A couple of photos from our Thanksgiving celebration.  This year we spent Thanksgiving with my family and had dinner at my parents house.  It was great visiting with all my family, especially my aunt from New Mexico.  The weather was great so the littles loved playing outside!  There is so much to be thankful for and I love the season of Thanksgiving and Christmas to help us reflect on all our blessings.

thinning out november

This month lets get rid of some unnecessary cleaning items.  Like the one polish you bought and didn't like so it's never been used again.  I personally like to do a little cleaning before setting out all my Christmas decor so it's a great time to look through your supplies.

TIP:  I keep all my cleaning items in a handy tote that fits under my sink but can go with me to clean the upstairs bathrooms.  It's easy and convenient!

scrap storage

So a few weeks ago I alluded to the idea of organizing our garage once the weather cooled down.  Well, we are making some small strides and we started with our wood scrap pile.

We collect a lot of scrap wood from our diy projects and it was getting overwhelming.  We save every little piece and sure enough, we find uses for a lot of them. So in our efforts to organize the garage, we needed a storage solution for our wood pile.

Lucky for us, Madeleine's playhouse was shipped on a pallet and we had seen some cool storage ideas using pallets on pinterest. Check out my Garage and Shop Board to see our inspiration pins for the garage project.

Joe was able to pull off a couple of pieces of the pallet and re-attach them to the front using screws so we ended up with a 2 compartment wood holder.  We stacked larger and heavier pieces in the back and smaller skinny pieces in the front.  For the tiny miscellaneous scraps, we threw them in a box and their final location is to be determined.

The picture doesn't show the scale quite right, the pile took up a ton of room

now it's neat and compact

oh boy!

Our little family is growing!  

Baby #2 is coming in April 2015!!  It's a BOY!!!

Big sister Madeleine doesn't get it yet but she IS excited about the balloons!  

We can't wait to meet you little baby!!

one little indian

Halloween was so fun  this year with Madeleine.  It's hard to believe she was sooo teeny last October and then this year she was walking door to door with her pail saying "trick or treat!"  She loved our bucket of candy and would play with all the pieces taking them out and putting them back or simply just digging and stirring them all up.  She enjoyed the freedom of walking in the street and adventuring past our yard, and the dark didn't bother her in the least.

We had a fun evening with the whole Pawelek family including Princess Anna and Princess Elsa from Houston, and they brought their little snowman Olaf too.

Madeleine's costume was a little Indian that I made just by gluing some felt and fringe onto a onesie and tied tulle into knots to make a tutu.  Her moccasins were from Hobby Lobby and I just added some leather fringe to dress them up.  She loved her costume and said "awwww" when she looked at herself in the mirror.  She was a little leery of the face paint but forgot about it once we were done.

We played soccer, ate pizza, passed out candy, and trick or treated around the cul-de-sac and at Caley and John's before calling it a night.  Happy Halloween!

pumpkins

The weekend before Halloween, my nieces were staying over at my parents so we all met at the pumpkin patch to pick out our favorites and then hauled them back to our house to decorate.  It was SO fun staging their little table and pulling out all my craft odds and ends that could be used as pumpkin decor.  The favorite all around was the glow in the dark paint and glitter.  M absolutely loved the pumpkin patch and she kept walking around saying "woah!" and "wow!" and "pumpins."  She didn't really get into decorating but she took on the role of supervisor and walked around monitoring all the activities. The girls were very creative and decorated their pumpkins as the Hulk, Frozen, and a modge podge of paint and glitter:)