1 year Pictures

The other day I got to take some pics of my friends little girl, Macey Jo.
She was not to keen on getting her picture taken and the only place
she was happy was on the slide...
No worries, we still got some super sweet pictures.

Enjoy...

Family Picture

Well since I will be huge prego once the holidays start rolling around, I selfishly decided that I wanted to go ahead and get a family picture for our Christmas card...

You know how it goes...
you have these awesome day dreams about getting the most beautiful family picture that will reside on your mantle for years to come collecting dust...

When in reality you, can't get your kids to smile, you get in a horrible fight with your husband, you bribe your kids with anything they want if they will just cooperate and you take a million pictures, praying that there will be just one that everyone's eyes are open, and look somewhat normal....

Well folks, this is as good as it gets...

It is not really that bad, and I actually think it is cute, but out of all the pictures we took, literally this is the only one that would be worth doing anything with...

I am coming to grips with the fact that the "candid" picture is the picture for us. 3 kids and a husband who hates to take pics, just does not mix well with the beautiful posed picture in my head...

Fall Mantle

Here is our fall mantle for this year.




The newest addition is the metal J up top. It is awesome and really added some rustic
charm to the mantle.

Fall Porch

For some reason I was dead set on having a fall porch... I am not quite sure why?
Maybe it is my sub-conscious knowing that I will probably not be able to decorate for Christmas as much as I like to with having a baby due.. who knows?

For a great before you can read my post on re-doing the front door HERE.

I just love burplap and fall colors so that was my inspiration for the porch...

And here it is...
I really really do love it!




I do plan on adding some real pumpkins once they start coming out. Now if we could just get some cool crisp fall weather to go with my porch that would be even better!

I am linking up at:

Fall Wreath and Front Door Redo!

Our front door was so BORING!
It did not add anything to the curb appeal of our house and it was time for a change!
This is what it looked like before:

When I decided that I was going to paint the front door, I was also inspired to make a fall wreath. So off I went with all 3 kids to the store...so fun :) and got some supplies.
I found a great chunky wood frame from the craft section and spray painted it white.

Next I found a J for James and some moss and then I got out my hot glue gun.

I know this is all pretty self explanatory, but then I just hot glued the moss all over the J...

I could not figure out how I was going to hook my J onto the frame because I could not hang it onto the frame... then I saw that the backing of the frame was just a very thin piece of wood and so I figured I would paint it and then glue the J on.

Striped just seemed very "fallish" and very much my style so I painted very simple and very imperfect stripes onto the wood. It really does not matter if they are super straight or crisp because the letter will cover most of it up.

Then I distressed the white frame with some brown ink... to give it texture and character.
And then I just put it all back together and hung it with some orange burlap on my freshly painted door...
I am really so in love with how it all turned out.



It gives our house so much more character and helps it to stand out.

Happy Fall!!!!!

Happy Birthday To Me...!!!

Well, it is not actually my birthday today, it was back in July.

But... my awesome husband promised me plants in our backyard. Which just made me so happy that I could of cried... then we went out of town, and there is a huge drought, and blah, blah, blah it was not happening. Then it just so happened that I planned my son's birthday party at our house :) Nothing like a little motivation...

So off we went digging, and digging and digging. Little did we know that literally our ground is ROCK hard. My husband worked so hard and sweat so much. It was a much bigger project then we thought to dig out all the beds.

Here are a bunch of before pictures of our backyard. Please excuse our horrible grass we are in the middle of a really bad drought :(


There was NOTHING in our backyard. No trees, no plants... NOTHING! It was really sad.


Last November we put in the stone patio and the covering. Which actually allowed us to go in the back because there was no shade and just tons of sun!


That is my husband digging and probably saying things in his head about me that are not very nice :) It is like 108 degrees here...


We will actually have a tree!

After recovering from all of the hard work it took to dig the beds, then it was the fun part of picking out the plants. But we soon realized, OH MY GOODNESS, now we have to dig again to plant all of these goodness forsaken things...

So, they sat in their pretty little planter boxes for about a week and a half, just waiting for us to muster up the courage to start digging again. We decided that we would attempt a bed a night... which turned into a bed every couple of nights.

However, my awesome husband, ( I can't thank him enough for all of the VERY HARD work that he did in this crazy heat and after a long day at work. THANK YOU!) did dig every hole and I put down all of the mulch. It was a great memory and now it makes out backyard so much more inviting and beautiful. It is really sad, but since we planted the plants we have had so much more animal life in our backyard, bees, lizards, spiders, worms...
there was just nothing for them before.

Here are the afters...

Eventually, that vine will grow up and cover that side of the house and up into the patio covering... which will look really great!

This is our fire pit area that just looks so much better now. This was my husbands idea to plant around it, I did not even think about it.

We added two oak trees to the back and hope to add 2 more to the other side in a little while.

This is the second oak tree. In the back bed there is a crepe myrtle tree and two Esperanza trees that will eventually add some great privacy to our back yard.




This is in the very far corner of the other side of the yard.




This is my favorite view of our yard. It looks so much more full and welcoming.
It was well worth all of the effort...now that it is DONE!