A Quiet Christmas Season

This year I have felt like quiet the Christmas slacker. Sure the tree got put up, the house decorated, and quite a few cookies baked (and already scarfed down). But other than that we haven't done a ton. Maybe it's because we have Griffin now and he's just still so little that I hate to drag him around town with there being like 90 times more germs out there right now than usual. Or maybe its the slight sleep deprivation that I am still coping with. Maybe its that things are just plain harder with 3 kids in tow versus just 2. I don't know. Now that it is December 6th already and our poor little Elf on a Shelf, Jerry, is still in his box and has yet to make his grand appearance, I feel bad.

It is time to dig deep, suck it up, and get a move on already! I am bound and determined that even if we don't leave the house (I'm sorry, it just still skeeves me thinking about Griffin and all those germs) we will still try and do a little something Christmas-y every day!

After Graham left for school this morning I had Grady start a little project.



Grady was doing his best here to look at me and smile but "Fireman Sam" was on TV and he was having a hard time concentrating! :)



I couldn't find any Christmas coloring pages around the house so I made my own! I did my best to draw what Grady requested and did pretty good until I had to try and draw a tractor for him. He kept telling me "Oh, thank you for my truck!". Tractor, truck, oh well, as long as Grady is happy with it! :)

After he got done, Grady told me that these pages were for his Mimi (my Momma) for her Christmas present! So so sweet! We will have to bundle them up with a pretty ribbon for her and tuck it under the Christmas tree. The other day he trooped in from outside with another gift for her...

I was super proud of him. Really fun and interesting looking sticks are hard to come by for little boys and the fact that he wanted to share it with her for Christmas made my heart just melt! We will have some very interesting presents under our tree this year for sure! :)

This past Sunday we lit the first fire of the season in our fireplace and it was just soo beautiful! I love to have a nice fire going and would do it everday if I could. It could be 90 degrees outside and I would still do it!

With the flash...

Without the flash...

I couldn't decide which picture I liked the best... :)

Griffin Is 2 Months Old!

I can't believe that my baby is getting so big already!

I know that this is the lament by every mother out there. Our kids just grow up too fast. One moment they are tiny, sweet, helpless little newborns and before you know it... BOOM they are all " I can totally play with toys, BRING ON CHRISTMAS TOYS MOMMA!"

Exhibit A, B, and C.

Griffin has begun to notice tags and strings and pretty just loves to gaze at himself. With the above toy he is pretty much in LOVE! I really need to dig out more of the baby toys I put away after Grady outgrew them.

And now onto some random fun facts about Griffin now!

• Griffin just got his first round of immunizations at the pediatricians office the other day. He did great! He only cried for just a moment but then quieted right down.
• He weighs 12 pounds 10 ounces (75th percentile) is 23 1/4" long (67th percentile) and has a head circumference of 38.4 (20th percentile).
• To the above 20th percentile for head circumference and my resounding "WHA??" to the doctor, she said that that was the same percentile as he was before and his head is still growing so I shouldn't worry.
• Griffin is quickly outgrowing clothes that are 0-3 month size and is wearing mostly 3 month or 3-6 month clothing.
• He is still wearing size 1 diapers but I see him outgrowing them in the near future.
• Griffin is still nursing almost exclusively. He usually takes 1 formula bottle at night from Bobby and maybe a random one during the day if we are out and about somewhere that I don't feel comfortable nursing.
• He is sleeping soo good at night (I know, I should shut-up right this second before I jinx myself.) He almost always sleeps from 10pm - 4 am, nurses then goes right back to sleep. Last night he slept from 9pm - 6am!! I have been trying to scoot up his bed time earlier so he won't sleep so long into the morning.
• Griffin is still sleeping in our bedroom in a pack n' play and swaddled. I don't know how things will go once we transition him to his own room and without the swaddle. I am more than just a little scared about it.
• He really is interacting more with those around him. When he's in a super happy mood he has been trying to coo (really still more like a gurgle but I can tell he's trying to talk :). His eyes dart everywhere and you can tell that he is taking it all in!



At the doctors office for his two month checkup!




He looks soo big to me here!

And here are his 2 month "sticky" shirt picture. Did.not.work.out.well. I ordered the clear monthly stickers and I should have gotten white. None of Griffins onesies are plain and so you can see right through them. Grr. I have to go out and buy plain onesie now just for these pictures.  Double grr. I think I took 40 different pictures and these were the best. Oh well. We will just keep trying! Pretty much my most favorite thing to do these days is take my boys pictures all day long! :)

We are soo blessed to have Griffin join our family and our lives for this Christmas season! God is good!

A Very Thankful Thanksgiving!

Wow! What a whirlwind of a week this past week has been!

We celebrated two thanksgivings, hosted one at our house, and had company. I.am.exhausted but so very very thankful! We are surrounded by family and friends who we love and adore and who love and adore us. We have a wonderful house to sleep in, lots of good food to eat, our beautiful children and our health. My list could go on and on and for that I am thankful!

So here is a quick re-cap of our Thanksgiving in pictures!

Griffin was super excited to be having his picture taken. Can you tell ? :) This was the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. We were waiting on my mother, brother and SIL and their girls to roll into town.

Just as soon as they arrived the big question of "Can I hold the baby?" began. :) This is my niece Alice. We look a ton alike if you compare our baby pictures! I like to think that Caroline might have looked like her... She's just beautiful!

