House Tour - Ava's Room

Now that the house is finally done (is any house really ever done?) I'm excited to show it off to all of you! Ava's room is definitely one of my favorites; it's bright and cheery, and I just smile every time I walk in there. I think I had the most fun doing this room, mainly because it was the first time I got to do a little girl's room. Up until now Ava has always shared a room with us, so it was fun to do something different.

The focal point of this room (and what was the most time-consuming) is definitely the walls. I originally had it as just pink and cream, but I actually thought it was too girly and just lacking something, so I added the blue and green. I'm so glad I did because I love how it turned out!

I made these paintings when we were still living in the townhouse, and I reused some of Ava's birthday party decorations in her room.

 I found these cute vintage illustrations years ago and never knew where to put them, now I do!

My sister-in-law, Anne made this adorable barrette holder (and most of the barrettes too!) for Ava's birthday.

I love this rug from Target. It is so soft, and it's pretty darn adorable when I walk in to find Ava and Riley laying down on it reading books.

I like having a lot of Ava's toys out where she can easily get to them herself. This Ikea shelf is perfect because it's short enough that she can reach the stuff on top, and the cubes are great for hiding the smaller, messier toys. I also really like the totes because they make it easy to rotate her toys. She usually only plays with what she can see, so every once in awhile when it seems like she's getting bored with what's out, I put those toys in the totes and pull out other ones, and it's like she's got all new toys again!

 

So, there's Ava's room. I still want to make some drapes, and I'd love to find more cute little vintage treasures, but I'm really happy with it so far.

Ava Turns Two!

Well, it has been absolutely insane around here lately! This little munchkin turned two last week! Which meant that we were running around crazy trying to get the house unpacked, painted, and decorated. Even though we've been here for over three months, when we sent the invitations out less than two weeks before the party the house still resembled an episode of Hoarders, but we somehow managed to get it all done (we've found that we work better with a deadline)!

Of course, during all of the craziness this little blog has been completely neglected. But, I have a ton of ideas for it, and now that Ava's birthday is over, and we're finally finished with the house I am so excited to get started on them. I hope to be making some changes around here including a much needed blog makeover, and some fun new features, including one that requires me to really step out of my comfort zone - eek!

But, before we get to all of that I wanted to give you a little peek of Miss Ava's birthday party. She is crazy about Sesame Street, so picking a theme was pretty easy. I had a lot of fun making the decorations - even if I was still finishing up an hour before everyone got here!

 

 

Happy Birthday Sweet Pea!

Christmas and Catching Up

So, this post is a little late, it was supposed to go up yesterday (or a week ago), but we've been pretty lazy around here. It's been nice having Jack and Riley home all week. We did a lot of relaxing and playing with new toys. Ava and I have gotten used to them both being home, it's going to be hard when they go back to school (Jack has off until the 17th, but Riley went back today). So, we were just hanging out enjoying our time together.

We've gotten a few more things done around the house too. We finally got the dining room cleared out enough to actually put the table up because it looked like this for a very long time. Jack's been busy painting our room, and I've been trying to create some sort of organization in my studio. We're quickly running out of time though because Ava's birthday party (I can't believe she's going to be two already!) is at the end of the month, and we're trying to get the house finished by then.

I've also been trying to tackle my long list of to-do projects. Does anybody else have these? Apparently I can't walk out of a thrift store or garage sale without a pile of stuff that "would be really cool if I just painted this, and glued that back on, and then covered this part with fabric and then... etc." It seems as though I've accumulated quite a few of these projects, so I've vowed not to go to the thrift store again until I actually finish a few of them. I can check off a cute little chair for Ava off the list though! I'll be back later to show you the makeover.

But, I realized I haven't put any pictures from Christmas up yet! So, here's what Christmas looked like around here:

Every year we each paint an ornament for the tree - this was Ava's first year!

Much to Jack's dismay, Riley has decided to be a Packers fan, although he says he still likes the Vikings too. I would prefer we just didn't watch football.

Clearly, the dog is very excited it's Christmas morning.

