Baby Girl Nursery Reveal

Alright, so the nursery has been mostly done for a while now, I was just waiting on the last touches before I put some pictures up.

But you just want to see pictures, yes? After MUCH deliberation (seriously, it took me forever to decide on a theme – it was so much easier for the boys for some reason), I finally went with a mint/pink/gold floral theme and I love how everything has turned out!

I found the adorable watercolor floral prints on Etsy and printed them out at Costco. The mobile might look familiar – I’ve used it for all three of them now, I just switch out the colors to match my color scheme. ;) And I’m totally in love with the gold polka dot curtains I found at Target. (Okay, there’s actually only one curtain – I still have to get a second one. WHY do retailers only sell you one panel?! Does anyone just put ONE curtain over a window? Or choose two different curtains for one window? Why don’t curtains come in a package of TWO?!?! This is ridiculous…but anyway…)

Here’s a glimpse of the absolutely adorable quilt that our family friend made for us. She also made quilts for the boys and I used them in their monthly pictures. I am SO excited about this flower quilt for baby girl’s monthly pictures!!

Here’s the IKEA dresser that used to be in our room, but we moved to the nursery after I painted those craigslist dressers. It has the same glass knobs that I used on my dresser :) The gallery wall was really fun to put together. I’m excited to have to pictures to put in all the frames! I’d also never made pom poms before so that was fun. I love the way the garland turned out.

I scored on some clearance silk flowers at JoAnn’s – all their spring/summer floral stuff was getting cleared out and I found a wreath of those white and pink flowers and just pulled it apart. It was MUCH cheaper than buying individual stems and the flowers came off the wreath really easily so I was feeling really pleased with myself ;)

And that’s it!! I’m so excited! And I can’t believe that I’m finally due THIS MONTH! Just a couple of weeks left! I. AM. SO. READY. To be done being pregnant that is. Having three kids? Is anyone ever ready for that?!? Eek!

A Dresser of My Own

Okay, so here’s the thing: John and I have shared a dresser our entire married life. We’re coming up on 8 years now, you know. ;) We’ve made it work, but I’ve been excited to have my own dresser at some point. In an effort to find a dresser for baby girl’s nursery, I found 2 dressers on craigslist for $100. Serious steal of a deal, my friends. 2 solid cherry wood dressers for $100! John was hesitant to buy both, because we only needed one for the nursery, but I convinced him that each of us having our own dressers would be awesome and it was too good of a deal to pass up. (He’ll thank me someday) ;) They were on my parent’s craigslist, and my dad was awesome and picked them up for me and then I refinished them at their house. The plan then was to move our current IKEA Hemnes dresser to the nursery and then the refinished dressers would go into our room. It worked out perfectly! (and I finally have my own dresser! yippeeeeee!)

Here’s the before picture:

I got everything sanded and primed one weekend in June and then finished them up when we were at my parent’s for Spencer’s birthday party. 

We got them up to our house a week or so later and I LOVE THEM! I am SO excited for a dresser of my own! I found some beautiful glass knobs on amazon and put them on my dresser and the IKEA dresser for the nursery (the nursery is still a work in progress- pics to come soon!). I then put the old knobs from that IKEA dresser onto John’s new dresser – they were a little more manly than the glass knobs ;)

Here they are all finished!!!!!

I also purchased a few things to style John’s dresser – I think he sometimes feels like my stuff is taking over our room, so I wanted to put together a space just for him. The little chest holds his cufflinks and collar stays and we both totally love the ship piece I found at Hobby Lobby.

I just LOVE walking into our room these days, I love how these turned out!

A Surprise Harry Potter Baby Shower

I helped put together a surprise baby shower for a friend of mine last weekend and I was so excited when we decided on the theme of Harry Potter – because, as you probably know by now, I’ll take any excuse to through a Harry Potter party ;)

I worked with two other girls to put this together and they had some great ideas and I think we put together a great party! It was SO fun to put together such a fun surprise!

This was at the front door when our Mom-to-be got home


They really had the perfect house for all my decorations from our surprise party for my sister-in-law last year – they had the perfect doorway for the train platform brick wall :)


You stepped through the platform and found yourself at Hogwarts, just in time for the feast!
And what a feast we had!


