Christmas in Boone!

Since we celebrated Christmas early with our families, we were able to celebrate on Christmas day with just our family of 3!  It was such a treat to not have to travel on Christmas day, and although we missed our families, we had the best time creating new memories with Emery. 

Here are a few traditions that we enjoyed starting/continuing to do this year!  Mailing out Christmas cards, decorating the outside of our home (even did rental this year!)...

and reading the Story of Christmas Advent Calendar Books every day!

Once we got to Boone, we spent the next 3 days creating new traditions of our own!  Starting with a fun hike through the snowy forest!

Lots of kisses to Santa!

Watching a "Elf Yourself" that we made for Emery with other family members pictures... Emery LOVED it and wanted to watch it over and over and over!

Making a gingerbread house with Daddy (and enjoying eating some of the candy while making it!)

Our finished product (thanks Home Depot for the free kit!)

Eating popcorn while watching Christmas movies!

Making cupcakes and singing Happy Birthday to Jesus!

Oh man, our daughter LOVES cake!

Opening new jammies the night before Christmas!

Santa PJs:

CHRISTMAS MORNING -- 2012!

We blew up red and green balloons all over, and Emery had a blast playing with them!

Bubby loved his bone from his stocking!

Making a home made snow globe (thanks Pinterest) and played with our floor nativity puzzle (thanks Uncle Nick!):

Baking a pizza snowman for lunch!

Wrote a letter to Junior (our sponsored child through Compassion) while Emery was napping!

And a park visit in the afternoon!

A wonderful, RELAXING, fun filled Christmas with our family of 3!

What I love most about my home sign -- DIY

On Sunday December 16th, Kyle and I celebrated 6 years of marriage together!  The past 6 years have truly flown by and I feel so blessed to have spent them with my best friend by my side.  I had seen a couple prints on Pinterest with the saying "What I love most about my home is who I share it with" and knew that would be a perfect anniversary gift to Kyle.  And thanks to my couple days in quarantine, I was able to surprise him with it!

First, paint your cut board whatever color you want your letters to be.  We chose a white/cream color: (I sanded off that rough patch in the middle of the board after we painted!)

 
Then place on your silhouette cut vinyl letters:

 Next paint on your background color.  We chose a silver/grey:

 Peel off your letters:

 Then distress with sand paper!  Loved how the white behind the gray came out!

 
And here is Ky with the finished product!  If only I had given him this sign a year ago, as wood is the traditional gift for 5 years!  Oh well, better late than never!

B Family Christmas 2012

Saturday afternoon after Christmas with Kyle's family, we headed over to my parents house to see them!  Thankfully they were up for celebrating Christmas early with our family so that we didn't have to travel to Raleigh two weekends in a row!  Our time together started pretty crazy as Emery accidentally stuck a bead up her nose within our first hour there.  She walked up to me and said "stuck" and sure enough I looked up one nostril and there was a purple bead.  We play with beads together ALL the time, but I think as she was just getting over a cold and had bugars, her fingers were in her nose a lot... no matter if there was a bead in her hand or not!  We tried to get it out ourselves, but ended up going to a nearby urgent care just to be done with it and have the bead not go any higher up.  We now know what to do if it happens again, but for now our beads are packed away for a while :) Don't you worry the famous purple bead is now taped inside her baby book!

After that chaos, we headed over to Tara & Jamie's new house to see it with all their furniture inside and hang out with their family.  Emery was in rare form, so hyper with them that we ended up staying till almost 10!  All my pictures are blurry since we were all laughing so hard, but with tea parties with Samantha and playing dress up with Natalie, Emery had so much fun with their girls!!

Sunday, we had a delicious meal with the whole family and then celebrated Christmas together.  Thank y'all again for celebrating early with us!

Emery had a ball opening her presents from everyone, yes she wanted to wear mommy's red necklace with her outfit :)

Special time with "Ga-pa":

And time with Gigi  (this picture was taken from CLT before we headed to Raleigh!)

A great family Christmas! 

Family Birthdays Sign -- DIY

The next sign we made was for Kyle's mom, as a way to remember all of our birthdays since our family keeps growing so rapidly!  I found this sign on Pinterest, followed her instructions basically to a tee and we are so happy with the outcome!

So, first we bought a piece of cabinet grade plywood, cut it down to 24" long by 6" tall and then routed all the edges to make it look more finished.  Next step was painting the entire thing your text color, we chose a creamy white paint.  Then place on your vinyl letters cut by your silhouette!

While I was then painting the entire sign gray, Kyle started pre drilling holes in the wooden disks for the eye hooks.  This was the hardest part, so buy as thick of disks as you can find!

Coming together! (This is how it looked once I peeled off my vinyl letters!)

Next step was painting the disks.  I chose a different color for each family, so we had a total of 4 colors used.

Once dry either hand write or cut more vinyl letters to put the persons name and day born on each disk.  Open all the eye hooks and connect the disks to the main board and each other if there are 2 or more birthdays in a month.

And VOILA a Family Birthday board!  We love how this one came out and might need to make more of these at some point!

Go Jump in the Lake Sign -- DIY

As I shared in yesterday's post, Kyle and I decided to make a "Go Jump in the Lake" sign for Kyle's dad for Christmas.  I found this one from pinterest ($60-- yikes!), and got to work trying to replicate it! Kyle cut a sheet of plywood 22x30 and routed the edges for me so it wouldn't be so rough.  We borrowed dad's machine for this, thanks again Dad!  Here is Ky getting a quick lesson!

So the first step is to paint your board whatever color you want the letters to be.  We went with a white washed blue. (We bought tester sizes of paint from Home Depot, it was plenty!)

 Next, cut your vinyl letters from your silhouette and draw light pencil lines onto your board to make sure you are placing them correctly (I chose not to buy the $8 transfer paper, so I laid each letter individually -- which actually went pretty quickly!).

 Erase all your pencil marks when you are done and make sure your vinyl is really pressed down on every edge.

 Then paint your whole board your background color, we chose a white/cream color.

Peel off your letters, then take sand paper and antique on edges and certain parts of the board.

We love the way it came out!