Week o' Camping (at someone else's house)

I meant to take a picture of the newest addition to our home: a new air conditioning unit. Yep. The upstairs unit kicked the bucket and had to be replaced. We ended up staying at Mike's parents' house Wednesday night through most of Saturday which was the earliest we could get anyone to take care of it. I am soooo thankful not only that Mike's parents rescued us once again (we had to stay at their house for the same reason a month ago) but that we live close enough that it wasn't nearly as much trouble as it would have been if we were still in Lakeland. For Autumn, it was basically a mini-vacation full of tent sleeping,


Swimming,


And general spoiling. :)


Quick funny story...Autumn is usually a chatterbox in the car. She says some of her funniest stuff in the mornings on the way to school. Well, Thursday, Autumn was dead silent the whole trip. Finally, I got concerned and at a red light turned around to see if she was awake. This is what I saw:


I asked her what she was doing and she said, "I'm reflecting the sunlight on the car." Ha!

One fun thing that Autumn's learning at home and school is how to write. She can spell her name and can usually spell something if she has help sounding it out but the one thing she hasn't quite figured out is that you're supposed to put all the letters in a row. So today at Macaroni Grill, she was spelling a bunch of stuff. By the time she was done, it looked like the scribblings on a madwoman's wall!


Also, here's a preview of what's coming on my other blog this week. I made Autumn a dress!


(Oh, and everyone say a prayer for me Tuesday. I'm having my hernia surgery!)

A Much Better Week and Weekend!

I mean, it wasn't going to take much to top last weekend, was it? :) I'm not complaining, though. Miss Autumn is doing great and I'm soooooo glad. She babied her left arm a bit but by Tuesday she was completely back to normal. Pretty awesome! I think something that helped was having stuff to do to distract her. I didn't take any pics this week with my regular camera but I got a few with my camera phone. Sunday, my mom and sister came over with Roxie. My mom was a little uncertain about playing with Autumn but I told her to pretend nothing happened and play normally and I think that really helped. By the way, apologies for the flashy eyes in some of these.


Monday was a work day for us since it was rainy. I just didn't feel up to running errands in the rain. Autumn decided to pretend that she was at the park with her sheep and they had a picnic in our still-furniture-less living room.


On the day we finally did make it to the store, Autumn dressed herself in this. :)


She's gotten rather opinionated on her clothes. I don't really mind unless it's a day where the weather's just not going to work with what she's got her heart set on. Thursday she decided to wear her octopus shirt to school. We had aikido on Thursday. I watched her to see how she'd do with her elbow and everything went really smoothly. No problems, no babying the elbow, nothing. She was too excited about her octopus. :)


Another thing that was kind of neat about Thursday is that Autumn took her change to school to donate to the school's change drive. She has a little money in this mickey bank she got for her birthday, mostly change she finds or my mom gives her. But she also has some coins she carries around in this tiny teakettle--this teakettle also houses a stuffed heart and two buttons. Pretty cute, huh? Anyway, they made coin banks and she was soooo excited about it that she got her coins out of her teakettle and put them in her new coin bank to take her change to school. I made sure she knew that she was giving the money away permanently and when she stayed certain, I gave her all my change, too.


Friday was another day of fun and distraction. I can't believe I forgot my camera for this, but we went over to Penny's house and had a ton of fun playing with her two dogs. Autumn loves her Aunt Penny and loves the dogs, too. So much so that she drew Ace and Conan some pictures. I wish you could have seen her telling Conan to "sit!" and "let go!" :) We also fed some geese and walked about their neighborhood's lake. By the end of the visit, both kid and dogs were totally exhausted. I did get one Friday picture--I finally got Autumn to do some ponytails without immediately taking them out.


To round out our week, Autumn and I did some gardening. Kurt, who landscaped Mike's parents house and came to do the trees we can't do ourselves had suggested we remove some bushes that had died in one corner of our yard and put in some blueberry bushes. So that's what I did this weekend! It was exhausting, haha. Mike was trying to do yard work at this house and our house that hasn't sold yet so I didn't want to ask him to do it. I got all but one bush out. The last was just too big so he finished that up. Autumn spent the whole time I was clearing space yesterday and the time today that I planted the new bushes and the strawberries (I have a strawberry patch in another spot!) digging holes, cleaning up, and fetching things for me.

