You make all little {and big} girls' dreams come true. xoxo, one super excited mama I've made no secret of the fact that in our house, we love music. My daddy was teaching us Beatles' tunes before elementary school and I was introduced to the awesomeness of The Grateful Dead my freshman year of high school. I've seen some pretty amazing shows in my lifetime (Hello, Lenny Kravitz in his heyday) and still have plenty left on the bucket list to conquer. I have a vast collection of concert tees and I don't care how expensive or unnecessary they are -- if we go, I will buy. Even while my girls were babes in arms, I thought about how fun it would be to take them to their first concert. It might sound silly, but I wanted to be sure their first concert experience was one to be ...
Christmas
Our Pen Pal, Scout
Christmas is over and we're all still mourning it a little bit, I guess. We spend so much time preparing our hearts and our homes and then it's over in a flash! We do everything we can to infuse magic into the days leading up to Christmas and give our girls as many happy memories as we can possible fit in. I know every mother has their own opinion about Santa's little helpers, but I just can't be apologetic about our elf fever over here. My girls look forward to Scout's arrival every year and to be honest, so do I! There are mornings where I wonder if he's made the move or if the girls will be disappointed, but it's worth the extra few minutes to see the smiles on their faces when he is found. In years past, Scout has always showed up on the first of December. Maybe he was worried about ...
Have Your #Selfie a Merry Little Christmas
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Let’s Celebrate
You know what I have to remind myself sometimes? That really insignificant things don't matter. I have a tendency to build things up in my head and then I unravel when they don't go exactly my way. Who cares if all of our outfits *coordinate* on Christmas morning. Really. Wouldn't it be better if everyone was comfortable and the girls were happy, than if we looked like a Christmas card? Kamin and I had talked off and on about when we would take family photos for our Christmas card and the only time we could work it out was while we were camping over the Thanksgiving holiday. I always use our photos for the front of our Christmas card and this year would have been no exception. I had high expectations because, blogger. Doesn't it always matter that other people validate my feelings AND my ...
Seeing Santa
Coordinating a day to visit the Big Guy has been much harder than in years past. I feel like Christmas completely snuck up on me this year and I definitely don't have it all together. My house is *barely* decorated, there are still numerous presents en route to the Rockin' House and I still have so many things to accomplish before next week. After comparing schedules and debating Santa locations, we finally got it all together after church last Sunday. We always visit the same setup at a mall about 30 minutes from home. Santa sings and the pictures are always beautiful, if not a little overpriced. I know we can do the whole Bass Pro Shop for free, but I'm going to be honest here, okay? I don't love the whole woodsy scene. The lighting is always bad and I really regretted taking Sophie ...
A Christmas Home Tour (Sort Of)
Remember when Sophie broke the door {hilarious video footage here}?! I had convinced myself that it was like six months ago, but when I scrolled through Instagram looking for the picture, it turns out it was in November. LAST November. We had been living with a square of cardboard on our front door for thirteen months. When we declared 2014 the year of lazy, we really got after it. In case you haven't been to my house before, the stairs to our porch are on the side and there is a tall rock wall along the front of our porch. Nobody can see the door from the drive or the street and we almost always use the back door to come and go. Add a dark shade to the window and it was pretty easy to forget that we were missing a pane of glass. There is a part of me that dreaded replacing the door, ...
On The Hunt
One of my favorite Christmas traditions, the one that welcomes the holiday season to our house, is our annual trip to the tree tent. We almost always go the morning after Thanksgiving, load up on pancakes at IHOP and then dash around the corner to pick out our tree. Despite the fact that we live in rural Alabama and there are plenty of places to chop down our own evergreen, my girls delight in the big striped tent. It's a family from out of state who operate from an RV for the month of December and sell the most beautiful Frasier Firs we've ever seen. Since we were out of town the week of Thanksgiving, our Friday morning trek into town didn't happen. I lobbied for Sunday afternoon, but the girls were already under the weather and we were exhausted from traveling. We hated to wait an ...
Aftermath
Am I the only one a little overwhelmed with the aftermath of Christmas? January is such a hard month for me. Even after six weeks of non-stop Christmas preparation and decorations, I'm not ready to see it go. Our stockings are still hung and the tree is wilting in its stand, but I still can't seem to put the ornaments away. I'm torn between clinging to the holiday season and looking forward to a fresh start in a brand new year. For days after Christmas our house was in flux. Gifts were still piled up in every corner, our trash cans stuffed to the brim with crumpled up wrapping paper and endless amounts of ribbon. The coffee table was shoved up against the bookcase, where we moved it before Santa delivered his loot. Cardboard boxes loaded with baby doll clothes were stacked three high ...