Christmas Wishes and Giving

After a restful weekend at home, I’ll be spending the week busy preparing for a very long upcoming weekend of Christmas celebration. I’m thoroughly looking forward to it! One of my favorite parts of this season is spending time with our large extended family. Since most of my aunts, uncles, and cousins live all over the place, it isn’t often we get to see each other. It makes these gatherings even more special and precious to me.

I wish everyone a beautiful, joyous Christmas filled with peace and love!

Also, as many of you know, I’m originally from a very small town which I love and will always call home. Growing up in a small town, I feel we are all intertwined in one way or another. Matt Pohler, also from my hometown, is only 17 and he was recently diagnosed with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia. He is currently going through chemotherapy and fighting the fight of his life. The medical bills are staggering. If you can offer any help, it would be greatly appreciated! His story can be found here: MattPohler.org Family and friends are trying to help by putting together a raffle and you can also donate as well. If you’d like to support this beautiful family, go to MattPohler.org

Heavy Heart

After what happened yesterday in Newtown, my heart is very heavy. I meant to post our Christmas card yesterday but out of respect for what happened, I decided a day of silence and prayer would be better. What is happening here in front of our very eyes with this nation? When is more aggressive action going to be taken?

Today all I want to do is hold my girls really tight and be thankful for them!

A Little Christmas Around Here!

We had a lovely Thanksgiving! But as soon as it passed, we began our Christmas celebration. From visiting Santa to decorating the house, it definitely feels like a cheerful time of year!

St. Nick (to read more about him, go here) stopped by last night. He brought a few goodies for Livy and Avery and he wrote a special letter to Avery about her inability to listen so we’ll see if her listening skills improve. Santa has brought the girls so much over the past years that I’m not sure what he could possibly come up with this year to bring them. His little elves are really having to think hard this year. On that same note, I think Avery is old enough to understand the joy of giving and how meaningful it is so perhaps we will start introducing a “giving day” where she can pick some things to gift for donations to other children.

I decided to go more towards natural elements for decorating this year. I ordered Burlap stockings that were handmade on Etsy and a beautiful burlap treeskirt with cute buttoms on Etsy as well. I also love a lot of greenery!

Last week I went to Anthropologie to do a little shopping and I noticed they had these cute faux snowglobes made out of Mason jars and other jars. They were $28 per jar and while I love a splurge from Anthropologie, I couldn’t justify the expense because I wanted a lot of them. I had a lot of the stuff needed to make these already at home and ran to Michaels to get the snow glitter and more jars. I made a grouping for the kitchen with only Christmas trees and I made a grouping for our family room. I think they turned out really cute! And considering I made 10 of them, that’s $280 worth of faux snowglobes for only about $30-40 worth of supplies. The most expensive part was the Lennox trees but I used a 40% off coupon from Michael’s.
Supplies (jars, cooltouch glue gun (don’t want to burn yourself!!), trinkets or village christmas trees, snow glitter, OH! and apple cider for sipping while you work) :

One of my groupings:

She moves too quickly! The lighting was low and I couldn’t get a good shot of her admiring the tree so it’s a bit blurry (and I was too lazy to go get my other lens):

Last weekend, we had a very nice weekend at home and I promised Avery that she could decorate a Gingerbread house over the weekend. She couldn’t wait! She’s been wanting to do this for weeks. We picked up a house from Whole Foods. Unfortunately, they didn’t have a kit to go with it so I went to their bakery and they packaged some frosting for me and we picked out some fun treats to decorate it with a la carte.


I love how hard she is concentrating here. This one was taken with my iphone:

The finished product turned out pretty cute! I straightened out the roof shingles just a tad:

Family Trip to Fredericksburg

Last weekend, we took our annual family trip to Fredericksburg, Texas, one of the cutest little historic towns in Texas full of really cute boutiques, wineries, and beautiful historic homes. To me, it is heaven!

I’m addicted to instagram and use my phone too much for photos:


I knew this wouldn’t last very long with her super fine hair:

Silly girls:

Trick or Treat

We’ve been busy having lots of fun around here so I’m a bit behind. I’ll make this post just about Halloween and follow up with everything else we’ve been up to.

