7 Months!

7 Months!

My little Christmas Elf is 7 Months today! He is no longer a quiet little baby that lays on the floor staring up at the sky. He is now crawling and pulling himself up onto anything he can reach. My day just changed drastically... and dramatically. With standing and holding on to furniture comes the rocky unsteadiness of little legs. There is a lot of falling over, followed by a lot of tears. He is also eating more and more solids. We are following a mixture of purees and baby led weaning. Where basically we give E some bits of food and let him feed himself. But I can be a nervous nelly about choking, so we are just going slow with this. Right now food is for fun and experimenting, so we are really laid back about solids. So far he loves everything he is eating. That's my boy! 


With Christmas right around the corner, we are so excited to share this holiday and all the beauty of it with our little guy! We have some traditions we are going to introduce him to and new traditions we will start as a family of three. 

Glitter House

I'm obsessed with glitter houses! Especially old vintage ones. I have a nice little collection of them, but I also thought it would be easy to make my own.  My mom ordered a bunch of cardboard houses from Hobby Lobby online. Sadly, there are Hobby Lobby stores in MN, but they are in the southern part of the state. One day I'll have to make a special trip down there! 


You can really do whatever you want with these houses. I painted mine first with acrylic paint and then sprinkled some mica snow flakes on them. I got  2 huge bags of Mica Snow Flakes off of Ebay last year. On the roof I painted glue on and then put a ton of glitter and snow flakes. 
I had some vintage glass balls I used on the wreath and trees. But really you can use anything you like!

Aqua Glitter House! 

Houses from Hobby Lobby. Trees, glitter, tinsel, and ball ornaments from Michaels.

Hobby Lobby houses (They come in a set of three, but I didn't photograph the largest one)

Martha Stewart Glitter from Michaels

My collection of Glitter Houses! 

Liked up at Design Dazzle!

and The Shabby Nest

{aka} design

tatertots & jello

Happy Thanksgiving!

6 Months!

A half of year has flown by since this little guy entered my life! Just the other day I was playing with him and I looked at him and said, "I've waited my whole life for you!" I've always wanted to be a mom, but I never knew how amazing it would be!

I love you E!

In other exciting news, we are now owners of a MINI VAN! And I'm not afraid to say... I LOVE IT!!! Thanks to my Grandpa Joe for selling us his sweet van!

House Love

Happy post Halloween. I'm ready for the other Holidays to be here. Now that I have a child, holidays somehow seem more fun and magical!! I can't wait to decorate for Christmas!

I've been busy around the house. Little tweaks here and there to make the house look more lived in. The realization hit me the other day that we might be in this house for awhile. I have been treating this house as a temporary dwelling place, but in reality, this is our home and I need to love it up. It's hard because this is a house I would've never picked out if I was house shopping. I really dislike so many things about it and I miss my old cute house.

The other day it really struck me at how ungrateful and bitter I have been about this house. And that is just wrong. I am thankful to have a roof over my head, a wonderful husband and a healthy sweet little boy. So I am working on accepting what I have and being thankful everyday for this house.

Thank you to Pinterest for giving me so many ideas to help make my house into a home.

Here are a few things I've done around the house....

Homemade Banner and a Chalkboard made out of an old picture!

Photo Collage

Baking Nook

New Curtains and Pictures

Cute Kid in a Wig

5 Months!

My little guy is 5 months old today! Full of laughter and smiles! He does this funny rocking with his body when he up on all fours. I've been told the next step is crawling!!! I am so not ready for that.


The weather here has been unseasonably warm! High 70's & 80's for October?! Unheard off! But I'm not complaining! We spent the day at our favorite Apple Orchard\Pumpkin Patch. This was E's second year going. Since last year he was in my belly.

2 feet tall! Only 3 more feet and he will be as tall as me!

(no that is not Grizzly Adams holding my son. It's his father who refuses to shave.)

(today he came into the living room and said, "If you walked into your 8th grade student's conferences and saw me what would you think?"

I said, "I would walk out ... please go shave!")

I am so excited to make continual trips to the apple orchard year after year. Of course I'm not looking forward to the year when E says, "Apple Orchards are LAME!"

It's bound to happen... teen angst is my bad karma!

Knock it Off!

My absolute favorite store of all time is Anthropologie!!! I seriously could go into that store and buy one of everything... if i was RICH! But alas I am not, and can only afford a few little things here and there.

Bless your heart Anthro, but sometimes the things you are trying to sell at the price you are selling them at are truly truly outrageous!

Recently, I was looking at mirrors online at Anthro and I saw this really cute one that I loved. Very simple and just what I was looking for. But with a price tag of $168, there was no way I was buying it.

Maybe I couldn't afford it, but I could try and make my own version of it! They used pretty tiles, and those I didn't have.

But I had pretty scrap book paper, so why not use those?!

(that is not a reflection of garbage in the mirror, just a lot of books in need of a book shelf and a whole mess of craft projects n' stuff that needed to be organized!)

Things I had on hand:

• Mirror
• Mod Podge
• Sponges
• Strong Glue
• Scrapbook Paper

The only thing I didn't have were tiles. I actually ended up finding wooden tiles that were the perfect size for what I was looking for. They have numbers on them, but I didn't care because I was going to be gluing paper over them anyway.

I cut out little scraps of paper to fit the tiles, Mod Podged the heck out of them and then glued them to the mirror. It was seriously so simple. My husband even sat and helped me cut out the papers and we had a little craft night. Of course he was also watching Fast Five so they both balanced each other out.

The result was this cute little numero...

(I Photoshopped a generic background into the mirror, because I didn't want my cute lil' mug to distract from the mirror)

Anthropologie Mirror: $168

My Knock Off : $2.99 (for the tiles, I had everything else!)