After we were done and cleaned up yesterday, Mike and I were in the hallway talking about what still needed to be done. When I called out for Autumn, asking where she was, she called back, "I'm being comfy." We tracked her to her room and found her sitting in her stuffed animal box with her pillow. Definitely comfy.


And that's pretty much it! One week after our Great Elbow Drama, things are going pretty well so I guess I'll sign off with our first official sign of spring: a pink, smocked dress for church this morning. :)

Celebrations, Part 1

This week, Autumn and her papa celebrated her upcoming little brother together!


:D Not really, but she looks so happy! Also, here's a blast from the past...Mike appears to enjoy photographing our daughter with his vices:


:D

Anyway, last week we had one baby shower and two birthday parties! The shower was at our house and it turned out really great. It was for one of our community group members. Elyse is having a baby girl and has one little boy named Micah who is just the sweetest little kid.


I got to decorate the house (with some help from Cheri!). It turned out a litttttle pinker than I intended but it's so happy and spring-like that I have left all the decor on the tables.


Inside each lantern, I put a nest and an egg. Dede brought some cute birds and I added those to the mix.


Even the cupcakes were pink! Tara did the cupcakes and I made the toppers from the invitation I ordered on Etsy.


Here's the breakfast room table.


And here we are! This is my community group. The husbands are in Mike's group. We meet on the same night which is nice. Also, ignore my hair. It's being crazy in this picture. And you can't really tell because of the black, but I'm definitely showing. It was funny, today at church I had a couple of people people go, "are you....???" I think no one is ready to be like OMG YOU'RE PREGNANT because I am still a little at that "pregnant? or donuts?" stage, to use a phrase from a blog I like.


Ok, I just realized that if I post my pics from the two birthday parties, this post will be just ridiculously long. So I better wait and do a part two later. I hope everyone is doing well!

The First of Many (I hope)

SO! We had a small party, right? This was a great opportunity to do what I love the most (throwing parties) but also gave a push to get some finishing touches on the house. Cheri (who did donnie and Liz's flowers) came over and got our shelves and tabletops looking truly amazing with the stuff I already had...and borrowed from Lainey. :D You'll recognize some of the table decor from Donnie and Liz's rehearsal dinner. Living around the corner from my in laws ftw!!

Here's a picture of one side of the bookcases in our living room. The only thing I changed from what Cheri did was I added the gorgeously illustrated Zen Ghosts book to the bookshelves and took down something Mike wanted in his office instead. I love the how the book looks there so I think I'll switch out for another book in the series when we decorate for Christmas.


Remember this?
Craziness.


The other side. There's also a nice little table setup behind the rock banders that I don't have a photo of. All we need is furniture. Or not! We have a great open space for playing rock band and charades, hahaha.


Here's my first buffet in this house. I didn't make enough savory food but I think it ended up being okay.


See that little black bowl?


There's vampire blood in it. :D It's hand sanitizer that I got for what was going to be Liz's halloween bachelorette party before they moved the wedding up.


This is what the former owners used as a desk. I USE IT FOR CHOCOLATE.


Everything's good with chocolate, right? Well, some things more than others. Every year I adjust and add to the chocolate dipping bar. Last year, the runaway favorite addition was donut holes. Tamara brought those for me this year. The new surprise favorite? Waffles.


I got a little theme happy with the drinks.


I got the printables from Hostess with the Mostess. If you ever have to plan a party and need a theme or ideas, make that site one of your first stops, for real.


I absolutely could not resist these bottles.


Mike's dad got creative with covering up a loose step we have in the front yard. He took this creepy little pumpkin man that my mom got us (she does that a lot. Remember the coconut monkey?) and put a flashlight in it.


Now for some costumes! I was sooooo happy because everyone but my brother came in costume. Seriously. It was so much fun. If we ever have another Halloween party, I want to be sure to install someone at the front door to take pictures of everyone in costume because I didn't get nearly enough photos. But, I got a few cute ones. Penny was a kitty and so was Frank's wife Emily.


Valerie came as a boy (complete with black eye) and brought Miss Roxie as a whoopie cushion. Maaaan. So cute and weird!


Tamara was...guess who? Landon is in the rock band pic above as a zombie. The "braiiiiins" he wrote my dry erase board is still there. XD


We had not one, but TWO Indiana Joneses!


After discovering that Cathy was mostly sure her gun was unloaded, Mike decided he'd rather pose with Annie Oakley in the beginning duel position rather than the ending.


