Our Family Unit
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  • January4th

    Welcome to 2012!  We hope everyone’s holidays were merry and bright – ours definitely were.  The kids and I headed back to Colorado a few days before Kyle, just in time for a perfectly white blanket of snow and even better, the arrival of my first nephew, JR.

    Isn’t he beautiful?!  And obviously a genius…we took this when he was four days old and asked him how old he was – he holds up four fingers!  (OK, so that story may not be true, but he is definitely a handsome boy and so precious.)

    Christmas Eve was at Kyle’s family this year and the kids were more than ready.  Kade remembered all about Christmas and presents and was ready to dive in.  Berlin just wanted to wear her new shoes, even with her Christmas jammies.

    I made the mistake of asking Kade if he wanted to kiss Berlin on the cheek.  Perhaps I should have checked with Berlin first!  I love how proud he is that he “won” at the end.

    Christmas Day we drove out to my family’s place where Kade got to be Santa’s helper and pass out Christmas stockings and Berlin discovered the joy of independence as she figured out how to walk alone with her new baby stroller.

    It’s always so much fun to go back and be with family and friends.  We did puzzles, drank hot cider, played games, held babies, and slept in.  One of the best days was going thrift shopping with my mom and sister.  I literally doubled my wardrobe in 1 day!  We had so much fun hunting for deals and I may have actually purchased 15 cardigans for myself.

    Now we’re safely back home; Christmas is packed away; we’re mid-grandparent-detox with the kids; and I’m trying to sort goals, resolutions, and to-do lists.  Thank goodness for vacations and thank God for His blessings.  Happy 2012 and may you see Him work this year!

     

     

     

  • April25th

    I hope everyone had a fabulous Easter.  We had a great time with friends yesterday.  Kade had a bowl of cereal yesterday morning and about 3 bites of ham at lunch and I’m pretty sure that the rest of the calories consumed were some form of candy…so you can imagine what his energy level was!  Luckily (?) grandparents had sent out a Dancing/Singing Bunny for the kids and Kade spent most of the day hopping along with that.  Last night he slept for 14 hours straight!  Nothing like that crash after a sugar high…

    As promised, here are a couple before and after pics of what I worked on last week for our Easter table.  I wanted dessert to be able to double as a centerpiece, so I made little nests out of chocolate and Chow Mein noodles and then filled them with chocolate eggs.  Then I covered some floral foam (because it happened to be cheaper than styrofoam) with moss so I would have something to hold my cake pops.

    I didn’t have 12 matching napkin rings, so I whipped up these out of some cardboard and leftover scrapbook ribbon.  The napkins I had left over from the last time we hosted Easter – they were white ones from Bed Bath & Beyond that I just dyed at home.

    Next I wanted some flowers for the table, but didn’t want to fork over the cash for real blooms.  So instead I did a quick Google search for tissue flowers and then made these one night while watching TV.  I think they turned out pretty cute, especially with the jelly beans filling the vase instead of water.

    And my favorite project this week was attempting Bakerella’s Cake Pops.  These took absolutely forever, but since I’m not doing them every week, I think they were totally worth it.

    But the real cuties of the day were, of course, Berlin and Kade.  Here they are with their Easter baskets, before the sugar high.

  • September23rd

    When we found out #2 was on the way, Kyle and I had the logistics talk.  We ended up deciding that whether the new baby was a boy or a girl, the kids would share a room.  Both of us had shared rooms at one time or another growing up and lived to tell about it, and to be honest, we didn’t want to give up our guest room / office.  After we found out Fritz was going to be a girl, I started brainstorming decorating ideas.

    Kade’s first nursery had a farm theme, which we loved since Kyle and I both grew up on farms and it was very “boyish”.  I don’t have a lot of great pictures of the nursery after we moved to NorCal, but here are a few from when it was set up in our LA condo.

    This time, since it was going to be for a boy and a girl, I thought a nursery rhyme theme would be cute, sort of a “Jack & Jill Nursery”.  Plus I already had a few family pieces that I wanted to incorporated.  My grandmother had made a baby quilt for me and it was nursery rhyme themed.

    And Kyle’s grandmother had given us a couple of wall cut-outs from the 1950′s that used to hang in her children’s room.

    Here is the result.  The nursery rhyme illustrations are from my parent’s antique shop and I painted 3 frames that I picked up at the flea market.  The bunting is made from the scraps my mom sent out.  I had made basket liners and a lamp shade for Kade’s farm nursery, but I modified them to both to fit into this new theme.  And the nursery rhyme nesting blocks I picked up on Etsy.

    I was glad that the grandparent picture frames still worked in my color scheme, and the farm overalls were a great compliment to the vintage pink dress I’d picked up at the flea market.

    My parents gave Fritz her very first doll and below her are the fitted sheets that I made, along with a few pics of the new white eyelet crib bedding.

  • September19th

    This weekend we moved Kade from his crib/toddler bed into his new Big Boy Bed.  To see him tucked into what now looks like a HUGE twin bed for the first time, made me have “a moment” and I came out of his room and collapsed into sobs on Kyle’s shoulder for a good 5 minutes.

    Now you can chalk that reaction up to a pregnant woman whose body is raging with hormones or believe that it’s due to a mother being completely in love with her son and sometimes forgetting that he really is going to grow up, whether or not she’s ready for it.  Either way, after composing myself, I decided that I needed to come up with a better way of dealing with this particular change and celebrating what an amazing road this precious child has taken us down.  So I hope you enjoy my attempt at squeezing 2 years down into a measly 5 minutes (and many many thanks to Kyle who had the patience and expertise to edit the slides whereas I would have just gone with the auto settings).

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