Our Christmas Bedroom

Well, here is the second to last post on our Christmas decorating. Once we get our tree (hopefully this afternoon after Miss Lillie's nap) I will take pictures of our living room. Maybe next year I will be organized enough to have all of the Christmas decorating in one post! Actually with two wild ones running around next year probably not! Anyway, here is our master bedroom:

The fresh evergreen in this stocking has since been removed as Jon did not appreciate the mess it made every time he opened his sock drawer =).

Yes, I am seriously addicted to this book project. There is nothing better than a project that you like how it looks and is FREE! I think there will be about ten bundles of them around our house when I am done!  =)

And here is a picture of Lillie checking out the horses in Colonial Williamsburg on Saturday.

I can't believe her birthday is in just two days!

Don't forget today is the last day to get 15% off your order by using our BLOG15 discount code!

And also a reminder that we will be closing our shop at around midnight on Tuesday

and will not reopen until Sunday December 12th!

I hope you all are having a wonderful Monday!

Lillie's Christmas Room and a Few Other Things

Here are some pictures of Lillian Annabel's room decorated for Christmas. Just like the rest of the house we went pretty simple and just used a mix of fresh and faux greenery. I also have taken pictures now of our master bedroom and will hopefully have time to post those tomorrow.

Here is one of the stockings that my mom made for Lillie's first Christmas - I can't believe that was two years ago! Where does time go? In fact it was two years ago right now (the date isn't the same but it was around two in the morning the Sunday after Thanksgiving) that we were on our drive back from Liberty after a basketball game that we hit that infamous deer and ended up at the hospital where Lillie made her arrival hours and hours and hours later! Thus the nickname Deer Lillie and eventually the name of our shop, Dear Lillie. We changed the spelling because we figured people would be very confused why we spelled it after an animal. Ahhh - I am getting sidetracked, as always! Anyway, we are selling a similar version of this stocking in our Etsy shop. We just put a little bit of greenery poking out of it to add a pop of color.

Jessica at Joyfolie sent us the little fur stole and boots! Now if I could just get Lillie to put them on! She has decided that boots are too hard to walk in =(....oh well, even if she never gets over that they look so pretty in her room I am content just staring at them!

The tree didn't last long in her room as she informed us it was "so scary" while clutching her heart. I am a tad confused seeing how she was soooo excited about all of the other "baby trees" that we had in the house that we made an extra trip back to Lowe's to get her this one for her room. Oh well! I just ended up moving this one to our room!

 

Our friend Kelly was working at the Santa's Land in New Town this afternoon so we brought Lillie over. Last year she did fine but this year she was absolutely petrified of Santa. She loved the train they had going around one of the trees, though, and spent about 45 minutes playing with that - but she wanted absolutely nothing to do with poor ol' Santa!

We also had another basketball game. We are hosting a Thanksgiving tournament and played last night, tonight and again tomorrow. We won both last night and tonight - yay! Our neighbors came tonight and I think Lillie and Jackson had as much fun tickling each other as they did cheering.

And here is Lillie with Miss Kelly checking out our mascot who she refers to as the "birdie"

And of course her favorite part of any game is once it is over getting to run around on the court. There was a new security guard working down on our corner tonight who informed them only coaches and players were allowed on the court but Lillie and Kyla were quick to let them know it was okay =)

 Lillie and her best friend Kyla! They picked up right where they left off last season and go crazy as soon as they see each other! Here they are on the bench after the game. I am pretty sure they wish they could sit here DURING the game!



Well, that's it for now! It is late and I still have some more work to do before crawling in bed.

I hope you all have a wonderful Sunday!

Happy Thanksgiving, Some Christmas Decorating and the Winner of Our Holiday Fairyland Thermal

Enter His gates with THANKSGIVING and His courts with praise; give thanks to Him and praise His name. For the LORD is good and His love endures forever; His faithfulness continues through all generations.

