Projects

I keep a running list of all the projects I would like to get done, and I wear my husband out most Saturdays just telling him what all I want to get accomplished that day. I know there is no way that we can get them all done in one day especially with two little ones running around (or crawling around in Emalyn's case), but I just need to get the ideas out there. But I will say after the craziness of this last month, I am done with projects for a while (which if you could see Maddie's room right now, you would know that is going to be hard for me.)

I feel like every time I sit down to write a blog post all I think to start with is whew, what a busy month it has been! But I think this month takes the cake, between hosting a wedding shower at our house (which meant a very long list of to-dos...it was the first time we had hosted anything in our backyard, helping with a baby shower, recovering from knocking my head against the brick wall of our house..and yes, a month later I am still dizzy!.., a trip up to Knoxville to finally pick up Miss Maddie's big girl bed then down to Chattanooga for a sorority sister's wedding, hosting a jewelry show, a trip to Auburn for the LSU game, hosting another baby shower in Birmingham, and helping with Maddie's class Halloween Party, I am exhausted!  Sadly, it has taken me 9 months to realize I cannot do all of this with two kids! All of which have been so much fun and I would not ever want to miss celebrating any these exciting events with our friends, but I think I am learning I may have to take more of the approach of I would love to help split the cost of the shower, but I'm not sure how much time I will have to help with the fun little touches a shower entails.

Chris has just start this men's Bible Study, CLC, and one of the first books (or in this case a mini-book) is Tyranny of the Urgent, which I sat down and read this week. And the premise of the book is that we so often let the "urgent" things crowd out the important things. And I know if I really looked back on my day, many of the time consuming tasks that seemed "urgent " in the moment are actually not that big of a deal. Chris and I had had many conversations the past two weeks as to what we need to cut out of our lives, b/c of live is too full and busy. And the thing that is most important, time with my girls gets swept away in the craziness.

Here are a few of the projects that have kept us busy the past few months:

Since the flood I have realized the importance of having furniture that has lots of storage in it. So I began the hunt. We found one sideboard at Nadeau, one of my favorite places to find furniture. And we found another side board at one of my aunts estate sales (Patterson Estate Sales). It is so fun to see what she has at her sales each week, and even more fun b/c everything goes 50% off on Saturday. And this piece actually was still there the end of the day Saturday, so we got a great deal on it. After refinishing a table from one of her sales, Chris said no more refinishing, and this piece would have required a lot of work. So I opted to paint it gray instead.
Here is the before:

And the after now that it is in the house (still working on the cord situation underneath)!

And I have had a lot of fun with my monogramming machine:

This is a little gown I made for some friends of ours, the Eaves, who are a having a little boy in November

Here is Miss Maddie in her M dress. Gotta love the monag dresses. I think my girls will be living in those for the next few years.

And for the shower for Jeff and Jessica, I embroidered them linen cocktail napkins. The pictures is not very good, but you get the idea. I had always ordered the white linen hemstitch napkins, and I wasn't sure what I would think about the cream. But I really like them monogrammed in brown. I monogrammed their initials on some, The Krones on some, and Jeff and Jessica on the rest.

And for the centerpieces on the table we used wine bottles with labels with their initials.

And it was our week to bring snacks to Maddie's class. We made Jello sail boats:

And here are the fruit cup jack-o-lanterns for her school Halloween party. Chris just shakes his head when I start one of these projects, but the end result is so much fun!

So here is to a much less busy November and simply getting to enjoy my girls!