30 DAYS OF THANKS - Day 15

Today I am thankful for some answers to questions I've had my whole life... looking forward to some relief and more answers.

30 DAYS OF THANKS - Day 14

Today I am thankful for my VitaMix to help wake me up this morning so I can go have fun at Moms Together this morning

30 DAYS OF THANKS - Day 13

Today I am thankful for my church... Genesis, small groups (past, present and future), the worship team, the woman's ministry, the children's ministy, the staff, the many homeschoolers I've met and the great friends I've made... it's also where I met Mark Greenwood, my bff ♥

30 DAYS OF THANKS - Day 12

Today I am thankful for my online friends... I've only gotten to meet a few but wish I could meet them all.

30 DAYS OF THANKS - Day 11

Today I am thankful for our veterans for serving our country and protecting our freedom. We are grateful for your sacrifice. I'm also thankful for those who are currently serving our country and those who will one day be serving.

30 DAYS OF THANKS - Day 10

Today I am thankful for Traci Reed who felt sorry for me, losing her contest even though I had scrapped with all the cookies... and she took a chance on me... the rest is history ♥

30 DAYS OF THANKS - Day 9

Today I am thankful for safety mechanisms built into my old microwave and thankful it shut off before causing a fire... also thankful for a hubby who bought me a new one knowing how much I needed it... and thankful to have a nice hot rice sock on the back of my head helping this tension headache and TMJ pain go away

30 DAYS OF THANKS - Day 8

Today I am thankful for my 3 little miracles... they bring me so much joy... though they bring me to my knees quite often LOL

30 DAYS OF THANKS - Day 7

Today I am thankful for hopeful answers.

30 DAYS OF THANKS - Day 6

Today I am thankful for my sweet little miracle boy, Isaac, who keeps me on my toes and on my knees daily. 3 years ago he made me a mama of a son and I love how "all boy" he is.

30 DAYS OF THANKS - Day 5

Today I am thankful for the best gig in digiscrap land. I've made some incredible friends who are such a support and inspiration to me and I just love that I get to scrap my memories with the best of the best and be a part of an awesome team. I seriously love the designers and the SugarBabes and so many members of the digiscrap community. Happy DSD!!!

30 DAYS OF THANKS - Day 4

Today I am thankful for my husband, Mark Greenwood, of 10 years... my best friend and so much more.

30 DAYS OF THANKS: Day 3

Today I am thankful for Nosefrida, The Snotsucker... my poor little dude can finally breathe a little bit and get some sleep... now if I can find some sleep that would be awesome LOL

30 DAYS OF THANKS: DAY 2

Today I am thankful for God's infinite grace.

30 Days of Thanks: Day 1

This month I am going to be posting every day something that I am thankful for...

Today I am thankful for a God who loves me so much he gave his life for me, so that I may live.

I Heart Faces - Tickled Pink

Here's my entry for this week's photo challenge at iheartfaces.com.

This a a picture I took at a local park a few weeks ago of my sweet baby girl.

Make It Monday

Well, not only am I in decorating mode, but I'm officially in organizing mode too. I've been pinteresting cleaning schedules and checklists and then scrapped a schedule/checklist for myself. I've framed it and use it as a dry erase board. I love it! I only spend 30 minutes on the weekly things and it's amazing how much gets done in 30 minutes. I usually have to split that 30 minutes up into 3 - 10 minute cleaning sessions because a certain little boy doesn't like being away from mama for much more than that. I must say that so far I'm in LOVE with this system and am really happy I finally put this together. It's been something I've been envisioning for quite a long time. It's been pretty dark and dreary lately so I don't have a picture of it framed but here's what it looks like before printing.

Falling For You by Kristin Cronin-Barrow and Shawna Clingerman

Scrapper's Toolbox: For The Love Of Banners by Dani Mogstad

Fonts: Holy Guacamole by Lisa Sisneros and typewriter scribbled

i {heart} faces Photo Challenge - A Touch Of Sun

I'm excited to get back into taking better photos and photos with intention, so I figured I'd start by getting back into the photo challenges at i heart faces again. This week's challenge is "A Touch Of Sun" and this is my entry of my sweet baby boy.

Make It Monday

I've been working hard on decorating this house with some fun stuff and trying to get a little bit organized in the mean time. Recently I've been inspired by Pinterest and found the idea of using an oil drip pan for magnets for the kids. YAY!!! I've been wanting to get those things off my refrigerator FOREVER!!!! I added some Contact chalkboard paper to it and I'm loving how it looks... I just need to figure out where I want to hang it up. It was $12 at Wal-Mart and I got the contact paper on Amazon. I can't wait to use it in the school room for spelling and stuff like that.

