Lola turns 1

My little Lola is

ONE!

 

March 20, 2012

I can't believe how fast this year has gone by!

Lola is such a sweet little girl.  She is very laid back and calm, unless.... she gets annoyed by something.  And then you'd better watch out, because she's very strong!

 Lola wasn't super into getting her pictures taken.  But we managed to get a few after we gave her a lollipop.

I worked for months on the decorations and party favors.  Not that it took months, just that I could do little bits here and there.  I worked on the stuff for Noah's party as well since  his birthday comes shortly after.

Her Aunt Brandy doing her little girl hair.

Soooo much of our family was able to come since they happened to be in town and/or available that day.  It was a huge crowd and a whole lot of fun!  

Noah sure had fun with all of his cousins!

Lola is 100% a Daddy's girl.  She LOVES her Daddy.  And Abe loves being her first choice!  I love it too, it's so sweet.

Thanks everyone who came and helped us celebrate Lola's first birthday!

Here's a newborn picture and a one year picture.

My how she's grown up!

Happy Birthday Sweet Lola!

Thank you sooo much to my dear, sweet friend Mandy for taking these gorgeous pictures for me!

new valentines!

I know I'm running late this year... seems to be the story of my life for the past 10  months since little Lola arrived in our lives!

BUT...

I have finally finished the 2012 Valentine sets!

The Birds and Bees Set

The Bomb Set

These are made from my original pencil drawings, then scanned and colored digitally.

This year, I colored them with the clone tool in photoshop using my prints so they would show texture.  I know that sounds weird, but the coloring turned out really cute!

They are available to purchase in the shop now!

Also, I may end up listing the past years' Valentines too.  But if you don't see those sets and want one, just let me know and I set up a reserved listing for you.

You can view the past years' sets here and here.

2011 valentines are in

Yay!  The new 2011 Valentines are in!  I fell so in love with the tiny ones I did last year that I decided to do it again!  This will most likely become an annual thing.  They are about 2.25 x 3.25 inches and come with tiny white envelopes to keep your message private and/or stick some candy in with your note.

Here are the sets:

And as I said last year, who says Valentines can't be year round??

Some possible uses for tiny Valentines include (but not limited to):

-Classroom Valentines

-slipping in a lunchbox

-tucking in a purse or wallet

-leaving around the house (ie: computer, mixing bowl)

-inlcude with other letters as a fun little extra

They come in sets of 12 (4 of each design) with 12 tiny little envelopes.
These are made from my own original pencil illustrations, then colored digitally. I have printed them on a light weight, white cardstock and hand-cut each one!

Enjoy these! They are available in the shop now!  You can pick up a set (or more) HERE!

silly christmas tradition

Before I get to our silly Christmas tradition, I promised a post with some detail of the tree decor, so here ya go...

I always thought I wanted a themed tree until I noticed how much Noah loved looking at all the different ornaments on Grandma and Grandpa Carlsruh's tree.  So I changed it up and now every ornament is different.

I have to say, I love this tree the most so far and it's so fun to collect neat little ornaments throughout the year.

Here's a few of my favorites:

It's hard to pick out favorites when the whole tree is full of them!

 

And now for our silly tradition!

I love the look of lots of presents under the tree and I can still do a theme with my wrapping paper.

You can see last year's theme HERE.

And for 2010 I used newspaper.  I know it sounds weird, but I LOVED the way it turned out!

Here it is:

It turned out to be somewhat of a challenge trying to avoid gruesome headlines and crazy pictures.  And... I still ended up with a few cooky headlines, but I loved how they looked with the bright red ribbon and the tree tags!

the silly part

So, in the last post I mentioned that we are minimalists when it comes to presents at Christmas so it must seem strange to have so many packages under the tree.

Well, Christmas 2009 I decided to have a plethora of packages because: a) I LOVE wrapping presents, b) it's fun to have a wrapping paper theme and c) it's so cute to have a pile of gifts under the tree!   So instead of shopping us into debt, I thought I'd just wrap some empty boxes.  As I was gathering the boxes, I had the funny idea to just put random silly things inside so we could have a few laughs Christmas morning.  Abe had no idea, so that's what happened.  Christmas morning, we laughed as Abe opened all the silly presents and found things like toilet paper, old Halloween candy, light bulbs, etc.  Turned out that Abe loved it and suggested we make it a tradition.  And so we did it again this year, only I gave half the boxes to Abe to fill so I could be surprised too.

So this year I got some things like soap, some quarters, old candy, a picture of a barn (that we dream of having one day) and other silly things.

Abe got some yarn, a can of tuna, some preggie pops, this lovely portrait of me that my mom painted years ago and more funny stuff.

It really is such a fun tradition for us and hopefully we'll get more and more creative as the years go by.  It's our own little white elephant gift exchange every Christmas!  Good times.

our christmas fun... a little late

We've been enjoying (and not so enjoying) a little hiatus here at home. 

Enjoying a little time off work and lots of time with family. 

And not so enjoying a house full of illness and

POTTY TRAINING!!  Eek!

With that said, I wanted to show a little of our Christmas fun from a few weeks ago.

Here's some cookie tree fun with Noah's cousins, Hunter and Zack:

Here is the night before Christmas reading of the nativity with Grandma and Grandpa Carlsruh:

Putting the oats and glitter on the lawn for Santa's reindeer:

(we didn't get more snow until the day after Christmas)

Noah got to open his traditional Christmas Eve jammies before bed:

Monsters this year.

Abe and I opened our traditional Christmas Eve game:

And now for lovely Christmas morning, puffy-eye pictures!!

Noah enjoying his stash of fun:

Abe seemed happy about his gift cards:

What pregnant woman wouldn't want a spa giftcard??

(please ignore the dark circles around my eyes... another thing to blame on pregnancy)

And Abe got us both some iPod shuffles:

Well that's about it for our gifts.  We tend to be minimalists when it comes to Christmas, so you may wonder what's with all the boxes under our tree.

Well I had a friend ask me about that last year so I'll be telling you all about it next post.  It's a rather fun thing we do and decided to make it a tradition.

But for the rest of the day, we hung out with Abe's family and had such a fun time!  I truly love this time of year!

And one last picture...

Noah sporting his adorable Monkey hat from Grandma Eve:

It's his favorite thing lately!  He wears it all the time.  So cute!

Hope you all enjoyed your Holidays!