Halloween is always close to my birthday so this year, the celebration actually fell on my birthday since it happened to be the Saturday before…October 27th. My entire family came to town to celebrate with me. I scheduled the entire day starting with a private craft party at Paper Source (FUN!), lunch and a little shopping, Trick or Treating with the kiddos at the Hill Country Galleria, and a night out with our special men at Uchiko and downtown with the crazies for Halloween. Our dinner lasted almost 4 hours. Woooo!

For the actual day of Halloween, the girls had a parade at their school and then later on that evening, our neighborhood has Halloween dinner and hayride that we joined in on. The girls had a blast!!

Birthday Festivities started out at Paper Source:

Followed by Trick or Treating at the Galleria:

Caleb and Avery:

Nana with Lyla and Livy:


Looks like tons of fun to me:

And then dinner at Uchiko while my parents babysat all the girls:

The girls getting ready for the hay ride and some trick or treating on Halloween:

Random pics:
Teacher gifts:

Park:

Headed to school in matching outfits:

Family Photoshoot Fall 2012

I’m dying over the photographs J. Bell of J. Bell Photography dropped off yesterday. The colors are gorgeous and I’m so proud of how well my girls did! It was really hot the day we shot and they were troopers and had tons of fun. My heart skips a beat when I see Livy and Avery in these pics.

Copying sister:






I LOVE this pic:

And this one makes me laugh because this what they do at home all the time:




* all photos by J. Bell Photography (he’s so good with kids!)

Witch’s Broom

What a busy weekend! We had planned on having a lazy weekend at home but with the beautiful weather and a rush of energy, we actually packed a lot in. I don’t know why but days that I plan on being lazy days often turn out to be the complete opposite. Our weekend was filled with trips to our favorite Eat Park per Avery, “aka: Central Market”, trying some new recipes like seafood stew, crafting (making kitty cat masks), lots of decorating of shelves which included unpacking loads and loads of books, and trips to random stores to pick up some styling details for my craft room/office space.

We made this (pretzel stick, mozzarella cheese, and chive or celery string:

*idea was taken from Pinterest

My first time making seafood stew (Iphone pic isn’t so great with dimmed lighting):

My precious little Livy at Eat Park ;).

My monkey posing for a photo opp:

Poor Livy is sick today! 😦 I really hope she is feeling better tomorrow. I just want to take all her pain away.

Our Fall Kitchen

This is my favorite time of the year over all other seasons. Perhaps it is because of the weather or that I really love how it appeals to the senses (especially the smell of Fall, the changing colors of leaves, the warmth of the indoors, etc.) Now that we are finally home, I’m embracing the chance to make our home hug us with “Fall” when we walk in.

I’ve made a few subtle changes from our last kitchen but it is otherwise very much the same. Besides the change in island color, we did a few other minor things. The one thing we did add are some cool cabinet features that I found on Pinterest like the cutting board that drops straight to the trash can and built-in utensil/drawer organizers.

Day Break: Round Top Antiques Fair

I decided that since today was the first day since we moved in that we wouldn’t have contractors in the house doing punch work and the weather has been PERFECT, I would take advantage and run to Warrenton/Round Top to the Antiques Fair. What made it even better was that my life-long bestie came to meet me with her precious little boy, Jed. Toni and I got to catch up on life and also found some goodies at the same time. We got some great deals since it is towards the end and they wanted to get rid of things.
How cute is he? And he was such a happy camper the entire time!

Some of my goodies I found (except the books):

I snapped up that oil painting with frame for $10 within the first five minutes of being there. It has the perfect colors for our family room and tying everything together.

Picnic at the Pond

The weather was gorgeous here yesterday so after we picked up the girls from school, we went on a picnic at our nearby fishing pond. It was very impromptu but the girls had such a good time.

One of the reasons we fell in love with where we live now is the natural beauty that surrounds us. It was important for us to feel like we were in the country. We love being outdoors and truly appreciate the rolling hill country views and the feeling that we live far out in the “Hill Country” (what Texans call it) yet are five minutes from all the stores we like to go to.

Picnic Time (she loves food!)

I could eat her up! And don’t mind my messy hair. I’ll get to it one day 😉