I still had some leftover contact paper and decided to figure out what I could do with the rest of it... so I put it on the glass of an old frame that was just sitting in a box. I spray painted the frame and then hung it up in the kitchen for a message board... YAY!!! I've been wanting a message board in our kitchen for awhile now and it was so easy to do.

Yes, I know... we still need to paint this house LOL... I'm so tired of looking at the garish wall colors. Mark promises me this fall they will be done, YAY!!! I can't wait to lighten up the house with some warmer and 1000x lighter walls. Check out the smears in both pictures from the dude, LOL... always has to get his hands into everything! Gotta love him!

I've also done a couple projects and I've just posted one of them to the scrappy blog, one was a ridiculously easy project... another took a little bit of time, but really it just took longer because of the kiddos... plus, by evening, I'd rather crash and browse the internet than work on projects lol.

Make It Monday - more projects complete :)

I'm feeling really good about how much I've been able to accomplish lately and feeling so energized by fixing up the place and making it more "us". So my new finished project is updating our TV cabinet. Yes, we live in the 20th century and still have a tube TV, LOL. Anyways, here's a couple pics of the newly updated TV cabinet.

I spray painted the cabinet a satin espresso brown and then bought some new cabinet pulls. Weird thing... one cabinet door is shorter than the other LOL. I never noticed it before, but I couldn't figure out why I couldn't get the doors to line up right. After the coats of spray paint dried I sprayed on 3 coats of satin Polycrylic... with three kids, I knew the paint would get scratched if I didn't have some kind of finish on it. For the panels, I used some leftover fabric from the curtains in our family room and stapled it to the panel and then put them back in. I love how it turned out, and glad I was able to save my cabinet w/o tossing it to the curb because I didn't like it anymore.

Check out the before picture... I had to go all the way back to April, 2004 to find a picture of it. I was really into log cabins at the time and faux painting too LOL. I had done a crackle paint on it and then stamped some pinecones on it. I will say that I don't have a before before picture though since that was pre-digital camera for us LOL. This picture was one of the first pictures I took with our brand new Kodak digital camera.

Stayed tuned (pun intended) for next week when hopefully I'll have my kitchen chairs and bar stools finished.

Make It Monday

So... this holiday weekend I've been "laboring". I'm having a blast working on some decorative things for the house instead of the much needed fixing up we've needed to do on the house. We bought some chairs at the Habitat For Humanity Restore this weekend and I've been working on fixing them up, along with some bar stools that were left by the previous owner. Here's some pics of what I've been working on this weekend.

This is a conference chair we bought at the restore and I'm thinking I may go back and buy another one because I like it so much and there were tons of them.

These are the barstools that were left by the previous owner and I decided to bring some fun color to the kitchen hoping to cheer it up a bit.

They had 2 of these chairs at the restore and we bought them both since we desperately need new dining room chairs.

I'm also thinking I'm gonna paint the TV console and put some fabric in the "windows" but I'm not sure I'm gonna have time for that this weekend... I have to go back to Hobby Lobby and get some more paint to finish up the chairs, since we ran out on Saturday.

I {heart} Pinterest!!!

So... have you ever heard of Pinterest? If you haven't, you must check it out! It's like FB married my inspiration board and you have Pinterest. So, instead of bookmarking everything into a million folders or tearing things out of magazines, I can just "pin" things I find inspirational onto this board... and then all my friends on Pinterest can see them too and pin them if they like it... or I can pin some of their things too. At first I thought it was a total time suck, and Mark used to make a sucking sound every time he'd see me on it, but now I actually use it for what it's for. I've been able to come up with some great scrapbooking projects from some things that I've found on Pinterest, like this owl I made last month.

Or I've been able to do some meal planning by picking some interesting meals I've found like these skinny meatloaf cupcakes which were sooooo yummy!!!

Last night we also had brown sugar and balsamic crock pot pork, which was also delicious!

I've even found color inspiration and ended up painting the bar stools aqua, because of this picture! Remember this post from almost 2 years ago when I couldn't figure out what color to paint them? Well, it took me this long to finally decide to paint them and once I finish painting them I'll post a pic!!!