I wish I could photoshop either Mike's real eyes into this or maybe those Pirates of the Caribbean Captain Jack eyes on his eyelids because this is an otherwise great picture.


These guys win for creativity...Matt and Jamie were the Black Eyed Peas. I love it!


I love this picture. Notice Donnie rocking out in the background. Also notice Matt from Kali's (as opposed to the above Matt from community group) cool coat cuff.


Anyway, that was our first real party here at the new house! It even ended on a funny note: our neighbor came by and told us he had called the police to complain about our party noise. The police didn't come into our house because you couldn't actually hear anything from outside. Insisting that it was, in fact, our party making the noise, the neighbor decided to come over himself which I wish he had done in the first place because he would have discovered it wasn't us without dragging the poor police out on a wild goose chase.

Apparently, there was another party in the neighborhood that was very loud. When the neighbor asked if it was our radio that was playing (and I could hear what he was talking about), I was able to tell him no because at that point, the 5 remaining people were standing in the hallways getting ready to leave and we had no more music or rock band going. :D He came over the day to apologize and that was very nice. But it does tell us a little about our neighbors. They are really going to hate our Christmas parties!

Alll righty, this is really long. I'll go ahead and split my post in two, hopefully before Tuesday so I can get caught up! But since this post is noticeably Autumn-light, say hello to Princess Bunny.


:) Every day is Halloween at our house.

When I don't post on Sundays...

...I get emails and text messages which is actually really cool. :D Yesterday I had an excellent reason for not posting which I will go into later. FIRST THINGS FIRST:

Autumn's First Ice Cream Man Experience!

Over the weekend, we had an epic cleaning, sorting, and unpacking experience spurred by the tireless energies of Lainey and Papa D. Saturday when we were all kind of drooping, hungry, and aching all over, Papa D suddenly jumped up, grabbed Autumn, and leapt out the door. In the wake of all this activity, Donnie, Liz, Mike and I were kind of blinking in surprise while Lainey explained that he had heard the ice cream truck. So, I grabbed my camera, shoved it at Donnie who's a better photographer than I, and ran out the door.


Autumn got the idea pretty quickly and, of course, wanted the pink ice cream.


She was thrilled=understatement.


We all got ice cream, which was even better. Liz and I got orange dreamsicles which is what I now crave every time I look into my almost-completed orange bathroom (which looks awesome tyvm). Mmmm. Orange dreaaaamsicles.


Autumn's ice cream ended up being roughly the size of her head...


So it got transferred to a bowl.


Our ice cream ended up being our first "meal" eaten in our breakfast room! How cool is that? The weekend really was fantastic and exhausting all at once. We all banded together and got almost all the boxes unpacked and almost everything is in the room where it belongs. Is it all put away? No, hahaha. But it's almost all in the right general location. We've even gotten a lot of the outside worked on. Kurt the Amazing Landscaper came and worked on some of our horribly out of shape trees last week. Boppa and I got all the beds weeded and Mike sprayed them and mowed. Donnie took a few shots of the house that are pretty awesome.


The place is really starting to look more like a home and less like a jungle. This was Donnie's favorite photo. On the left are the crape myrtles that the tree people cut all the way to nubs right at the end of the time when it's safe to do something like that. We thought the trees would never be okay again but they came back just fine.


I wish I had a good photo of the backyard before all the work that was done. You wouldn't even recognize it. There's actually sunlight!


Most of the work that we did was inside the house. Probably my favorite thing that was done is this:


My first china cabinet!!! I am sooo excited! Those of you who have been around when I am setting up or taking down from a party know that I have a ton of entertaining equipment. In our teeny former home, it was in the attic, in cabinets, in the laundry closet...just wherever I could stash it. And it's all stuff I use! Now it can all go in the kitchen and breakfast area (it's still stashed in all kinds of places but at least it's all within the same area! and not the attic!) which is awesome. Lainey did all this and I am so thankful because I was looking at all the boxes and then looking at the cabinet and feeling really overwhelmed.

Anyway, it was a long weekend but so great. There's a lot to do but not as much as there was before, thank goodness. But, really, it was hilarious because last night, mike and I were so tired that we were delirious. have you ever been so tired that you laughed like a maniac at everything, no matter how stupid? That was us. :P

Now, I will close out this looong post with the little miss having her morning tea. She says, "hold it with TWOOOO hands, mama!"