Archives for November 2012
Thrifting Treasures
I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving yesterday. We had an amazing day! It was our first time to host, and we had Matt’s extended family over. It was a lot of fun with lots of laughter and family! The benefit of hosting was we hardly had to do any of the cooking. Sweet deal in my book. I can’t wait to share some of these pictures with you! I hope you enjoy the rest of this holiday weekend. I did a little Black Friday shopping last night with my sister-in-law and am now gearing up for my son’s birthday tomorrow. It is crazy busy times, but it is all so fun and full of love. I am truly blessed!
Even though its been a busy week I didn’t want to ignore my Friday Project Spotlight. I wanted to share a quick chair makeover that my sister, Olivia did last week. Olivia is the other half Dancing Zebras, our Etsy craft store.
Olivia, and my niece, Charleigh, were in town for a week. We crafted and did all sorts of fun thrifting shopping adventures. It was a perfect week! My mom was so sweet to watch the boys one afternoon and finish up “school,” so I could have a girls day! So, my sis and I loaded up our girls and went to four thrift stores in a row. It was so fun!
We found lots of good deals and fun things to re-do/re-vamp! Don’t you love Reagan’s Baby Gap hat we found for $1.00?? I love brainstorming with Olivia and dreaming of how to make ugly things beautiful again.
One of Olivia’s amazing finds was this old chair that she redid with a little paint and a pretty piece of fabric! I love it and might secretly be wishing I had bought that chair!
The chair folds up, and it would be so easy to store and yet bring out when you need that extra seat! I love the colors she choose and combined together! She unscrewed the seat, spray painted the chair, then recovered the seat with some fabric she had left over from another project. She then went back and gave it a light sanding job. Didn’t it come out so cute?! It always amazes me how quickly these thrifting finds can become treasures.
We had a lot of fun on our shopping trip. I found some fun things that I was able to use this week to decorate for our Thanksgiving feast.
I got that little pumpkin holder for $1.00 and those glass vases for $.80 each. I simply filled them with some acorns I had collected. I just adore that wood bowl I found for $1.00!
Thanks for stopping in and seeing my Project Spotlight item. Thanks Olivia for letting me feature your chair makeover! Do you have a project you would like me to spotlight? I’d love to hear from you and share one of your creations! Message me and we can work it out! Enjoy the rest of your weekend and I’ll be back on Monday with more from my Tidbits of Me series.
**Linked up at Miss Information.
Feast with Friends
Last week we enjoyed doing a lot of fun Thanksgiving activities as part of our school days. We did fun crafts, continued to talk about things we were thankful for, and even had a Thanksgiving Day feast with friends.
We have continued to do our thankful tree, and it’s been such a joy to capture their little hearts as they share what they are thankful for.
Our tree has really filled out, and Reagan loves to stare at it and rearrange the Give Thanks blocks under it.
You already saw one of our crafts we did this week, when I showed you our Thanksgiving banner, with the kids’ cute little turkeys. I am obsessed with hand prints and wanting to capture all the cute “little-ness” of this time in paint.
We updated our Thanksgiving table runner with new turkeys.
We also did another cute turkey paint activity. This one involved only their finger prints.
It was so fun to have my niece, Charleigh, in town to do this craft with us. I used the kids’ fingerprints to stamp out the turkey’s feathers. The kids were so excited to run off and play together, that I got to finish the turkeys on my own. 🙂 I glued some little wiggly eyes and painted on a beak and legs. I then cut out the turkeys and added some fun stickers with them to a piece of paper. I love to have framed “seasonal” art in my kitchen during each holiday. It is almost time to make our Santa Clauses!
I think the highlight of our thanksgiving school activities was having a feast with our sweet friends that we do a co-op with.
We read a thanksgiving book, talked about things we were thankful for, learned what a “cornucopia” is, played bingo on thanksgiving images with candy corn, and made sweet little indian headdresses.
