Neal and I were able to have an anniversary re-do this weekend since last weekend plans were foiled by his sudden cold that made him so very miserable. Sophie went and stayed with my parents Friday evening and she did not come back until Sunday evening! She had a blast, as she always does whenever she goes to either grandparent's house. So when Sophie is away Mommy and Daddy will........work? Yes we worked. Cleaned house, we cleaned the house from top to bottom. It started Thursday night when Neal washed all the floors downstairs and then continued on into Saturday with vacuuming, dusting every surface including base boards and blinds; that was all Neal's department. I cleaned bathrooms, vanities, mirrors, toilets, and SCRUBBED the tubs, that took the most time, and did about 5 loads of laundry! I think we started cleaning around 8 or 9am and didn't finish until about 12pm! We had something to eat, got showered and dressed and headed out the door to do a bunch of errands including getting Sophie's birthday presents, which we were able to score some awesome deals on! Then it was back home to work on the outside of the house and plant the pansies that we had just purchased. Let me tell you planting flowers at a very ripe 37 weeks pregnant is not easy or comfortable, so needless to say Neal planted "his" flowers and then came over to my side and finished planting "mine". After all the hard work we did reward ourselves with an anniversary evening out at one of our favorite restaurants, Carrabbba's on South Blvd. It was so yummy, but I definitely think that we both ate way too much. Neal enjoyed his Sam Adams while I downed 2 glasses of milk due to the incredible heartburn that pregnancy blesses me with. Sunday; church, lunch, Neal cut grass, I finished planting the rest of the pansies in pots to place on the front porch, back to church for our small group and then back home to be greeted by our sweet, sweet Sophie whom we missed so much!
So can you say NESTING?!?!!?!? Bring on the baby folks, 'cause I'm ready and so is my house!
Freshly cut grass and some beautiful fall foliage.
The Fire Dept. even recently came out put a fresh coat of paint on our hydrant! I'm loving the fire red tree in our backyard.
We had lots of pansies, so many I had to start putting them in pots and I almost ran out of pots to plant them in!
Sophie's Snazzy pumpkins, she glitterfied her's and the baby's and left Mommy and Daddy's so we could carve a face.
This past Saturday we decided that it was time to paint Sophie's room. Over the course of the almost two years we have been in this house each part of the house has slowly but surely gotten a fresh coat of (much needed) paint. Sophie's room is one of the last rooms to see such a transformation. We definitely did not want to go to girly with our paint choice as her room is girly enough. Neal and I settled on a pretty blue that complimented her bedding. Apparently we are really into blue, as there are several other rooms in our home that are various shades of blue, including our room, but whatever it all looks good and we are pleased with it. Sophie was so excited that her room was blue and that she helped a little bit. Most of her time was spent on our bed watching DVDs on the portable DVD player and eating from a gigantic box of Goldfish. She did really well for the entire time it took for us to paint the room, which was a while!
We are also so so excited that Sophie is now paci free ALL THE TIME! She was ONLY getting her paci at bedtimes, but we felt with 3 years old fast approaching and another baby on the way it was time for her to give it up. She did amazingly well and only had two small incidents where there were tears, but after that she worked it out like a champ. Granted, it does take her a little longer to fall asleep, which is almost a little entertaining since I get to hear the conversations that she is having with herself and her stuffed animals upstairs over the baby monitor!
The count down is on only 8 more days until we go back to the orthopedist to see about getting Sophie's casts off, so keep praying that this becomes a reality and my little girl gets her full mobility back!
We do normally have sheets on our bed, incidentally enough it was also the day to wash the sheets!
Neal pieced together panoramics of her room before and after, aside from the closet doors looking a little funky I thought it came out really good.
We also completely did away with the changing pad on top of her dresser it is now a full on big girl dresser, no more changing table.
The weather held up....sort of. It rained intermittently throughout the planting, but nothing major thank goodness just a little drizzle here and there. It actually turned out to be a great day to do some gardening since it was over cast and the temperature was very comfortable. Neal's parents came down about noon to help us get everything going. Neal and I really don't have the first idea of what to plant where and what will survive and thrive so we rely on Martha, our personal landscaper, to make those decisions for us! Mark stayed behind to listen out for Sophie while she napped and Martha, Neal and myself headed off to Lowe's to pick out what we needed to beautify the front garden. About an hour and a half later we arrived home with an assortment of beautiful plants, some compost and mulch and got down to it. Luckily our neighbor let us borrow his tiller so that cut down on a lot of time spent hand tilling in the compost! Sophie was such a big helper she was digging and raking alongside the big guys! She was having so much fun and she was so excited to have her Papa and Gigi there too. The garden beds turned out really beautiful, I am so excited to have some rose bushes back, we had a rose bush at our old house and I absolutely adored it and now I have 3!!! We were even able to transplant 4 of my lantana that started sprouting up from last summer, hopefully they will take and thrive like crazy as they did last year! What a major transformation from what the garden used to look like , I can't wait to watch it all grow!