This is my sweet sweet SIL Ann. She is holding Griffin with my other niece and her youngest daughter, Bess.



Little Bess has the sweetest personality! She was such a blessing to have!



My SIL Anne was super smart and brought fun crafts for the kids to do on Thanksgiving morning. The kids decorated ornaments (and some of the adults did too :). They now grace two of our little trees in our house!





The Momma!





We have a tangerine tree outside our house and the kids had a blast picking the ripe fruit! (I laugh a little because I know some of y'all are already seeing snow but here in South Texas we are picking ripe orange fruit :)



The Men had a very rough morning of watching a turkey cook in hot oil for 45 minutes... :)

My mother will kill me for posting this picture! HA! Cheers!

The kids table with all our little turkeys!

The delish Thanksgiving lunch!

Later that night (and after naps were had by all) we went out to a local drive thru light display. It's an awesome place that you can drive around for about 20 minutes that the kids just adore! (Sorry for the terrible picture quality... my camera decided that it just did not want to focus in the dark that night)

After the light display  we headed out for a very festive dinner at IHOP. :)

We got a little silly waiting for our food to arrive.



Silly Bess! She had to try Graham's spoon trick too!




Griffin says "Happy Thanksgiving" too!



Griffin's Newborn Photo Shoot!

I'm super excited to share with all you guys some of Griffin's newborn photos! Our friend Misti did such an amazing job!! We are soo in love with how they turned out. Griffin did an awesome job that too :). He was active and alert for part of the time then wore himself out and we got some great ones of him sleeping too. So precious!!

Misti did a great job of giving us 3 copies of every picture (this only 1/3 of them!). She did every picture in a cool tone, a warm tone, and black and white. Each one is so special and unique. I think that I've watched them all on my laptop as a slide show a million times already this morning :). I am going to have an incredibly hard time picking just a couple of them for his birth announcements.

Ya'll I have soo much more to blog (ahem, Thanksgiving 4 days later...) about but I just had had had to get these posted!!

If you had to pick just one of the pictures above for a birth announcement which one would you pick??

Its Begining To Look A Little Like Christmas!

Pretty soon it will be time to pull out our 4 million tubs of Christmas decorations and I can not wait!! Decorating for Christmas has to be one of my most favorite things to do all year. Putting it all back up is a very dark day for me :(. This year I started early cruising different Etsy websites and Pinterest looking for new ideas to help spruce up our already existing decorations. There is just soo much fun stuff out there! I could spend a million dollars just on decorating for Christmas alone!

The thing that I've been wanting most so far this year is a new wreath for my front door. Is it just me or have ya'll noticed too just how dang expensive they can get!! The cheaper ones that I did find... well, they just looked cheap. I found a beautiful wire mesh wreath on Etsy that I was dying for until I saw the price. $175.00! What!! I started wondering if  I could make one myself. I looked around online for a while until I found a couple of different websites that gave really easy tutorials. I kinda combined all the different techniques into what I thought I could manage and off I went to the store of my dreams... Hobby Lobby!

I bought all that I thought that I would need for soooo much cheaper than what they were priced for online.



Proof that I spent waaaay less than $175.00.

Actually once I got done making my wreath I realized that I had quite a bit left over of what I had bought. I really could have made two wreaths!! That comes out to a little over $20.00 each. How amazing is that!

Here is my progress in making my wreath :



The last picture is the finished product (I think). I keep fluffing and shifting things on it just a little bit. :)

I can't wait to get it hung on our front door!

You Know You're A Boy Mom If...

It doesn't surprise you to pull empty bullet casings out of the dryer...

Another Bathroom Checked Off The "To Do" List!

Does anyone remember this post? Probably not :). I think that when I wrote it I had been blogging for like an entire month. It has been almost a year and we finally finished another bathroom in our home!

Just to quickly recap... our house needs a lot of work. It was built and decorated in the totally tubular 80's :). Bobby and I love the way our home is situated and the space that it provides for our family but it needs some serious updating!! Like most families these days, we are doing it ourselves and working with a budget. Even then, it is still taking us a lot of time.

Last January, I stated to re-do "Caroline's bathroom". It's the spare bathroom that is attached to the bedroom upstairs that will soon be Griffin's. At the time I started I was still knee deep in grief over Caroline's loss and the only way I knew how to cope was to stay as busy as possible.



This is the before picture! Don't you just looove the pink and blue plaid wall paper!! :) I didn't. Also, the shower door drove me nuts as did the pale color of the cabinet.

This bathroom was the 3rd project that I started in our house. The first thing that I changed was to have Bobby remove the shower doors. They were just so....Gold. The next thing that I did was to spray texture onto the wallpaper and then paint over with a nice neutral beige.



Good Bye scary shower doors!!

I forgot to take a picture of the paint on the walls because that night I decided that with all this home remodeling I was doing  and paint fumes I was breathing, I should probably make sure that I wasn't pregnant.

As we all know now, I WAS!!

I promptly stopped all the hard labor and Bobby said that he would finish the bathroom for me. :) My poor hubby has been soo busy that here we are, almost a year later and it is finally done!!

We pretty much did almost everything in the bathroom (with the exception of replacing the floors and the counter top). We replaced all the hardware, replaced the mirror, and painted the walls and cabinets. There are still some minor touch-ups to be done to the paint but overall I am in love with how it all turned out!

I am soo proud that we have checked off another thing on our household "to-do" list. I can't wait to tackle the rest of the house!