We're Moving!

I keep asking myself  "why oh why did we plan to move the week after Christmas". The cleaning out and packing has begun. The  next week or so will be a busy one for sure, but when it is all said and done it won't seem like such a busy time.



I am happy to be moving, but as I go through the motions of getting everything ready I can't help but to feel a little sad. This is the house we lived in when we brought Tyler (our first born) home from the hospital. This is where both of children have grown up at. We have so many good memories here and then even a few not so good ones. I may or may not have shed a tear or two the last few days, and I may or may not shed a few more before it is over. This season of our life is over and it is time to begin a new season. One that I am sure is going to be harder than I thought it ever would be, but also know that it is going to be greater than I ever expected it could be.

I'll let you know if I survived. ; )

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Wishing you all a very Merry Christmas!

“For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.” - Isaiah 9:6

Mama’s Holiday Wish List Meme

Todays Mama and GameStop are giving away a sleighful of gifts this holiday season and to enter I’m sharing this meme with you.

1. What is your holiday wish for your family?
To remember why we celebrate Christmas, and to give generously to others.

2. What is your Christmas morning tradition?
Our kiddo's wake us up early, we get the coffee going and join our kids in the living room. Then we open our gifts and have breakfast.

3. If you could ask Santa for one, completely decadent wish for yourself, what would it be?
A getaway for my husband and me, and one of these

to take pictures to remember our trip with. 

4. How do you make the holidays special without spending any money?
We watch a Christmas movie (Elf) together and we also go to a drive through Live Nativity that a local Church puts on each Christmas. We also like to get together with family to play games.

5. What games did you play with your family growing up?
My sister and I liked to play Candyland, Yahtzee and Uno.

6. What holiday tradition have you carried on from your own childhood?
Reading from the Bible about the birth of Jesus. I would also help my mom wrap gifts, she still asks me to help wrap gifts every year.

7. Where would you go for a Christmas-away-from-home trip?
I would love to go to a cabin in the mountains with my family and have a "White Christmas". This place would be perfect.
When you live in Florida, you just don’t get this.
8. Check out GameStop and tell us, what are the three top items on your GameStop Wish List this year?
My son would love to have this:

My daughter would love to have  this:

This would be nice to go along with what my son wants:
You have until Friday, December 10, 2010 to enter.  Be sure to visit Todays Mama to see how to enter.

‘Twas a few weeks before Christmas……

My Christmas cards are still not sent out. Actually I have not yet ordered them.  To be quite honest,  I had just about decided not to send any photo Christmas cards out this year until I found out about this.

Shutterfly has this  big promotion  going on for bloggers right now.  Needless to say, I was so excited when I read that I could get 50 photo cards for free.  So after looking through the selection of Christmas cards that Shutterfly offers, I found some that I really like (I am partial to the flat photo cards).

I love the Christmas Tree on this one, and the colors are gorgeous  too.

  How about the cute way that Merry Christmas is written in the little blocks.

This one is really neat with the ornaments and a story line.

  And who doesn’t like a monogram. Simple but elegant.

I have to say that this one is my favorite. It is very simple, but tells what I believe.

Not only do they offer Christmas Cards, they also have a great selection of canvas wall art. You could also take photos and make your own calendar. There are also thank you cards.

I recently made a photo book about our vacation. Let me just say that I was not disappointed. The book turned out so cute. Another reason for me to place my Christmas card order with Shutterfly.

So what are you waiting for, Click here to get started on getting 50 free cards from Shutterfly. I can’t wait to get my cards designed.

Antiques Galore!

Okay, so I haven’t posted anything in about two weeks. There have been many things that I thought I would put on here and never did get around to it.  Anyway on to this post, this is one that I thought would interest a few of you (ahem, Carrie).  I follow a blog called My Blessed Life, and today I read about a trip that she took with a good friend of hers to Southern Accents in Cullman, Alabama.
So get this, My Blessed Life is hosting a giveaway over at her blog for a $50 gift certificate to Southern Accents. She will randomly draw for a winner on December 1st.  I decided that I would visit the site of Southern Accents and take a look around, and just look at some of the items that they had on their web site:

Copper Tub

Cast Aluminum Mailbox with Paper Holder

White Iron Urns

Window Sashes

Reproduction Tin Ceiling

There  is so much more there to look at. So here is your chance to win a  $50 gift certificate. Just head on over to My Blessed Life and enter. I would so love to have that Copper Tub, but unfortunately it is way and I mean way out of my price range. The window sashes are more of what I can afford. When I saw these I thought of a friend from North Carolina that takes windows like these and turns them into so many different works of art. I have seen her make chalk boards, and picture frames out of them. Oh I sure would like to have some of them.  I already have a project in mind for them.
Disclosure: The above pictures were taken from Southern Accents web site.