Psalm 100 : 4-5

I hope that you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving! We had such a nice day here in Williamsburg. The team had practice this morning and then everyone went over to Coach and Mrs. Shaver's for a traditional Thanksgiving meal. The food was absolutely divine! I have no idea how Mrs. Shaver was able to have that much food and have it all cooked to perfection and piping hot (imagine feeding a team full of 6'8 growing boys who can eat more in one sitting than most of us can in two weeks...seriously, if you could see what they can eat at one time you would be in shock. I have been watching it for five years now and still can't fathom how it is humanly possible to eat as much as they do and not be violently ill). Lillie is definitely going to grow up thinking Thanksgiving is a basketball holiday and not a family holiday - haha! She had lots of fun playing trains, ping pong, foosball and being doted on. In fact when it was time to leave she pretended to fall asleep in one of their chairs so that she could extend her stay a little longer =). We definitely miss our families and getting to spend the holiday with them but thanks to phones and skyping it's not too bad and we did have a truly wonderful Thanksgiving.

Now it's time to get back to work! Our Etsy shop is back open and along with that we are continuing to get ready for Christmas and Lillie's birthday. Seeing how it is now officially Christmas season I thought I would start posting some pictures of our Christmas decorating. This room is actually my favorite this year but is the worst to photograph. We only have windows on one wall and there is a covered porch outside of those windows so we don't have much natural light which can make taking pictures a major pain. Everything looks kind of fuzzy and yellowish.  Anyway, here is our family room:

We kept it simple in here and just used fresh greenery and some fresh rosemary plants.

Here is one of the stockings that Lillie helped make.

When I first hung the wreath above the couch I just used one sticky hook and that night it came crashing down on Jon! I thought it was quite funny but he did not find it so humorous! Now there are two hooks holding it up and I promised him if it fell again I would put it somewhere else!

I always put greenery around our TV too which Jon really hates because he thinks it interferes with the remote working properly.

I am missing one of the pictures of this little corner between the family room and kitchen. If I can find it I will add it tomorrow.

Several of the projects Lillie and I have been working on are over here: the stocking, some Christmas song prints, the burlap pillows and the tea-stained pile of books.

I saw this project on two of my favorite blogs, My Sweet Savannah and Miss Mustard Seed earlier this fall and finally tried it! It seriously was the easiest thing and I am so excited about it I am going to make three more piles of them for some other spots around the house! You just rip off the covers of some ordinary books - I just used some I had that were stuffed in the armoire out on our porch catching dust, and then I rubbed some tea on the front and back pages and then watered down some brown paint and rubbed it on the spines. After that I just used some twine and bundled them and stuck some fresh greenery on it and that was it!

We normally have photos of Lillabel in these frames above the wingback chairs but I decided to just quickly type up two of my favorite Christmas songs and put them in the frames.

If you want to use either of them just click on them and they should open larger in another window for you to print. I would recommend printing them on cardstock. I am not sure how crisply they will print, though, because they are JPG's. I am going to list the PDF files in our Etsy shop for 99 cents. I am not sure how to upload a PDF to our blog.

I am not quite happy yet with our dining room but here is what we have for now. I like the sideboard area but don't like how the table looks but haven't had time to play around with it without my little "helper" Lillie.

And here is a dark shot of our living room. I am waiting to take the rest of those pictures until we get our tree up. Oddly enough, as much as I LOVE decorating for Christmas I HATE doing the tree for some reason.

Another odd thing is that as much as I like taking pictures I find it soooo awkward taking pictures in front of anyone besides my family. I brought my camera to the Shaver's this afternoon but only snapped a few shots before I felt weird and put my camera away. Here is Lillie playing before all of her "friends" arrived.


And here she was pushing it back and forth to Andrew and Kyle while they were trying to eat. I think they were probably very quickly wishing they could switch seats with someone - haha! Actually, they (along with all of the boys) are incredibly good with Lillie. It is so sweet watching them. They are all such good kids!

Okay and now for the winner of our Holiday Fairyland Thermal:

Congratulations to Kara of Kara's Korner!

(I did use Random.org, as always, to draw our winner but my computer is refusing to do a screen save/print screen right now! Arghh! Also a quick reminder to everyone who enters our contests - please make sure that we can contact you! The first winner that we drew had a blocked profile so we had no way to get in touch with them so we had to draw again!)

Don't forget to enter our discount code BLOG15 to get 15% off your order if you shop at Dear Lillie this weekend!

I will post either tomorrow or Saturday with our upstairs decorations. The lighting is a little better up there so those ones came out a little bit sharper.

I hope you all had a blessed Thanksgiving!