Spoonful of Imagination

Add it to a Family for Something Beautiful

Savannah, Georgia

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Last weekend I got to get away with three friends and spend the weekend in Savannah, Georgia.  It was a complete blast!  We went sightseeing, shopping, and did lots of eating.  It was the perfect girl’s getaway!

We ate lunch at a Mellow Mushroom right outside Savannah for lunch on our first day.  My boys have flipped over two of our lunch dates that were also eating there.  All four of us are moms of boys and took lots of pictures of the restaurant’s decor.  🙂

While sightseeing, we lived by the “block system” and the free maps located around Savannah.  I wasn’t very good with them, but I was very thankful to be with friends who were more proactive with figuring out the way to go.  My tendency is to think “let’s start walking, and we will find it”, which is not ever successful with my mind’s GPS.

They got us to this very cute store, The Paris Market.  Inside there were some real eye candy displays.

I absolutely love those glass lights.  I have no idea where I would put them, but I dream of having some somewhere someday!

I brought the boys home a bag of those beautiful marbles each.  They have been carrying them around like crazy but have had moments like in Hook where they are so upset they have “lost their marbles”.

I left that gorgeous store with those string balls on my to-do list.  I HAVE to make a bucket of them.  They are so colorful and fun.

This gorgeous drift wood elephant stood inside one store.  I have a thing for elephants and this one is perfection!

As we strolled from one store to the next and ate in lots of restaurants, we saw a common thing were these shelled chandeliers.  They really grew on me, and I kind of want to try to make one of them too!  We fell in love with a lot of the cute stores in Savannah.  There was one other store we just loved like The Paris Market, and I can’t remember the name.

We did lots of walking!  We walked all over on our own, and we also did two walking tours while we were there.  We did a ghost tour one night, and a cinema tour one afternoon.  They were both highlights of our trip!  Good thing they had one of my favorite stores in this town…

There were some beautiful candy stores along the river.  They provided lots of good treats to enjoy while walking around.

The squares around town are filled with Spanish moss trees, and I couldn’t get enough of them!

I had never been to Savannah and the beauty with the trees and architecture/buildings was so fun to take in.  The tours really helped us learn more about the city as well.  The Cinema tour was fascinating to see the parts of town which have been in movies.  We saw the square and restaurant that were used in Forest Gump.

I had never seen Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.  If you too have not seen it, it is a true story that took place in Savannah and then was also filmed there.  It was fascinating to see clips of the movie while we were looking at the real building.  The night after our tour we watched the movie.

This little history part of our trip was fascinating to all four of us, and we are all now reading the book that was written based on the movie’s plot.

I just adore all the features of these old houses.  I want to live in an old house with some of these fabulous features!  I love the great big front doors, the porches, the metal work, and definitely all the huge windows!

This is the main house in the Midnight of the Garden of Good and Evil.  So much history right here!

I love the color used on this house front.  So beautiful!

We had a lot of fun talking, laughing, and enjoying long meals with out the worry of a child losing it.  It was good to come home to my family though too!  It’s amazing how just a little space can be so rejuvenating and strengthening to go home and keep pouring into those cute, yet needy parts of your heart.

If you haven’t been to Savannah, GA, I highly recommend it!  Some of my favorite places were The Paris Market, Rocks on the Roof of the Bohemian Hotel, Huey’s, and The Moon River Brewing Company.  Oh, and you have to do a tour!!  For more gorgeous pictures from this trip please visit my friend Erin’s blog!

I hope you are all having a good week!  Check in tomorrow to see what item is in my Friday Project Spotlight!  It is something I haven’t made in a while, but I love them!

Living on the Road by the Numbers

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I know you might want to have some more details about our trip across the United States.  We love to talk about it, so there might be quite a few posts about it!  While we were driving and on the road, my husband had the idea for this post.  We kept some tally marks on interesting things that we did or happened to us.  One of my favorite facts is how many times our boys peed in a bottle in the van.  🙂

I hope you enjoy this post with tid-bits of our trip as much as I do!

Facts from our road trip:

  • Travelers: 5

  • Days on the road: 25
  • Miles driven: 5,904
This is the path of our travels!
My job, as the passenger, can be heavily described as “toy retriever” to keep the kiddos happy.
He is so cute!!
  • Hours in van: 95 (**this is not including time at each destination driving to different activities, etc.)
Overall our lil 19 month old babe did FANTASTIC!
  • Galloons of gas: 289.80
  • Quarts of oil: 10
The driving time was so gorgeous! It was one of my favorite parts of the trip! I loved seeing the different landscapes.
  • States: 13
  • Hotels: 9
We got two double beds at our hotel stops. The boys LOVED sharing one, and Reagan was in her pack and play.
There were quite a few meals where we got food to go & took it back to the hotel.
  • Number of bags packed: 19
This is just a small sampling of our luggage pile.
  • Number of bags to still UNPACK: 4
  • Pictures taken: 793
  • Family members/friends seen: 34
Poor Grammy Pammy can’t have a cute picture with her grandkids while everyone is looking at the camera at the same time. 🙂
Our “family -best friends” in California have some of the cutest kids. Our kids alternate ages, so they are really close in age and were raised together most of their lives! So special to spend time with them in their new home!
  • Superheroes seen: 27
In Hollywood, people dress up as Superheros and you can give them a “tip” to have your picture taken with them!
One of our favorite “guys”!!
  • National landmarks: 3
I had never been to the Grand Canyon! I was giddy and soooo excited to be here!
  • Oceans: 2
Having my daughter and sweet niece experiencing the ocean for the first time together was such a gift!
Caleb has no fear of the ocean! He LOVES the waves and even did a jet ski ride!
Reagan and her BFF, Kendall, are two of the prettiest girls I know!
  • Crabs caught: 37
We had a cooler filled with these guys after our beach night walks. Yes, I screamed every time one ran across in front of me. After the fun of rounding them up the boys would walk back down to the beach and let them all go.
  • Starbucks stops: 13
  • Times the boys’ LeapPad’ batteries needed changed: 10
These little “i-pads” were worth every dollar spent for our trip. They were AMAZING in the van!
  • Stomach viruses: 1
Caleb woke up throwing up one day in California. Praise the Lord no one else got sick. I think he drank too much salt water the day before. He is a beast at “body surfing”, but it did change our plans with our dear friends on our last day there. 🙁
One plus to having a car seat that needed cleaning was discovering an awesome laundromat to explore and spend a lil time in. For someone who might actually like laundry (crazy I know!), this place was gorgeous!  Did you notice Caleb’s throw up bucket!?  Nothing like a multipurpose pink sand bucket!
  • Stops without a sweet tea to be found that was not fountain or canned: 14
  • Tweets breaking my social media silence: 11
  • Ways to get Reagan asleep in the van: 1
Reagan would only fall asleep in the van if music was playing and playing loudly!
  • Pools swam in: 9
  • Broken bumpers: 1
  • Zip ties required to hold a broken bumper together: 3
Turns out Waco, TX has some pretty steep curbs and driveways. Oops!
  • Horse rides: 5
My sis, Olivia, and her husband have horses in Arkansas. We got to stay with them for almost a week. It was a BLAST! The boys loooovvvveeeddd the barn and land!
She could barely wait for her turn to get a horse ride!!
My boys would move to the country in a heart beat!!
  • Immigration checks: 3 (Odd, right!? Even though we never crossed the border, driving close to Mexico had checkpoints.)
  • Van vacuumed:  1
In the top picture that might be a spilt/dried chocolate milkshake from an In-N-Out in California. It is getting cleaned tomorrow! Yes!!!
  • Target runs: 6
These girls are the cutest Target shoppers!
  • Drives in the rain: 4
  • My longest drive stretch at one time: 3 hours
  • Pees in a cup or bottle in van: 19
  • Times I went for a run: 2
  • Theme parks: 2
We went to a water park with friends in TX, and it was so fun!
We went to Disneyland’s California Adventure in Anaheim, California. It was awesome! Where else do you see live Lightening Mcqueen and Mater driving around!?!
This rocket ride was one of our favorites! Reagan even got to go on it!
  • Blog posts written: 0
My only “to do” was to enjoy my family, and I did!! Isn’t it crazy that we are home all together and I miss them?? I’m still with them all day/everyday but so distracted by life and house up keep.
  • Memories and laughs together: millions

Thank you so much for reading this post!!  I have some more posts coming with the “how to’s” of traveling with kids and how we made this insane trip possible.  This is not our first BIG trip on the road, so we have learned a few tricks along the way.  Please feel free to ask any questions about our trip or how we did something.  I will respond!

I’m BACK!!! (with info about our trip across the country!)

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Last time I posted, I was leaving for the beach and needed a media silence.  That was almost exactly one month ago.  I am back and here to tell you that beach trip was only the beginning of our travels!!   I am sorry I could not reveal the full extent of our trip, but we were gone for almost a month. For all the stalkers and house toilet paper rollers out there, we didn’t want it to be hugely wide known that our house would be vacant for weeks on end.  This little blog of mine is not huge by any means, but you know, a girls gotta be careful!

We left August 8 and headed to Florida, from there we started our travels to the west coast!  Our goal was to see our beloved friends in California, and we did that and had so many awesome stops before and after!

We got back this past Saturday, and we have been adjusting to life back at home, doing laundry, and seeing family.  Its been bitter sweet to get back from such an incredible trip.  In the coming days, I will be sharing more details from our trip.  The post I am most excited to share with you is the FACTS from living on the road for 25 days, while driving across the United States, with a 5, 3, and 1 year old.