Thank you Mark and Martha for EVERYTHING, especially ALL the hard work you guys put in, hope you are not too sore today!!
Before
After
Before
After
Looking for her cricket friend.
It is difficult to plant with a monkey on your back!
Martha laying out where the plants need to go.
Yay!!! The owl sheets arrived on Tuesday and I am not sure who was more excited me or her! Then the owl pillow sham arrived yesterday and today we went to Mary Jo's and got some batting to fill the pillow sham with for $2.19 because I was not about to pay Pottery Barn $10 plus tax for a pre-formed pillow! For those of you who are not from around here Mary Jo's is the fabric stores of all fabric stores and is quite intimidating for someone like myself who knows nothing about fabric or anything that goes along with fabric, you really could get lost in there! We made our way quickly in and out of Mary Jo's after getting a quick info lesson on batting from the nice lady at the counter, I am sure that I sounded like a complete idiot not knowing anything about something as simple as batting, but hey I've got to start somewhere! Once we got home Sophie very willingly helped me pull apart the batting and stuff it inside the pillow sham, I think that she was so excited to be tearing something apart with out getting scolded for it! So with all that done, the "Big Girl Owl Bed" is now complete! Now I am thinking that I want to paint some owls, birds and possibly some trees on the walls......who knows, it seems I am always trying to start a new project, I have to do something to keep myself busy, otherwise I will lose my mind or what little there is left of it!!!!
Speaking of new projects, not only have I decided to start Scrapbooking from scratch, and I say "from scratch" because in the past I used the scrapbooks from Hallmark (Thanks Mom!) with the pre-made pretty pages and I would just add my pictures and a few more embellishments or stickers and boom instant memories, but now I am scrapbooking like a big girl and making my own pages and the two that I have already done I am pretty proud of. The second is a little better than the first, but this like anything else is a learning process. So Yay me!
The other project I am attempting to start today is making pillows for Sophie's play room. I have had fabric left over from making Sophie's baby doll bedding since last year, yes, I said last year, I have been wanting to do this since last year! I finally got my butt in gear and before hitting up Mary Jo's today we went to one of our favorites Target, to pick up a small starter sewing machine for myself, a cheap $24.99, we'll see how this goes! Wish me luck, I will be sure to post pictures no matter how badly the pillows turn out!
Check out these cool frames I found at Target they match her room PERFECTLY!!
Sophie has said farewell to her toddler bed, and hello "Big Girl" bed or "Owl Bed" as she likes to call it. She calls it her owl bed, because the new bedding has owls on it, well at least the sheets have owls on them and we got her a small pillow that also has an owl applique on it (the sheets and pillow have not arrived yet, the sheets in the photos are just a spare set that I bought until the others arrive in the mail). She has been so excited about getting her big girl owl bed, ever since she saw the picture of the bedding set in the Pottery Barn Kids catalog.
Thanks to potty training Sophie is now a frequent visitor to the downstairs bathroom where there is a vast array of catalogs to choose from while taking care of business, one in particular that Sophie has taken a liking to is the Pottery Barn kids catalog. In flipping through the pages one day she happened upon the owl bedding and has been infatuated ever since, thus sparking the interest in the big girl bed. We have been thinking about converting her toddler bed to it's full size or double bed for sometime because she just looks so cramped. We thought maybe it was a little premature since we felt like we just switched her to the toddler bed a couple months ago, but after a while all she could talk about was "big girl bed, big girl bed, owl bed, Mama, Pwease!" So here we are with our Sweet Sophie growing up way too fast right before our very eyes. I will admit it was a little sad to see the toddler bed go, but this is just one more chapter starting and ending another. I will post some more pictures when the final pieces of the bedding arrive so that you can get the full effect! Can you tell I'm excited too!?
Freshly cut grass and some beautiful fall foliage.
The Fire Dept. even recently came out put a fresh coat of paint on our hydrant! I'm loving the fire red tree in our backyard.
We had lots of pansies, so many I had to start putting them in pots and I almost ran out of pots to plant them in!
Sophie's Snazzy pumpkins, she glitterfied her's and the baby's and left Mommy and Daddy's so we could carve a face.