We talked about symbols and how Indians used pictures to tell stories. Each child drew symbols on their headdress to represent themselves. Both my boys might have drawn the transformer symbol on their headdress.
No one wanted to be a pilgrim, so we had a table full of little Indians at our feast. It was not the perfect example of the first thanksgiving feast, as two groups of friends came together, but we had a blast!
We came up with a meal that seemed like traditional food. A rotisserie chicken was our turkey. They ate a lot of fish at the first thanksgiving, so we had some gold-fish. We threw in the pumpkins as a fall food, and the carrots as a crop they would have grown. The grapes were just an added touch because let’s face it…they are a good kid food.
I love that in the midst of having six young kids together, this feast was loud and fun (probably how MOST Thanksgiving meals are) and even entertained some “superheros” at our table. We are so thankful for these sweet friends to do life with!
I’m pretty sure Caleb was already running around as a superhero, when I went to take the individual shots. Life with boys on the move! 🙂
We have enjoyed fall break this week and have done NO school. I hope you are having a wonderful week and Happy Thanksgiving!!
I linked this project up at: DIY Showoff
The Formative Years
Welcome to Part II of “Tidbits of Me.” You can see my first post “1 of 9” here to catch up on the beginning of the story.
I take “formative” to be the time when you are becoming you. Going through middle school and high school is no easy task, and starting into college and on my own for my first time ever was even scarier! Somehow all of these crazy years helped to shape me into the person I am today.
In middle school, I was really innocent and naive. I think much of that came from being homeschooled through my elementary years. I remember my mom trying to prepare me for “real” school. We went and got a hair cut where my long locks were cut into a cute shorter bob. I remember her pulling me into her room (where all deep talks happened) and asking me what I thought a music video was. I naturally said Mary Poppins. No joke. I had no idea what MTV was at that time. In some ways, I look back and love that I was allowed to be a kid and missed a lot of harsh stuff by being home schooled.
Going into high school I became a little more confident in who I was and where I came from. I went to Roswell High and got involved with the swim team and golf team. I played on the golf team all four years and had a blast with it. Since my dad is a landscape architect, specializing in golf course design, we got to play on a lot of his courses for free! For all you golfers out there, you know that’s amazing! I was really involved in my church youth group as well all through high school. I had the steady boyfriend, went on mission trips, and had a great group of girl friends. Some of who are still my close friends today!
I had a hard time deciding on college. I struggled with wanting to go to a big college like my boyfriend and close friends, but then also needed to stay in state (and secretly I wanted to stay close to home). As a close, big family I left for college with a four-year old brother still at home. I didn’t want him to know me like a distant aunt. I decided on Toccoa Falls Bible College in North Georgia.
I went to Toccoa for a year and from there took a semester off, came home to a community college, went back for a semester, took another semester off, and ended up finally graduating from Kennesaw State with a degree in Early Education in the fall of 2006. I was one of those five-year college students, but more on that later.
I think all of my back and forth with college was part of me figuring out who I was.
I had been so close to my family and then I had a safe, good group of friends through out high school. College was the first I was on my own and figuring out who I was and who I ultimately wanted to be. All these college transfers, dealing with life at home, different groups of friends, and several different boyfriends helped me come into myself. One of the greatest things I did was go out west in the midst of this all and work on a ranch in Jackson Hole, Wyoming for a summer. Pulling away from everything and everyone I knew was one of the scariest decisions I ever made. Once I settled in though, it opened up space for me to understand me. That was a time and an experience I still rave about today, almost ten years later.
Coming home from the ranch, I felt alive and confident in who God made me to be. I was tired and exhausted of drama with boys and trying to figure out what I thought was best for me. I decide to stay home for that semester and just work, pray, and seek what God had for me…which ultimately led to me to those Early Bliss Years. Come back next Monday to hear Part III of my story.
Update: Click on the following link to be directly taken to the next post in this series.