I've also started a "homeschool" folder to post some fun projects to do with the kids... I love that when you click on the picture you get the blog or website address to the tutorial or recipe or shop. So... what I originally thought was a total time suck has turned out to be really helpful and motivating to get things done like decorating the house, meal planning or working on homeschool stuff.

Do you love Pinterest?

EGADS!!!!! It's been 8 months...

...since I last posted here and so much has happened in those 8 months. I decided to revive this old blog now that we're gearing up for homeschooling our sweet little girl, who I can't believe it old enough for school already. I guess I'll just do a quick run down of our year so far.

January... We welcomed our sweet little (well, not so little) boy, Asher in January. He is such a miracle and I can't imagine our life without him in it.

February... started out with a huge blizzard... one of the things I like about winter babies is that we can just snuggle in our home while I'm recovering and while baby is too little to go outside to play. I love being a mama of 3 kids.

March... is one of my favorite months, other than the fall season. I love that it's finally getting warm enough to head outside to the playground. It's also when we went to the maple fest and learned all about how to tap a tree and make maple syrup... Moriah got to help with drilling the hole into the maple tree and we will definitely go again next year.

April... we were all sick for Easter but we still were able to get a family photo outside. We were all bummed to have missed the service at church. It seems like we can only go to church every other week. One week we're healthy and go and catch something from church and then the next Sunday we're all sick at home. Moriah was really bummed that she didn't get to show off her new dress to her friends. I still think they had a great time though. Isaac broke his toe and he ended up having to wear a boot for 6 weeks. He LOVED his boot, which was good and he did so well with all his x-rays and stuff. I'm so proud of what a tough boy he is!

May... Isaac got his boot off... he really didn't want to keep it off so we went to the outlet mall and bought him a new pair of shoes and made a big event out of it. It was so nice to know that it was healing nicely. We had Asher dedicated on Mother's Day at church. It was so fitting to have it that day since it was a year ago on Mother's Day that I realized that I was pregnant. I still can't believe our little miracle after years of infertility and miscarriages. God is so good!!!

June... we went to the ICHE homeschool convention at the beginning of the month. This was for real this time. We went with the intention of figuring out what our plans were for the fall with Moriah. I'm really excited about our curriculum we chose and can't wait to get started. I must say that I was much more relaxed this year and let the Lord just guide me. I think this is the last year that Mark is coming with me though. He ended up not getting to attend any of the workshops and spent the whole time wearing Asher while he was sleeping. I pretty much went to a workshop and then nursed Asher in between each of them. I didn't stress about missing any of them and we bought a CD of all the workshops so that I can review them or listen to the ones that I missed. Next year, Mark will stay home with the kids and I'll go by myself. I think I'll get more out of it. I also got myself a VitaMix after a failed attempt at making chunky monkey "ice cream" in my food processor. I LOVE LOVE LOVE this machine!!! We had a blast spending most days outside!

July... is always our big vacation month!!! We always go to Michigan for the 4th of July celebrations in Grand Haven and then we go to St. Germaine, Wisconsin for the Greenwood family reunion. I love the small town 4th of July celebration we experience with the nice short little parade and then the fireworks at the end of the day. The fireworks are always my favorite. I also love spending time with all of Mark's relatives and catching up. This year Mark's 2nd cousin got married on the island on the lake. It was such a fun time as always! Isaac got an ear infection but otherwise it was such an enjoyable vacation. At home we had tons of fun doing outdoor activities and running through the sprinklers.

August... Mark and I celebrated 10 years of marriage this month! I am so incredibly blessed to have him in my life and to be married to my best friend. We went to Michigan for a long weekend to celebrate. We're also starting our school year! I can't believe my baby girl is old enough for school. She's so ready and I have a feeling this year will be a breeze for her... which means lots of time outside learning from God's creation. We've seen a little bit of color in the trees and can't believe the summer is over and fall is on it's way! Fall is my most favorite season, I just love the colors and the cooler weather to come! I've been enjoying having the windows open and the cool evenings.

As you can tell, those first few months are a total blur to me, LOL! I did however try to journal a bit so I wouldn't totally forget and you can see my scrapbook pages from my Project 52 on my scrapping blog. I'm a bit behind on those too... it's been an amazing and whirlwind of a summer and can't wait to settle into a routine and get caught up on those layouts! I've been really good at taking the pics, just have been putting off actually completing the layouts!

I'm excited to be blogging again and can't wait to catch up on our home renovations tomorrow!