Grayson's First Easter

We had a really low key Easter this year. It was so nice to just have a quiet day and relax. We went to 11:00 mass and then went home for appetizers and to cook dinner. We stopped by to see our friends and Grayson's sweet Godparents later in the afternoon and then spent the rest of the day in our comfy clothes.

The Easter Bunny(ies) spoiled Grayson big time this year. He got a basket from his Gram, from his Auntie Caitlin and from the real bunny himself!  Of course he didn't have any idea what to do with his baskets but he was pretty excited to show off his cute bunny ears.

The Easter Bunny brought him a cloth swim diaper, some sunnies, sunscreen, a monkey rattle, some bubbles, a teething ring, and most importantly, some candy for mama!

 

This was definitely a special Easter, it being Grayson's first and all but for me it held an even more precious meaning this year. Last year at Easter we were well past a year of trying to get pregnant, we had met with doctors and done fertility testing and found that it was unlikely that I would be able to get pregnant without intervention. I will never forget sitting in church on Easter Sunday last year and having a silent conversation with God. Asking why not us? Why not now? Asking impatiently, when? It seemed so far out of reach that we would have our baby by the very next Easter! This year I sat in church for about 10 minutes before Grayson started to fuss and we headed out to the lobby to stand with the rest of the babies and mamas. We stood and rocked and eventually he fell asleep and I couldn't help but feel like the most fortunate person in the world. We are truly blessed this year.

The dogs even got into the spirit! Clearly they weren't as amused as me but how cute are they?

 

Happy Easter, bunnies! 

House Tour Blog Hop

Mande over at Sweet Home Alabama has nominated me to share a quick peek into our home for a House Tour Blog Hop. I'm embarrassingly late and this was supposed to be posted over a month ago. But,  our house was undergoing a bit of a face lift and every piece of furniture from every single bedroom was piled into our living rooms and kitchen and I wasn't about to share what that looked like.  Anywhooo, you know I love me a House Tour and I'm excited to share our fall decorations! {Confession: Fall is down, and Christmas is up in full force at our house. Nope, no respect for the turkey what so ever. We've been keeping the blinds closed so our neighbors can't catch a glimpse of all the twinkle lights in the house...}

Welcome!

This time of year our house smells amazing. We've got pumpkin candles burning in every room of the house and warm spicy smells coming from each Scentsy warmer. Now that it's finally starting to cool off I'm ready to get my crock pot cookin' and those smells are even better.

This is the view when you walk in through the front door. Our cozy little living/dining room.

 

 

I love this bar cabinet that I refinished last year. It's so much fun to keep decorated for every season and I always try to have my chalkboard sign say something cute and festive.

Our kitchen had a major makeover this year. We replaced our very fancy blue counters with granite and tiled the backslash ourselves. I'm planning to reface all of the cabinets next summer and we will be replacing all of the floors {adios blue laminate!} throughout the house with wood by this time next year. We are trying to stretch each of these expensive projects over time.

Our bedroom also had a makeover this summer and I love the colors we chose. It's very different from the warm bold colors we have in the rest of the house but it feels so relaxing and comfy.


Clearly it was really important to Teddy that he be featured in this post.

This is the courtyard off of our room. Nick's mom decorated it for us for a housewarming gift when we first moved in. {I told you, she's a walking Pinterest board}It is such a perfect little space. Sometimes in the summer we turn on the fountain and eat dinner out here. Like our own private little restaurant patio.

 

To the left is our master bathroom which is also on the list for a makeover sometime next year. New floors, new paint, counters, remove all the crazy mirrors, and new fixtures. I can't wait until it's all done.

We spend 90% of our time in the family room. It flows into the kitchen so anytime we have people over for dinner or anything else,  everyone ends up in these two rooms.

The first bedroom off of the family room we have turned into a gym and will double as my home office after maternity leave is over. Nothing exciting to see there.

Our guest bedroom, {also known as my personal clean laundry dump} is one of our favorite rooms. I think Nick wishes we lived in this room instead of the master. The colors are so cheerful and bright. I had some prints made from our anniversary trip and hot air balloon ride last year and hung them on the wall in here. I love how this room turned out. The guest bathroom is nothing exiting to look at. We'll just leave it out. Okay? Okay.