I took the opportunity to make more Harry Potter cookies :)


My cupcakes were rather ill-fated…we were given a temporary passcode to get into the house to decorate and I was the first one to get there. But I couldn’t get the keypad to work! As I attempted to get it to work, I ended up putting down my carrier full of cupcakes onto the ground to try again, but bumped something on the way down, and spilled half my cupcakes over themselves!! :( I was able to salvage most of them, but then later when we were all set up and waiting for the shower to start, one of our floating candles fell off the ceiling…right onto the cupcakes!! Oh well, they still tasted good!




One of the girls got a copy of the first Harry Potter book to use as the guest book – isn’t that such a fun idea?!
And some fun favors for our guests!

I think everyone had a great time chatting and eating and showering our cute mom-to-be with gifts. Yay for baby girls!! :)

The Magical Halloween of 2016

I know I’ve already put these up on facebook but I always have to add them here :) I had so much fun with our costumes this year – love me some Harry Potter!!

I was sorted into Hufflepuff on pottermore.com and I made John take the sorting quiz before making his costume and he got Hufflepuff too! Nathan was a Gryffindor quidditch player and Spencer was our snowy owl. (aka the most adorable owl you’ve ever seen) ;)This is Spencer’s camera face. I promise he smiles. And he actually liked his costume. He started taking the hat off after a while but didn’t have any problems with wearing his outfit. I modified THIS pattern, you’ll recognize it from the year we did Mary Poppins Jolly Holiday :) I wish I’d gotten a picture of the back, his wings totally spread out and it was so CUTE!
My little quidditch player :) I used THIS pattern for all the robes. Or it was more of a set of instructions with a picture of what the pattern pieces were supposed to look like and you had to use your own measurement and draft the pieces yourself. It wasn’t too bad though. I made Nathan’s out of fleece so that he would be nice and warm. Again, I wish I’d gotten a pic of the back, it has his name and a large 3 on the back as his jersey number :)
I made them both little treat bags and they enjoyed trick or treating at all the cars. Spencer liked to put his candy on the ground, then pick it up and put it in his bag. Little weirdo ;) I’m terrible at night photography, so I didn’t get a picture of our trunk, but we had a Hogwarts banner and I strung up battery operated tea lights up with black thread. The black thread was really hard to see so it really looked like the lights were floating on their own. And we had some of our favorite Harry Potter soundtrack songs playing in the car. It was pretty awesome if I do say so myself!
Hope everyone had a great Halloween this year!

Hot Air Balloon Baby Shower

So a week after I threw Spencer’s birthday party, I was throwing a baby shower (July has been a crazy month for me, if you couldn’t tell ;) ) for a cute girl that I visit teach. She chose the theme of hot air balloons (she’s having a baby girl) and it was such a fun theme to work with! And I had lots of wonderful ladies help me out by providing the location for the shower and bringing food and preparing games, which was so wonderful!
I didn’t get as many pictures as I would have liked of the actual shower, but I got some shots of the set up before people arrived and started eating all the goodness ;)

We played some very fun games that my friend Charity put together (THANKS Charity!).  We started with a name the animal baby game, and then we played a game where you had to pull out safety pins from a bowl of rice while blindfolded (a lot harder than it sounds) and then finished up with a very fun matching game where you got candy when you made a match. We ate yummy food and visited and the mom-to-be opened gifts. Thanks to everyone who helped make this shower happen, I really appreciate it! And I hope my friend’s baby girl comes soon! We are excited to meet her!

A Milk and Cookies Birthday Party

A little late, but here are pictures from our cute milk and cookies party that we had for Spencer for his first birthday! I had sooooooo much fun putting it together. We had the party at my parent’s house and we were able to have it before my mother-in-law went back to CA, so that was really fun for us.

We had lots and lots and LOTS of cookies!

Milk and Cookie cookies!
The party favors were these milk cartons filled with cookie crisp. ;)
I finally got a picture of this face!! Spencer has been making this face for a while now, but I haven’t been able to get it on camera. Love it!
Some of our little friends enjoying the food – for dinner we served pasta salad, strawberry spinach salad and pigs-in-a-blanket
Since it was going to be hot, we had kiddie pools and a water table to beat the heat.


We gave Spencer his smash cake, which he mostly squished, and then threw onto the floor…*sigh*…I thought for sure he would down the thing, he eats everything! Nope.
Then we ‘opened’ gifts – when really I opened them, tried to stop Nathan from opening them and tried to get Spencer involved. He was more interested in eating the tissue paper.
After a little playtime it was time to get everyone cleaned up and off to bed.

Overall I’d say it was a success! Thank you to everyone who came out to celebrate our sweet boy with us!