CT’s first day of Kindergarten was this past week. It was a HUGE milestone for both of us, so of course I had to take loads of photos.

I also figured I should make a little sign so we never forget it was the first day of school.

Then after much thought I decided on a second piece that can be detached that says which year of school shes starting.

All of this snowballed into the fabric banner above! It’s 8″ square with marine grade vinyl letters cut out using my Sizzix Fabi and the Block Talk Alphabet Die Set. The background is Andover Fabrics chambray in black. I made it pretty much the exact same way as my Appliqued Vinyl Letter Pillow.

I also added snaps to the bottom of the banner so I could make an attachment for each year she is in school. I plan on making all the grades later this week when things have calmed down around here and putting this in a safe place.

The idea of her using this every year makes me all teary eyed! Can you imagine her in 12th grade holding this little banner?!?!?

As you may be able to tell, I’m a complete mess over her going to school. Yes I gained 8 uninterrupted hours each weekday, but I still miss her soooooooooo much. Does it get easier?!?

I have been working a lot more than normal lately and we haven’t really done much this summer due to colds and other illnesses. My husband, JC, thought we needed to do SOMETHING! So he used some hotel rewards points he had and booked us a hotel about a half hour outside Washington DC at no cost. It was only 30 mins away from our house, but it had an indoor pool, lots of neat restaurants close by and IT WASNT HOME! We spent the first day there kinda wandering around the local mall, eating good food and relaxing! For me relaxing meant reading the new Martha Stewart’s Living and sketching and for JC and CT it meant swimming. It was nice.

The second day away we spent at the National Zoo in Washington DC. One of my favorite places! It was supposed to rain, but apparently we had some luck for once and it was just a bit overcast. It WAS super humid, even though it was only 75*F out! My lungs hated it, but I pushed myself to keep walking. It was also CT’s first time visiting the zoo, I wanted to make sure she saw as much as possible.

Oh and of course I took a load of photos, so prepare yourselves, there are a bunch…

I treat my trips to the zoo like photography challenges. It probably has something to do with the yearly field trips my photo class took to the zoo in high school (and the few times I chaperoned my siblings trips later on) We were let loose on the zoo for an entire day and told to take photos certain ways of certain subjects. I loved it! One of the nice perks of living near a big city growing up. We also did Baltimore trips, but nothing beat the zoo!

My personal challenge this time was to only use my 75-300mm Lens and the largest aperture my camera would let me. Nothing else. Its obviously not a hard challenge, but I still like the limits. This did mean that whenever I wanted to take a picture of something close by, I had to back up really far and look like a fool. The photos came out with such a nice depth of field that I don’t care!

(This ragged looking little bird wasn’t part of any exhibit, he was just wandering around. I just wanted to share a photo of him because he was so friendly and came right up to me!)

Anyway, back to our trip…

The zoo ended up being a huge hit with CT. Though her favorite part ended up being an orangutan who would throw up on the glass and eat it again. She’s STILL talking about that! I’m so happy we finally went. It’s hard to justify not going when we live so damn close to the city. I’m going to make it a personal goal to visit DC more often. We even live down the street from  MARC train stop that goes into the city every weekday!!! No excuses.

The rest of our time away was spent wandering IKEA and thrift stores. I ended up with some Blythe furniture from IKEA and a sweet Pyrex bowl from the thrift store. CT found a huge wooden modern dollhouse for $10!! SCORE!

I’m so happy we were able to do this and its made me a little more excited, and less nervous, for our NYC trip coming up in October. I’m going for BlytheCon, my family is just going for fun. Any of you guys going too?

After lunch we ended up at Culler Lake, which is kinda part of Baker Park. It’s a cute little lake with ducks and all. It was perfect for taking pictures! CT and my brother were able to play and my husband was able to hang out on a bench.

My adorable sister Cori was really awesome about taking so many pictures too! Seriously, I took A LOT of photos!!

Funny thing, I have been making jewelry for almost 10 years, and somehow this is the first time I’ve ever taken pictures of my jewelry on a real live person!!! How weird is that? I’m pretty new to portraits where the jewelry is the main focus and not the person, and I’m not too sure about how they came out. I’m very happy with my sister in the shots, but I don’t think I did well focusing on the jewelry. I guess I’ll get better with lighting, composition and all the more I try?

Anyone have some pointers?

From top left…

• a doctor who pouch for my friend Molly
• a Pyrex inspired pouch for my friend Tasha
• the Modern Maples quilt I mentioned earlier this week for my sister Ashley
• a hedgehog pillow for my sister Cori (using the paper piecing pattern I found here. Oh and this was my first time trying paper piecing! I’m in love!)
• a pillow for my grandmother using the Modern Maples blocks.
• a hedgehog pouch for my sister Cori (as you can see, she loves hedgehogs, she even has one)
• two Tangled inspired dresses for nieces.

I actually made a few other things too, but they haven’t been gifted yet.

It was all a lot of fun to make, but I am beyond exhausted. New rule: Start sewing gifts in the summer!!!!!