Down the hall is G's little room. All we have to do now is the fun part... decorate! It's the smallest in the house and I was a little anxious about how everything was going to fit in here.  But it came together beautifully! Stay tuned for a nursery post once it's all done.

Our backyard is home to Nick's garden and monster tomato plants. We love our fire pit and use it all the time. We got it for a housewarming present from a family friend and love it so much. Eventually we will be pulling out all of the concrete and replacing it with more lawn and better landscape.

We've already winterized the patio furniture. All the fun pillows and pads are stored in the garage for the winter.

Make sure you go back to Mande's post to see her seriously beautiful home too!

Mother's Day

 

My mom came down on Saturday to spend the weekend with us. I picked her up from the train station on Saturday morning and grabbed some breakfast from Whole Foods and sat out on the patio and did some catching up. I had booked us a couples massage in the afternoon  and I know that sounds funny but it was so much nicer to be in the room together!

We spent the rest of the day shopping around for my sister's little bambino, eating lunch, and relaxing. Saturday night we cooked dinner and waited for Nick to come home from Napa. {He went up Friday night to take his mom on a date on Saturday.}

We hosted Mother's Day brunch at our house. It was so much fun to have both of my favorite mama's together. Nick's parents and sister came over to have brunch and spend the day relaxing outside.

I put together some of our favorite breakfast dishes; crescent roll sausage & egg casserole, candied bacon {omg yum!}, granola and yogurt fruit parfaits and of course many mimosas. I major failed at taking photos all weekend.

We said goodbye to my mom last night at the train station and she headed back home. We had such a fun weekend and loved having my mom here to visit.

I hope everyone had a wonderful Mother's Day!

Merry Merry Christmas!

We had the most wonderful Christmas! I think this year was the best one yet.

Nick and I both took Christmas Eve off so our vacation started Monday night {Christmas Eve Eve}. I picked him up from his company holiday party and we packed the dogs in the car and drove around our neighborhood to look at Christmas lights.

Our crazy neighbor!
via

When we got home I made a cozy bed on the living room floor for our Christmas tree sleep over. We snuggled in bed with The Santa Clause on my laptop and had the coziest sleep ever!

 

 

 Christmas Eve morning we woke up and had coffee in bed and opened our stockings. We started a tradition a few years ago of just getting each other stockings when we were broke new homeowners. It kind of stuck and has become one of my favorite parts of Christmas.

 

 

We packed all of our presents into the car and headed to the in-loves for pre-church happy hour. Because, I don't care what you say, singing at church is always more fun after a cocktail. We went to the 4:00 Children's Mass which I love and then Christmas Eve dinner on the harbor.

 

Via

We went home to play Christmas Rummy {another favorite family tradition} and didn't go to bed until 2:00.

 

We woke up late on Christmas morning for Portuguese sausage and presents. The rest of the family came over in the afternoon and we ate and drank the day away and ended the night with annual M family charades.

Our favorite littles!

All of the girls

 

Friday was back to work for a half day and then we loaded up more presents into the car for a quick 5 hour drive to see my family in Mt. Shasta. There is usually tons of snow this time of year, but this year there was hardly any. Instead, every lake is frozen over solid. It was so nice to get to spend a belated Christmas weekend with both of my parents and my sister & brother in law. We just love them all so much!

 

The Best Way to Spread Christmas Cheer...

Is singing loud for all to hear!

 

Or...

 

Spending $100 {look away husband!} to send a pretty Christmas card to everyone you love.

 

Christmas cards. There are few things I love more than Christmas cards. When I was growing up my parents sent the kind of Christmas card where they would write a two page letter about every single thing each family member had done that year. My mom would say things like "Camille likes to climb up on the roof and read books. {I did love doing that} She can read an entire Box Car Children book in one sitting!" and I would die of embarrassment. Then they would attach some family photos that they had taken when we were on a hike somewhere. My bangs would be entirely too fluffy or crooked and I would probably be wearing pants that didn't quite reach the tops of my shoes.