I'm Getting Paid to Shop!

Have you ever thought about how nice it would be to get paid to shop? Well I have and I have finally found a way to do just that. Recently I signed up for Ebates which pretty much pays you to shop. This is how it works, you go online and join Ebates (don't worry it is free). After joining you can go to any online store that they feature, (believe me you will find one that you already shop at) and it will tell how much cash back they will pay you just for shopping through them. Here is an example of a purchase I just made this evening.

I went through Ebates and clicked on the Entertainment Book. By purchasing the book through them, I will get 35.0% cash back. The Entertainment Book was priced at $35.00, it was marked down to $28.00 and I also got free shipping. So the amount I will get back from Ebates is $9.80 (it will not show up on my account until a couple of days after my purchase). With the cash back, that's like paying $18.20 for The Entertainment Book.

Some of the ones that I saw today while looking around Ebates were:
The Children's Place 3.0%
FAO Schwartz 4.0%
JCPenney 6.0%
Snapfish 11.5% (This would be good for Christmas Photo Cards)
Target 3.0%
ULTA Beauty 5.0%
Vera Bradley 3.0%

See what I mean? I know you want to "get paid to shop", so why not go to Ebates and sign up. I did.  (o;

Just a quick side note, I did sign up in 2009, but didn't start shopping through them until recently. You have to have money to shop, Ha! I was never a shop on line person, especially since we don't have credit cards, but I have started taking my cash and getting Visa gift cards with them so that I can shop on line. By using the Visa gift card, no one can take my debit card or credit card (if I still had one) and go on a shopping spree.

Campfire Chili

Do you feel what I feel? Ahh, the cool air has finally returned to our small town here in the good ole’ Sunshine State. Of course with the return of the coolness, it is time for our family to have a nice little fire outside to sit around and try to keep warm. I know it makes absolutely no sense, we complain about the heat then what do we do, build a fire to stay warm. This afternoon Chuck asked me if I would like for us to eat our supper around the fire. My response was, “sure, why not”. So we took our chili and cornbread and ate around our “camp fire”. Of course no campfire is complete unless you have these.There were a couple of times where our marshmallows looked more like Baked Alaska with all the flames coming off of them rather than marshmallows.   

Touring Savannah

Now for the rest of the  “Sisters tour Savannah”. On Tuesday morning Crystal and I decided to walk around the Historic District of Savannah. We knew that there were walking tours available, but we had already seen some of the people the previous day on a walking tour and to be quite honest they looked like they would have rather been somewhere else.   So we opted to take our own little tour. So we walked and we walked some more. We ended up at the City Market.

  For lunch we stopped in at Barnes BBQ. I think we made an excellent choice for lunch. We had the special, which was BBQ sandwich one side and a drink. Let me just say that I do not think that I have ever in my life had a BBQ sandwich that was that good. It had the smoked taste in every bite. (In my opinion it seems like now days so many BBQ restaurants just bake their meat and it just doesn’t taste the same.) We were only able to eat half of our sandwich so we took the rest with us and ate it later in the afternoon.
So after lunch we went back to our room and relaxed for about thirty minutes then decided we would take a trolley tour. The lady at the front desk called Oglethorpe Trolley Tours and scheduled them to pick us up ten minutes later at the front door of the Eliza Thompson House. This was another “best” decisions we made on our trip. We were able to see so many things that we had missed while walking and even found some places we wanted to check out before we left for home the next day.  Here are a few of the places that we saw:
This is Chippewa Square, named in honor of the American victory in the Battle of Chippewa during the War of 1812. It is also the square where Tom Hanks sat on the bench in the movie Forrest Gump.
Here is the Andrew Low House. The home of Juliette Gordon Low (Founder of the Girl Scouts).
These are just a few of the houses that we saw on the trolley tour. I love the look of all of them.  

While on the trolley tour we saw this very small house, the tour guide told us that it was a one bedroom home that just sold. It had been on the market for $525,000 . I know it is Savannah, but really a small one bedroom home for that much. No thank you!
So remember the walking tour that I told you about earlier, well here is a couple of pictures that I took from the trolley of one of the guided walking tours. Notice the guy in the white suit and hat, he was the guide for this tour. Sorry the quality of this photo is not that great, I was in a moving trolley. ( ;
After our tour we got ready and headed down to River Street and did some browsing in some of the shops, then we found us some seafood and once again stuffed our bellies.
Before we headed home on Wednesday morning we went to nourish a natural bath products store. I bought a bar of  vanilla raspberry soap. I love this scent. Then we made one last stop at Back in the Day Bakery where I purchased cupcakes to take home and share with my husband and kids.
I am so glad that my sister asked me to take a trip with her to Savannah. I wonder where our next trip will be to?????