I hope your holidays were happy and stress-free. Thanks to anyone who has made it through this long, rambling, fairly directionless post! Check back later to see Ava's cute new chair.

Getting Our Christmas On

Wow, it's been a really, really long time since I've posted anything. It's been pretty crazy around here; we're still trying to get everything unpacked and get the house all pretty-looking, and then Thanksgiving came and snuck up on us, and now all of a sudden it's Christmas!

Actually, I've put a lot of the unpacking/prettifying things on hold to at least get the living room looking like Christmas around here. And we've spent a good amount of time doing Christmas-y stuff like driving around looking at lights, going to see Santa, and watching far too many Christmas movies. We still need to make cookies, but we can't do that too far in advance or they'll all be gone before we can leave any out for Santa.

A couple of things we attempted to do but failed were going to the Holidazzle parade and to Macy's Santaland. I've lived in Minnesota my entire life and I've never done either. The Holidazzle  parade is well, a parade - outside, in Minnesota, in the middle of December. Yes, that is as crazy as it sounds. Regardless, we still (halfheartedly) tried to go this year, but we didn't factor in just how many people would be there, or how hard it would be to find a parking spot. We took this as a sign (maybe just a sign of poor planning, but still a sign that we were not meant to stand outside freezing, watching a parade in the middle of winter!).

Well, since we were already in Minneapolis, and we had eventually found a parking spot somewhat near Macy's, we decided to check out Santaland. I'd love to tell  you more about it, but I can't because I've never seen it.

When we first walked into the store we found a little station where you could write a letter to Santa and put it into the postal box. Super cute and Riley loved it, he wrote a letter for himself and one for Ava. Then we began walking around the store, and walking and walking. Seriously, this store was huge! And all we wanted to do was find Santa! Finally, we figured out that he was on the eight floor.

So, then we had to find the elevators, shouldn't be that hard, right? Apparently Macy's likes to hide their elevators (and bathrooms). Eventually we found the line for the elevators and waited. And waited some more. Then we got on, and then about thirty more people did too. Then we started going up until we got to the fifth floor, then the doors opened and an employee yelled into the elevator that whoever wanted to see Santa had to get off here. We stepped out and saw the longest line I have ever seen in my life. And we were still three floors away from Santaland!

That's when we turned around and left. We were all a little disappointed, but nobody wanted to spend the rest of the night standing in that line.

We have, however visited Santa at other places, three times in fact. The first two times were practice runs to let Ava get used to him, so we could avoid a similar picture to last year's:

This year she did awesome! This is what she does when we ask her to smile, we call it her "Popeye face":

I'm pretty happy with the picture we ended up with. I think we'll do some practice runs next year too.

I'm not sure why this scan looks so weird.

If you have kids, do you do practice runs with them meeting Santa? Have you been to Santaland, is it worth the line?

Did You Get Your Halloween On?

I can't believe Halloween is already over! Did you have a good one?

Apparently painting and carving pumpkins is serious business that takes a lot of concentration.

A certain little munchkin refused to sit down so we could get a nice picture of the kids with the pumpkins.

I still have no idea who is Riley is, someone from Star Wars: The Clone Wars, I guess. And Miss Ava was going to be a puppy until we stopped at the store to get Riley's costume and she saw Elmo up on the wall. She didn't seem to care that Elmo only came in size 12-18 months, she was going to be "Mo" and that was that. Oh well, they still look pretty darn cute!

Did you go trick-or-treating this year, or hand out candy, or just hide in your home with the lights turned off?

We're Pumpkin Pickers

Last Saturday we decided we needed to get away from all of the painting, unpacking, and general chaos of moving, and get out of the house for awhile. So, we hopped in the car and drove down to Belle Plaine to go to Emma Krumbee's. It was such a beautiful day and we had a lot of fun playing outside.

Is it sad that this is the first time I've ever not gotten my pumpkin from the grocery store? Yeah, you don't need to answer that.

My baby's got mad pony-riding skills.

This one does too.

Somebody was very excited to see "Mo."

It was a great day, exactly what we needed to de-stress and recharge. Have you gotten out and played in a pile of hay lately?