Happy Thanksgiving!

We are spending the day enjoying family and friends and good food. Hope you are doing the same!

-Lauren-

Our Weekend

Brr! It is cold and rainy here today! A perfect day to stay inside and watch movies and do a little Christmas decorating! Yes, I am decorating before Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is so late this year, so I figured we should get the most out of our Christmas decorations!

We did some Thanksgiving celebrating this weekend. Jon’s parents rented a place down in New Braunfels for the weekend and all of the extended family spend the day there on Saturday celebrating an early Thanksgiving. We had a great time with everyone! I think it is safe to say that Aedan has lost any shyness he may have had when he was younger. He was making new friends left and right and pretty the life of the party!

Adelaide did pretty well. We tried to get her to take her afternoon nap, but it was a no go. She was pretty happy, but really just wanted Jon or I to hold her, which made for a long afternoon/evening!

My sister came in town Saturday night and we spend Sunday hanging out. We did some shopping yesterday and caught a late showing of Catching Fire after the kids went to bed. She is here until tomorrow and we are planning on staying in comfy cloths and relaxing around the house today!

Happy early Thanksgiving!

-Lauren-

Giveaway Winner!

 

Thank you guys for participating in my Christmas card giveaway from Shutterfly!

Random.org picked comment 2 so Jen, that means you! I can’t wait to see your Christmas cards!! I have sent you and email and passed your email address on to Shutterfly. They should be sending you a code soon!

I’ll be ordering our Christmas cards soon and I will be participating in Faith’s Christmas Card Carousel again this year so you will see our cards up here on December 18th!

Hope everyone has a great weekend!

-Lauren-

Family Pictures!

Here are a few of my favorites from our family picture session a couple of weeks ago. I think they turned out really well! My friend Jenny took them for us and if you live near us you should check out her website here.

 

Now if I could just decided on a Christmas card to use!

-Lauren-

Christmas Cards and a Giveaway!!

I love sending and receiving Christmas cards! I have blogged about them every year since I started blogging. You can see our cards from  last year here. Aedan looks like such a baby and well, Adelaide was such a baby!!

We had family pictures taken last weekend and I can not wait to pick out cards for this year!

I have been using Shutterfly for our Christmas cards (as well as any shower invitations I have ordered) for the past few years. They have such a great selection and their customer service is awesome.

In fact earlier this year, I ordered some invitations for my best friend’s baby shower. Right after I submitted my order, I realized I had misspelled the street name. I immediately called customer service and the representative that helped me was great! She looked up my order, made the changes and sent me a proof to okay the change. The invitations still arrived ahead of schedule too!

Back to Christmas cards…this year Shutterfly has tons of options with some new designs and styles.

New card design styles for 2013  include 5x7 folded tri fold & back of card designs

o Classic: Traditional colors, iconic illustrations, aspirational sentiments, snowflakes, monogram

o Contemporary: trend forward colors, texture and layering, water color techniques, shine, glitter, Instagram pictures are perfect for this style

o Whimsy: humor and nostalgia meet, fun sentiments

o Merry and Bright: all about color and having fun

o Religious: metallic type treatments, incorporated story ideas

o Photo Basics: multiple colors, vertical type, family name highlights

You can check out all the options here, but below are some of my favorites (click on the image to go directly to that cards page).

I love that you can write a little blurb under each picture in this one…

I love the simplicity and the colors of this one…

I like the bright colors of this one…

And how much fun are these photo gifts?

iPad cases…

And phone cases for both the galaxy and iPhone…

 

So what about you? Do you enjoy picking out and sending Christmas cards?

Shutterfly is graciously allowing me to host a giveaway for $50 off a total order (plus free shipping) to one reader! All you have to do is check out their 2013 collection of holiday cards and leave a comment on this post telling me your favorite holiday card. Those of you reading from Facebook…make sure to leave a comment under this blog post and not in Facebook.

This giveaway is open from now until November 20th at 6pm. I will use random.org to select a winner. Only one comment per person and make sure to leave me an email address within the comment so I can contact the winner. I will email the winner as well as announce it in a post on the 22th.

-Lauren-

This is a sponsored post, I am being compensated in the form of free products. However the thoughts and opinions are all my own. I have used Shutterfly many times in the past for both cards and invitations and have always been happy!

12 Month Stats–Adelaide

We had Adelaide’s one year check up on Friday. The doctor said she is doing great and looked perfect.

Since I wasn’t able to include her stats in her 12 month update, I thought I should right them down here before I forget…

She is 28 in. tall (15 percentile)

She weighs almost 19 lbs (18lbs, 13oz to be exact) (13 percentile)

She got two shots and only cried for about a minute. She showed the doctor how she can walk around the room, clap and wave hi/bye and point. She wasn’t too thrilled about him listening to her heart because she just wanted to grab the stethoscope but she cooperated with pretty much everything else. She has 8 teeth and he said after the one that is popping through on the bottom comes in, all she will be missing are molars!