Thank you for being patient with my while I took time away from social media.  This was a great time for me to just enjoy my family.  That was my only “to-do”. While gone, I really got to recenter my priorities, process what I am doing and where I am going, and just be FREE!  Matt and I had some amazing talks and got to dream together.  It’s incredible how pulling yourself out of your “norm” and being freeed up can bring you back to the root of who you are, what you want to be about, and what matters in life.  We had an amazing trip, and I can’t wait to share more of it with you!!

For all of our friends/family that we didn’t get to see on this road trip, we will get to you next time!!  There will be more road trips!  Isn’t that a success alone?!  I can honestly say, I can’t wait to get back on the road.  More coming along these lines too!!  I have some great ideas for blog posts (well, that are exciting to me!?!  I hope you enjoy them as well!) and series that I can’t wait to share!  I missed this little outlet of mine!

For now, let me leave you with some fun shots from our travels:

Thank you so much for stopping by!!

The Auction

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Here are the long-awaited pictures of my grandparents’ auction!!  It was so hard to cut down my FULL camera card to these 22 pictures, but I did it.

The morning of the auction, my mom did a toast with her sweet parents!

Aren’t they cute!?!  Editing these pictures made me sentimental all over again!  I’m so thankful I got to go to Ohio and see them and be there for this big event in their lives!

There were so many cool things in this auction!  I got to claim one of these old-time cast irons!  It is now a beautiful book end on my shelf!

I could have claimed a lot, but I held myself back!  How gorgeous is this copper bin?!?

There was stuff in three barns and oozing out on the grounds around.  I never knew they had so much stuff crammed into this cute house.

Yes, that was a church bench!  I go “grandma, where did you get a church bench!?” while thinking to myself  “she is the coolest grandma ever to have a church pew (and where has that thing been hiding)!!”.  She said, “I got it at church!  While the church was remodeling, I got it!”  Ha!  Of course you would get a church pew from a church!?!  If I had lived closer, I would have snatched this thing!  It went for $50!!

So, as you can imagine having two small boys around all this was a bit hard.  They LOVED it all, and wanted to touch it all.  Hence why we threw a lot of rocks down by the creek (removed from all this during the actual auction).  It was really cool to let them experience it off and on all day though!  They couldn’t believe how fast the auctioneer talked!

I think they are messing with old coffee grinders in that picture!  So cool!

We estimated about 300 people showed up for the auction.  My grandparents strolled around a little, but they mostly sat on their front porch throughout the auction.  I can’t imagine how hard it would be to see all your stuff go and to know some of it was worth more than what it “sold” for.

I love my grandma!  Isn’t she pretty!?!  It’s so sad that Ohio is so far away!!

The first barn held a lot of household items and decor stuff.  The second barn was all my grandpa’s tools and equipment.

Here they were auctioning off my grandpa’s tractor.  Insert tear, tear.

The boys had a blast!  You can see J was more interested in waving to his family than seeing what the auctioneer was talking about.  After the house was auctioned off to the highest bidder, the auctioneer came and talked to my grandparents to see if they wanted to accept the bid.

It was lower than what they wanted, so it is going on the market for sale.  They were a little disappointed that they didn’t get offered for more for the house, but I was proud of them for not just saying yes and giving it away.

My boys were such great sports!  I was so proud of them!!

I love that picture and how it shows info on the auction and also my sweet grandparents taking it all in.  So, do you want to see something my mom and I bid on!?!  We bid on these two beauties.  (They were in the third barn.)

They are old rustic drawers that my grandpa kept screws and bolts in.  We only wanted one, which is good because my cousin wanted the other!!  We got these for $5.  I’m not even kidding.  I guess no one else saw the potential here!!!

My cousin has amazing taste, and  he already has transformed his into a masterpiece!  Amazing job Corbin!!

Did he not do an incredible job!?!  They hadn’t put the hardware back on yet, when I got these pictures, but he said they would.  My little beauty is still sitting out in my garage with most of my other finds.  Check out everything I walked away…

I do love old wood, but I gave those two boards to my wood working brother.  The old window, I’m going to make into a masterpiece to help me homeschool my boys!  I can’t decide what I want to do with the little chair.  I’m pretty excited about it!  I can’t decide if I want to paint the wood or the metal.  One of the two I want to leave alone, but I can’t decide which way to go with it.  What do you think!?!

My old drawers I plan on using for craft supplies.  I can’t decide what I want to do with it either!  There are so many options that keep my head turning and wont let it land on an idea!  Oh decisions!  I love how Corbin added legs to his drawer box, so maybe I will do that too!  I’m going to start by washing the thing and go from there!

Thank you so much for reading about my grandparents’ auction!  I love that I have some pieces of my grandparents’ past to enjoy!  Do you have some old items that are special to you!  I’d love to hear what they are!?!