 

I have been impatiently waiting to send my own Christmas cards for like..  years. The year we got engaged we didn't send one because our Save the Dates went out in January and it was too close to Christmas to send both. The year we got married our thank you cards went out in November and it was too close again to send a Christmas card. Both of those were covered in engagement photos and wedding photos and we figured that if we sent people one more picture of us they were going to unfriend us forever.

 

Each year our fridge has been covered in other people's Christmas cards. This is my favorite thing in the whole world. I love seeing our friends chubby babies, pets, and smiling faces all December long. I love opening Christmas card mail. So, I was particularly excited knowing that this year was finally my year to send a Christmas card along with everyone else. Or so I thought...

 

{Here is where I'm going to complain.} I don't know if it's because Thanksgiving was a week late, giving us one less week between Holidays for Christmasy types of things {ahem... like sending me my Christmas card} or maybe everyone actually did unfriend us after receiving too many photos in the mail. Either way we have so far received 2 cards this year. Two. One is from our mortgage agent. The other from Nick's dentist. I won't lie, I'm a little sad about it.

 

Either way I am in love with how our {first!!} card turned out and I will hope for more cards next year.

 

Merry almost Christmas friends!!

 

It's Beginning to Look A lot Like Christmas! - Holiday Home Tour

I'm linking up with Kelly from Kelly's Korner for one of my favorite posts of the year, the Christmas Tour of Homes! I have always loved Kelly's Home Tours and I'm excited to do mine for the first time this year.

I love our house at Christmas time. I think that it feels so much prettier and so much cheerier with our Christmas decorations up. The paint colors that we chose when we bought the house complement our Christmas decorations so well that it feels like our house is supposed to be filled with Christmas all the time!

Let's do a little home tour shall we?



We will start in the living/dining room. This is the first room that you see when you come in from outside. It's a cozy room that unfortunately we never ever use. I love the couch in this room so much and I think I have only used it maybe twice. Mostly the dogs just sit on it. It's a tragedy.

This coat hook is where Cubby keeps his favorite Santa costume

These photos make our front room look orange. It's red.

Each year we choose a theme to base our decorations on. This year I chose Burlap & Berries. I bought a couple yards of burlap for my tree skirt and some burlap ribbon to make the bows for my tree. {Teddy has already eaten half of them. Please excuse the uneven bow to ball ratio!} They had some berry spray for cheap at Jo-Anne's. I pulled them apart and added the berries to detail my tree and to different accents throughout the house.

We have so much hurricane glass left over from the wedding. I took some of the berry spray and twisted them in the hurricanes and plopped a candle in the middle. Pretty and cheap!

I rescued this cabinet this year from our friend's garage and refinished it by painting it black. It's my new favorite thing to decorate for each holiday. We use it as a liquor cabinet and to display all of the pretty stemware we got for wedding presents.

We've always kept a small tree in our room. I love being snuggled in bed with a Christmas movie on and our pretty little tree all lit up next to it. This year it is doubling as our "fertility tree" my mom gave us the angel that is on the tree with three little babies. She gave these fertility angels to both me and my sister right when we were starting to try to get pregnant. My sister recently gave us the little baby birdie nest. She said to use it to call our little baby home. A positive pregnancy test is #1 on my wish list this Christmas!

One of my favorite parts of our family room is the fire place and mantle. I think it's pretty all year long but I especially love it with our Christmas lights and garland on it. I finally broke down and got our monogrammed stockings from Pottery Barn this year and I love them so much! They are the perfect size for all kinds of goodies and look so pretty on our mantle.

I made this burlap wreath for the front door earlier this year. Since our front door already has a wreath for Christmas, I brought the wreath inside and pulled the monogram off of it and added some berries. I hung it on the mirror at the end of the hallway with a Command hook. I love this wreath.

Here are just a few decorations in the kitchen.

The little Christmas village in the kitchen bay window is the village that I grew up with. My mom never put it up anymore and gave it to us this summer. I used to love setting it up when I was a little kid and playing with all the people. Now it doubles as a cute little light display.

So, there you have it. Our little Christmassy home!

Thanks for visiting!