Her next visit will be at 15 months, which just seems so crazy!

-Lauren-

Trick or Treating & More

Okay, last post about Halloween stuff.

On Halloween, we ate a quick dinner and got the kids ready to trick or treat.

Adelaide was dressed up, but rode in the stroller most of the time. Here are a few pictures of Aedan going from house to house.

He was a big fan of ringing doorbells. The houses that just left candy out in a bowl were not so exciting. Ha!

We live on a pretty long street and we almost walked the whole length of it. When we got back to the house, I put Adelaide to bed and then Aedan, Jon and I hung out in the front yard and visited with our neighbors while passing out candy to the older crowd. I think that was Aedan’s favorite part. Next year we may spend more time giving out candy instead of collecting it for ourselves!

Oh and here are a few pictures of Adelaide and her new chair…she loves it!

And one of her jumping out of the chair…which is another favorite activity of hers. Seriously, she is nuts! Haha!

Happy Friday!

-Lauren-

Adelaide’s Birthday Party!

Last Saturday we had Adelaide’s birthday party!

After a week of rainy weather, we had a perfect cool fall day! We had the party in the late afternoon/evening. It was nice because we didn’t feel rushed to get everything ready for an early party.

Jon’s parents were able to stay with us for the weekend, so it was helpful to have two extra sets of hands to entertain the kids while Jon and I got stuff done. Adelaide even wised up and realized that if she wanted to be held, she better start liking people besides mommy and daddy holding her. By the party, she was being passed around between lots of family and doing really well…until she got tired, then she just wanted mommy or daddy again. Sigh.

We served chili for the adults and hot dogs for the kids. I made chocolate cupcakes with butter cream icing. Both a recipe from Jon’s grandmother and both came out great!

We had so much fun hanging out with good friends and family! I still cannot believe she is 1!!

Here are a few pictures…

She really didn’t know what to think about everyone singing happy birthday to her or the cupcake. She mostly went after the icing and then she was done. Ha!

-Lauren-

Phone Pictures!

Monday phone pictures! With Adelaide’s birthday and 12 month update post, I didn’t get a chance to share these last week.

A boy and his best friend…

They both love any kind of car cart…Target needs to jump on this bandwagon because I have a little one that things it is fun to stand up in the regular seat.

Carving pumpkins! Aedan was pretty thrilled to use the drill to get things started. He is really good with it too. Someday he will be the one hanging pictures and curtains for me since someone else hates to do it!

 

Adelaide loves Aedan’s chair. She has this routine down… she lays on her boppy and drinks her bottle, then when she is done, she immediately climbs into Aedan’s chair. She obviously doesn’t mind whether he is already in it or not! Ha! Aedan is pretty happy we got her a chair of her own for her birthday.

She was so proud of herself and waving at us!

Happy Monday!

-Lauren-

12 Months!

Adelaide turned one on Wednesday!

Adelaide, here is what you have been up to lately…

• You weigh about 18.5 lbs, which is about how much Aedan weighed at 5 months! Ha! I’m not sure how tall you are since we don’t have your well-check until next week. I’ll have to update then.
• You wear 12m clothes and size 3 diapers. You don’t have real shoes yet, but you are a size 2.5/3 in those.
• You sleep from 7:30pm-7:30am every night and you usually take a 1.5 hour morning nap and a 2.5 hour afternoon nap.
• We just switched you to milk on Tuesday. I warmed it up, just like we used to warm up your formula and you took it without a blink. Now we just need to work on you taking it colder!
• You love the Ella’s kitchen baby food pouches in every flavor we have tried. You also like applesauce pouches. Other than that, we just give you whatever we are eating. You do okay eating, but as soon as you are done, you start throwing food off your tray, one item at a time, until it is empty. Then you start fussing and signing “all done”. Hiro is enjoying the extra snacks 3 times a day!
• You know how to clap and wave, although you tend to wave with both hands, which is pretty cute.
• You LOVE to climb. If you think it is climbable, you will try it. Your favorite is Aedan’s chair (good thing you got one for your birthday!), any riding toy, stairs and pretty much anything else you can find.
• You love to be held by daddy (and he almost always holds you if you want…spoiled already!).
• You love to get right in the middle of anything Aedan is playing with. I left both of you in the playroom one morning for a few minutes. You both started off playing at opposite sides of the room, but by the time I came back, you were pretty much sitting on him. Obviously he loves this. Ha!
• You like to swing, but prefer to climb and go down the slide (with help).
• You like to dump out bins of toys and then clean them back up again.
• You love to look at books or be read to.

Adelaide, you are so special to us and we love you so much! I still can’t believe you are one and I know this next year is going to go by even faster! Love, mommy.

-Lauren-