CT turned three this year, and yesterday was her first time playing in the snow, ever! It’s not like we live in a hot area of the country. She was just too young the first year, too scared the second year and no snow the third year, it wasn’t until her fourth winter could she FINALLY play in the snow!

She threw her first snowball (and about a dozen more), she made her first snowman,  and her first snow angel. She rode a sled for the first time, and said she never wants to do it again. She loved it all, as you can see above!!

She also had her first cup of hot chocolate (which was actually luke warm) and HATED it!! Haha. I guess she can’t love all her firsts.

Today marks the day when all the craziness of the holidays ends! Hopefully…

I hope everyone who celebrates any of the December holidays had a great month! I can’t wait to get back to my normal, everyday schedule. I have so much to share.

(oh and to explain a bit about why CT has TWO of the same pez in the above photo… I apparently have been really absent minded lately and bought two of the same thing. I didn’t realize it until Christmas eve, while wrapping. So I wrapped them together, and we told her she got twin pez dispensers. SHE WAS SO EXCITED ABOUT IT!.)

Like I said, Saturday was at our house and I had this huge plan to have a beautiful set table. Well, I forgot about a tablecloth, and it started to get a bit hectic before setting the table so everything was kinda just thrown together. Oh and to add to it, I had my camera set on a high ISO and my camera battery died after taking the above photos! Grrrr. So I was unable to get all the pictures I wanted. (I did also get the Instagram photo below before my phone died too!! haha!) I was told all the food tasted great, (I was only able to eat the foods that were gluten free) and everyone seemed to enjoy themselves, so I’m guessing that means we did everything right as hosts!

I’m very thankful I was able to spend time with all our families, and I’m also very thankful for a reason to clean the house! It’s so clean I’m afraid to do anything to make it a mess again. CT on the other hand has no problem making messes.

The rest of this week I plan on sewing, sewing and sewing some more. I have huge plans for handmade Christmas gifts this year and I’m only halfway through finishing the first one. I also need to start putting together everything for CT’s third birthday in two week. It’s her first themed party, and were planning on a bunch of kids coming. So I need to make it all super fun!!

Oh and a friendly reminder, our Cyber Monday sale is still going on! 25% off everything in the shop, and all orders over $50 will receive a free accessory set!! It all ends tonight at midnight EST.

Last week we decided we wanted to get a new Christmas tree. We have been using the same tree since our first apartment together 9 years ago. It was bought on clearance after the holidays, and was pretty much the only one we could find. It was a little short, and a little sparse, but it always looked super cute when we put all of our ornaments on it. You can see a photo of it from last year (CT is really cute and tiny in the photos too!!). The reason we decided to upgrade was because we felt it would be nice to have a bigger tree, since we have such large ceilings. Plus we found the perfect tree for us by accident and needed an excuse to buy it. Ha.

The new tree is 7.5 foot, instead of 6 foot. It has those plastic feeling branches on the outside and tinsel on the inside instead of tinsel all over. Oh and the best part… The lights are LED’s and can switch from colored lights to white lights!! That last part is what sold me and made me spend my hard earned cash on a new tree! I’m a sucker for new technology.

We apparently waited to long to buy it, and ended up with the floor model. Which bring me to why we set it up so early. Since we bought the floor model, it didn’t come with a box. So our options were to have a huge tree in pieces in the middle of the library, or set it up! We set it up, and of course I couldn’t have a naked tree standing around. So we decorated it too! CT’s decorating skills have improved greatly since last year. She put ornaments on the bottom half of the tree, and I did the top half for the most part. JC had to put the star on, I’m just too short.

I’m happy the main tree is up, along with a few other decorations. It’s been slowly lifting my spirits. Everything is so shiny and bright. I still have my white tree to put up, but I’ going to wait until after CT’s birthday in mid December. That way I have more space in our dining room for the party! Which I really need to start preparing for…

Has anyone else already set up their tree, or decorated for the holidays? Or am I the only crazy one?

One good thing that came out of it all was since he worked so much during the weekend, he was able to take off yesterday. We used the day to actually do some fun stuff! We went out to eat, did a teeny bit of thrifting (I found a Disneyland cookie jar and CT found loads of books), some “window shopping” and we saw a movie!! Everything was nice, but that movie was great!!

We don’t really have a way of going to the movies often, timing is just never right. If we want to go, it has to be a kids movie that all three of us want to see. It pretty much has to be cartoon and can’t be scary. We learned our lesson about scary when we saw Brave, I still haven’t seen the second half (though I did buy the dvd this past week, so I’ll know what happens soon) Anyway, we decided to check out Wreck it Ralph.

CT has been asking to go see this movie for months now! It’s been hard explaining that movies come out at different times, sometimes in theaters, sometimes on DVD. She’s starting to catch on. We didn’t tell her we were seeing Wreck it Ralph until we bought the tickets, just in case. She was excited once we got in. We all were, ha. Truthfully we’ve all been looking forward to seeing this movie, and I’m so glad we did.