Sisters tour Savannah

My sister and I took a quick trip to Savannah on Monday. She was so sweet to book us a room at the Eliza Thompson House.

After arriving in Savannah on Monday, we headed down to Congress Street to  The Lady and Sons  to see if we could get in for lunch.

 

We feasted on fried chicken, mashed potatoes, green beans, black eye peas, cream corn, mac and cheese, collard greens (for me) and lima beans (for my sister). Their was also biscuits, and hoe cake, and I can’t leave out some of the best sweet tea around. For dessert we decided we would choose something different and share with one another (like good sisters do). Crystal got the chocolate gooey butter cake, which I have to say was so rich, but oh so good. I opted for the banana puddin’ which was good, but not as good as that cake. 

When we finished our meal, I do believe I could have skipped eating another meal for about two weeks. All I can say is that we both got our monies worth.

  While we were waiting for our reservation for lunch we walked over  to Johnson Square, which was the first square laid out by General James Oglethorpe in 1733. This square which is the largest in Savannah is named for Robert Johnson, a close friend of General Oglethorpe.  

As Crystal and I were sitting there on one of the benches, (people watching, one of our favorite things to do) a lady comes up to us and hands each of us this flower made out of palm fronds, and asked us for  a donation. Well normally I wouldn’t just hand over money to someone who comes up to me like that, but for whatever reason I pulled a dollar out and handed it to her. She thanked me and went back to the bench that she was occupying to make her flowers.

Not long after we finished eating I realized that I didn’t bring extra batteries for my camera and battery light was flashing on my camera. So after getting checked into our room we asked where the closet place to buy batteries was at. We were given directions and found the place that we were told about. However they looked busy and also looked like I would most likely pay an arm and a leg for batteries. Long story short, we drove all over trying to find a CVS or Walgreens, and went way out of the way to find absolutely nothing. Although I did see this Great Dane.

We finally found a CVS and it was just down the road from where we were staying .

I’ll be back soon with another post of our trip to Savannah.

Pure Randomness (is that a word??)

I can’t believe that it has been just over two weeks since I have posted anything on here.  So what has been going on at our house? Well since my last post, Kaelyn had a birthday, I went to the Optometrist (verdict there, I need glasses), Chuck and I attended the NANC (Biblical counseling training) in Jacksonville, just to name a few.

I still have a hard time with my “baby girl” growing up so fast. How in the world did she go from this baby:

to this 11 year old girl.

We didn’t have a “big birthday party” for her. She had two of her friends over and we took them skating then we came back home and had a “cupcake party”. I had baked cupcakes ahead of time then made some butter cream frosting and each one of them decorated their own cupcakes. So very simple and yet so fun for them.

The girls at the skating rink.

Decorating cupcakes.

My nephew Wyatt decorating his cupcake.

My nephew Waylon with his finished cupcake.

  So as for me and glasses, because of my allergies and only needing a light prescription we decided that I would just have glasses and skip on the contacts. I have not gotten the glasses yet, I am “shopping” around for them. I want to find some that I like how they look on me and also the best price for them. 

This past Friday, Chuck and I traveled to Jacksonville for training in Biblical counseling. We were in classes Friday evening and then again all day Saturday. There is so much information to take in and then trying to remember everything. So thankful that notebooks and notes were provided for us. Chuck is going to pursue the certification process of becoming a NANC counselor. I on the other hand, will most likely be a support person for him, and counsel as needed. Eventually I may seek certification for myself.

I leave in the morning with my sister for a much needed “SISTERS ROADTRIP”.  Thanks to my sister for taking me with her and to my husband for the time away. I know Chuck and the kiddo’s will have a good time while I am away. Will hopefully have some nice pictures to share when we get back.

1- 2 -3 Imagine . . . .

Several weeks ago my sweet sister invited me to go on a field trip with her, my nephews and my mom. Our destination, Sesame Street. So this past Tuesday morning we headed to see 1 –2 -3 Imagine! with Elmo and friends. 

 

I enjoyed the time that I spent with them, not so much the show though.  Could have been that I saw this show years ago while I was still working in Pre-K or it could have been the fact that we had a hard time hearing what was being said.I don’t know if it was everywhere or just in the section that we were sitting in. Apparently I wasn’t the only one who couldn’t hear the show. There were several people sitting around us that said they couldn’t hear either.  About 30 minutes into the show, Wyatt says, “I want to go home” guess he didn’t like it much either.  Here are a few of the pictures that I was able to take while we were there. Sorry that the quality is not the best.

 

 

I love the shirts that Waylon’s teachers made for them to wear on their field trip. They were so cute. 
When the show was over we loaded up the boys (their mom had already signed them out of class) and headed on over to Cracker Barrel for a yummy lunch. The boys did a great job on their field trip and also at lunch. I had a great time with them. Thanks Crystal for inviting me to tag along with you all.