We’re thinking PINK!

Yep, it’s a girl :)  Let’s just say, I am super excited about this!  I was hoping all my craftiness wasn’t going to be put to waste, haha.

This time we also got some video of the sonogram, which is pretty cool.

Advent Calendar

This year I decided to make a cute little Advent Calendar made out of a 24 mini muffin pan.  I used my Silhouette to cut out the squares and numbers:

Here are the “activites” we have planned:

• Decorate the tree
• Go to the Trail of Lights
• Open your special ornament and put it on the tree
• Choose a special treat
• Make a craft with Mommy
• Have breakfast for dinner
• Wear new jammies to bed
• Read the story about the birth of Jesus
• Make popcorn and watch a Christmas movie
• Drive around to see Christmas lights
• Happy Birthday Calvin!
• Sing Christmas Carols
• Wrap Christmas gifts
• Visit Santa Claus
• Decorate cookies
• Make a Christmas decoration
• Enjoy homemade hot chocolate
• Color a Christmas picture
• Calvin’s Car Party!
• Build a fort and have lunch in it
• Read a Christmas book
• Got out for lunch/dinner

Then I just put Hershey Kisses in 2 of the spots.  And the activities are in no particular order. 

Here’s another little craft I made today:

I bought the letters from Hob Lob (or Rob Lowe, eh Lala?), covered them with scrapbook paper and double-sided tape, then embellished with ribbon, buttons and snowflakes. 

Tiny Prints Christmas Cards

Like I said in our previous post, Tiny Prints has the cutest stuff and I highly recommend them for your stationary needs.  This year we’ll be using them for our Christmas Cards, which you can check out here.  They have tons of cute options to check out :)

Also, this year we’ll be displaying all your cards using a cute garland made out of clothespins and ribbon like this one:

Tiny Prints Talent Search

Now through Mon, Nov 21, you can enter to win Tiny Prints Talent Search!

The prize for winning is $1,000 cash plus a $500 gift card to Tiny Prints, and they have the cutest stuff :) 

They are looking for winners in the following categories:

• Cutest Baby (0-24 months)
• Cutest Kid (25 months – 10 years)
• Cutest Family
• Cutest Couple
• Cutest Pet & Owner

You can check out the Official Rules here.

After Monday, they will open the contest to everyone for voting.  I entered Calvin for cutest baby, and we might enter cutest family too :)

I guess we’ll live in this room

Ok VA friends (and others of course), here is a pic of our new living room…all decked out in Fall décor.

We got all the pumpkins at Sweet Berry Farms in Marble Falls in October.  I made the maple and oak leaf garland using my Silhouette, but you could follow this tutorial.  And I found the fall subway art here, printed it and framed it.  Go fall!

Trick-or-Treat!

Brace yourselves folks, this year our family was as cute as can be for Halloween :)

It was a fun-filled day!  First we headed to Luke’s work to enter in the costume contest they were having (results next week).  As you can see we decided to go with characters from Disney’s Up!  Calvin was Russell and Luke was Carl Frederickson…you’ll see later in the post what I was :)

After showing our little Wilderness Explorer around to Luke’s co-workers, Russell Calvin and I headed to MOPs.  We had a little party in honor of Halloween and I won the door prize!  I’m not sure if I should be ashamed of this, but they figured out who won by asking who had been to Chick-Fil-A the most times in October.  Well, I said we went about 7 times, which is most likely true :)  It was free breakfast Tuesdays this month and I know we went a couple other times too…so yeah, I don’t know if I should brag about that one!

Anyway, the prize was a cute little CFA cow and some coupons, so of course we went there for a free lunch!

Calvin was sporting his cute “Daddy’s little Monster” shirt from MaMaw while he was giving his Russell costume some rest!

Then we went home for naps and such.  Around 6 we got back into costume.  As you can see, Calvin was a cutie pie!  Luke’s costume was pretty awesome too!  A big thanks to Auntie Katie for the idea!

Ok, ok, you’re probably wondering what in the world is Stephanie??  Well I wanted to go along with the theme too, but I didn’t want to be Carl’s wifey that died at the beginning of the movie…so I went as Kevin the Snipe!  If you haven’t seen Up, Kevin is a girl :)

Here’s what we were going for:

I thought we did pretty good overall :)

Here are some more pics of Calvin’s costume.

After our photo shoot we headed to a Trunk-or-Treat at a nearby church.  Calvin just kept walking around wondering why he would go up to strangers and take candy from them.  Everything seems so wrong with that, but he had a blast!

Next we trick-or-treated on our street.  It was Calvin’s first attempt at this b/c last year we hosted a party with our home groupies and didn’t go trick-or-treat.

Then we spilled all the candy out when we got home.

 

For any of you who want to make Up costumes some time, here’s a breakdown of what I did:

• I found the Wilderness Explorer badges online here and the logo here.  Then I printed them onto fabric paper, ironed that onto fusible paper, then cut everything out and ironed it onto a fabric sash and flag that I made.
• I just sewed a rectangle out of orange fabric for the “bandana”. 
• I couldn’t find a yellow hat small enough for Calvin (that wasn’t like $12), so I just painted one of the cheap hats at Hobby Lobby, that’s why it’s not the best shade :)
• I made Luke’s bow tie following this tutorial and sizing it up slightly for a man. 
• Luke’s glasses are the 3D ones you get at the movies with the lenses removed.
• I found Luke’s wig on Amazon, the closest I could find was a Colonel Sanders Wig!
• I found Calvin’s yellow polo, Luke’s coat and pants, and my colorful shirt at Goodwill.  The rest of the clothes are just our stuff. 
• I tied random stuff onto Calvin’s backpack like a tambourine, blanket and pampered chef steaming pot (b/c it was plastic and light!)
• And LaLa can attest to me hand drawing the little house and coloring it…I mean Calvin did all of that :)
• Lastly, we picked up some balloons from Party City that morning and luckily they lasted all day!

We had such a fun time dressing up, and Calvin loved wearing his costume!  I was worried about that b/c he never wanted to try anything on, but once he saw Luke and me dressed up, he was all about it!

We hope y’all had a Happy Halloween!  Now onto listening to Christmas music :)

Fall Festival

Well as you’ll see in the first video, we had some bad luck this past weekend with fall festivals.  We found a website with a list of Halloween activities going on near us.  So we decided to check out one at the Humane Society…all they had were dogs, no bounce house or games like it advertised.  It was so unclear what was going on that Luke asked a worker if they were having a Halloween thing that day, of course she said yes, but it didn’t look like it :)  Calvin loved the dogs though, but we were on the hunt for something else.

The second one we went to was a church fall festival that was supposed to have carnival games, a bounce house, food, candy…we drove up to an empty parking lot…0 for 2.

But on our way home, we drove past an elementary school hosting a festival, so we decided to check it out.  They had a toddler area for Calvin to play in, a petting zoo, pony rides, and bounce houses & slides :)  It was a hit!

We didn’t want to use Calvin’s official Halloween costume until Trick-or-Treating, so here’s what we decided to strut around in for the day...don’t look too closely at the little baby’s fingers, it was hard to work the stencil with such a small shape, next time I’ll get an exacto knife :)

And LaLa came to hang out with us for the weekend!

As you can see, Calvin didn’t want to participate in a family photo :)