It was seriously one of the best Disney movies I’ve seen in a long time. The characters were all done so well, and the story kept your attention the entire time. They were able to make you feel something for the bad guy, the main character Ralph. You wanted him to be the hero! CT loved Venelope the best, of course. She was adorable!! I won’t get into the full story line here, because I really feel that anyone reading this should see this movie! It has a nice retro feel, it has loads of video game references from different decades, it has a little love story and a hero’s quest! Perfect! I loved it so much I MAY try and convince the family to go see it again. Maybe when it’s at the $2 theatre.

Now it’s Tuesday and my week is about to get crazy. We are headed to my uncles for thanksgiving on Thursday, and I said I’d make a pie and some macarons. Then we are hosting our own Thanksgiving for my husband’s side of the family on Saturday, which involves a lot of cleaning, prepping, baby proofing and baking too. I’m also hoping to get some antique shopping in on Friday during a huge sale at one of our favorite shops. It will be my only plan for Black Friday. Hopefully.

I hope everyone else is having a calmer week than me, and a great time with family!!

(the above two photos were courtesy of disney.com)

Our original plan was to do the Mickey’s Not So Scary Halloween Party the second night we were there, just in case any of got sick or something else happened. Kinda get it over with before everyone was exhausted. Well, it rained that night, so we were able to switch our tickets over to the next party, which was the night before we left. So it was basically a party to celebrate the end of our vacation!

You may be asking what the difference is between the party and any other night at the Magic Kingdom? well, a lot! They have these events a few times a week starting in September and ending right after Halloween. It cost additional and tickets should be purchased before heading to Disney, and if you go on Halloween (like we did for our anniversary in 2008) you have to get those tickets months ahead of time. It’s a great time to have your entire family all dressed up in costume, because everyone else was! (CT was snow white, us parents ran out of time to make costumes)

They close the park to anyone who didn’t purchase the party tickets around 7pm, which is when they start all the fun stuff. The first thing they do is hand everyone trick or treat bags, this year they were paper bags with Wreck It Ralph and Frankenweenie on them. These are used for trick or treating all over the park! Sometimes its just a Disney employee handing out the candy, but other times its actual characters. Though this time I didn’t see actual characters doing it, maybe its just a Halloween day thing? Soon after all that they start the first of two special Halloween Parades…

We figured we’d just watch the second parade, since they’re exactly the same, and go ride some rides during since they’d be empty. But we got sucked in and had horrible spots, so sorry for the crappy photos. If there’s a next time, we’ll prepare better and wait it out in a good seat. The parade was all about the villains. The whole night was pretty much all about them. Everything was so neat looking and all the costumes were amazing. It really set the mood for the whole night.

After the parade we went to ride the teacups again. As you can see above, the teacups really were her favorite thing at the parks. When you ask her what the best things at Disney were, her first reply is the pool at the resort and her second thing was the teacups!

The Happy HalloWishes fireworks were amazing! Again, they were all Disney villain themed. During the fireworks show they would cast weird lights on the leftover smoke to make it all creepy looking, and they would also project images of different villains onto the castle. As you can see in the green colored photo above, one of them was Oogie Boogie from the Nightmare Before Christmas. There were many others, but I can’t remember them all. Wow, does Disney do fireworks right! They were basically all around, complete 360. As my husband says, what’s considered a grand finale for our local fireworks is just the beginning at Disney. It was all so pretty!

After the fireworks we went to go have dinner before the next parade started. CT had been up a little late every night we were at Disney, so we figured she’d be able to stay awake. We headed down to the beginning of the parade hoping to get a better seat. We had no such luck. Good thing for CT, her dad is tall and she was able to sit on his shoulder to watch some of the parade… She started to get drowsy halfway through and ended up falling asleep in her stroller. We figured we’d seen the parade before, so we would just slowly head out of the park. I took a bunch of pictures on the way out of course, always take advantage of the quiet and calm time you have when your child is asleep! (like me writing this blog post right now) We actually caught the parade at the entrance and ended up being trapped in the middle circle of main street! That’s where that photo on the right above came from. Luckily they let people through inbetween parade floats, so we were able to beat the rush to the bus. which was great, because carrying a passed out toddler, a stroller, backpacks, camera, etc on a crowded bus sucks!! (we know, we had to do it a few nights before)

As you can see, our little snow white was seriously exhausted. I know she had a great time though, because she has excitedly talked about it all nonstop since we got home!!

I’m really happy we were able to take her to Disney World, and even happier we could do the Halloween party. It’s one of my favorite things to do at Disney! It makes me wonder if the next time we go should it be for Halloween, or maybe mix it up and do the Mickeys Very Merry Christmas Party? Has anyone ever done both? If so, which was more fun for little ones?

Well, this is the last post I’ll be writing about our actual trip. If you’re interested in seeing all the photos from this our Disney vacation, just head on over to my Flickr page, I uploaded everything finally!!