The Family Dynamic and Christmas Thermals (Jason's October Post)

Just wanted to let you all know that our 'Twas the Night Before Christmas Thermals are now available in our shop!!! Just click here!

Photo courtesy of JLYNN PHOTOGRAPHY

And now here is Jason with with his October post....

To put it simply, our family is different.

Yes… I know… Everyone thinks that his or her own family is the craziest group of people around and is deserving of its own sitcom. I can’t count the times I’ve heard someone casually toss out the phrase “they should really make it into a TV show” after telling some mildly entertaining story about one of their relatives. So don’t worry, I’m not about to claim that our family is in any way more worthy of having a camera crew follow us around than your own may be—but still, I feel as though it is at least a subject worth touching upon.

For instance, I can comfortably say that under most circumstances we are at least remotely reasonable people, but put us all together on a croquet court or in front of a board game and the result is always at least one utterly savage argument. Now I don’t want to give the impression that we’re all a bunch of hotheads running around and swinging mallets over a possible double tap, I’m just trying to paint an accurate picture of the unhealthily competitive nature of our relationships towards each other (I mean I’m willing to bet you’ve never seen more dictionaries at one game of scrabble). As children, we had to write our own rulebooks for most of our games simply because we came across countless scenarios not covered by the actual rules. And don’t even bring up Cranium… One sister may or may not have declared that I was “not even a real person!” during a particularly ugly battle over the validity of the use of a singular form of a word when the answer called for the plural.

Jenni would probably want me to mention that we aren’t always arguing. In fact, these days there seems to be an unspoken agreement that no games are to be played at family gatherings, and in spite of our childhood clashes, we remain unusually close.  In fact, my youngest sister Jamie is the only sibling to not have lived with Jenni and Jon at one point or another (but with the rising frequency of her visits, I’m actually shocked that she hasn’t started receiving mail at their home). Somehow in our youth, I think Dana, Jamie, and I all developed the misguided notion that Jenni somehow knows everything. Take Jamie, for example… a capable decorator in her own right, she can’t even purchase a piece of furniture for her own home without first seeking Jenni’s approval (or pick paint color for her bedroom… or which book to read next… you get the idea).

Just look what happens to Jamie and her overwhelming fear of crowds when Jenni isn’t around to direct her… It's taken directly from the Boston Celtics' jumbotron a couple of years ago, and trust me, its worth watching.

In recent years Lillie and Lola have thrown a bit of a wrench into the family dynamic. Its not necessarily a bad thing, but should a six month old really be the one determining our holiday plans? To say that our family obsesses over its new additions would be a bit of an understatement. Its as though with each new thing Lola learns, a family announcement is in order, and with each word Lillie says, one of us is ready to pounce on the opportunity to win her affection. Its fine for now, but I wonder if that will all change when they’re old enough to play croquet…

We'll do just about anything for them... For now.

A Little Halloween in the Dining Room

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As much as I love to decorate and especially love decorating for different holidays I am not really much of a Halloween person. However, I did decide to add a few accents for the weekend.

Melaine from My Sweet Savannah was so sweet and sent me these black crows last fall, which I LOVE!

I got these hang tags last year on Etsy.

Happy Halloween!

Some Winners

So, it is time to announce the winners for two of our giveaways! 

First, it's time for the winner of our

Silent Night/Holy Night Pillow Cover Giveaway:

(Oh and by the way they are now available in our shop again!)

 

Congratulations to Patty!

 

Send us an e-mail at dearlillie@hotmail.com with your address and we will get the covers shipped on out to you!

Thank you all for entering!

And now for the winner of the Little Posh Bebe Giveaway:

 

Congratulations Barb!

Someone from Little Posh Bebe will be sending you an e-mail shortly with information on collecting your prize!

And here are a few pictures of my little girl who is officially six months. She' such a sweet little thing.

I hope to be back tomorrow with photos our dining room decorated for Halloween.

Well, I hope you all have a blessed weekend!

Our Christmas Tutu

 

We have a new tutu now available just in time for the holidays! I took our Christmas card picture of Lola and Lillie with Lillie wearing hers. I haven't finished editing the pictures for our card yet but here are a few of Lillie from that day.

 This isn't one of the ones I am going to be using on our card but I thought I would share it seeing how both girls are actually SMILING! I can't believe it! Haha!

I hope you all have a marvelous Thursday!

Silent Night/Holy Night GIVEAWAY!!!!

Guess What? Today we are giving away a set of these pillow covers! Another batch is ready to go we just need to get the labels sewn in. We will be busy working on that today and tomorrow and they will be available at midnight Thursday night (or I guess technically 12:01 Friday morning).

Anyway, in the meantime we discovered that one of the Holy Night pillow covers had the back flap sewn on upside down (it has no effect on the front of the pillow and really doesn't effect the back either, but just because it isn't the same as the rest we didn't feel comfortable selling it). The Silent Night one doesn't have anything wrong with it. We were going to offer this set at a 50% discount on our site but then decided it would be more fun to give a set away!

So, how can you win?

All you have to do is leave a comment on this post!

You don't have to have a blog to enter, either. If you aren't a blogger, just enter a comment and then where it says "comment as" scroll down near the bottom and click on anonymous. However, if you do that, make sure to leave your e-mail address so we can confirm that you are the winner. If we draw the name of someone who doesn't leave any identifying information we will simply draw a new name. Make sure to check back here on the blog to collect your prize!

You can comment each day if you would like to up your chances!

For extra entries become a follower of our blog, twitter

and/or  like our facebook page!

Just write "follower" as a second comment so it counts as an entry,  and "twitter"

and "facebook" as their own entries.

And for one more extra entry: 

 "share" it with your friends on facebook and come back here and let us know you did!

You can enter this contest through tomorrow night and then Friday we will announce the winner. We will announce the winner of the Little Posh Bebe Giveaway then too. 

We are busy working as fast as possible trying to restock items and get new ones ready to go. We have some Drummer Boy and Joy to the World pillow covers in the works,  several styles of Christmas thermals,  and some new Hope as the Thing with Feathers thermals and sweatshirts.  My mom has been busy working on quite a few new items for our shop as well: our brand new Christmas tutu will be available tomorrow and we have baby stockings and drummer boy coasters that are finished and just need to be photographed, so hopefully they will be available at the beginning of next week! 

I LOVE this time of year!

Have a blessed Wednesday!

Where Are All the Toys? (And more Give Thanks Pillow Covers)

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 One of the questions we get asked the most is, "Where are all the toys?" Don't worry! I promise you the girls do have toys and our house is not always as tidy as it looks in the pictures. Although they do have plenty of toys, I must admit that we don't have tons and tons of them. This is for two reasons. First, I really want both Lillie and Lola to be creative and use their imaginations so we do alot of coloring, painting and drawing as well as reading and puzzles and stuff like that. Now, don't get me wrong, we still have some oh-so-lovely plastic toys too, including Lillie's current favorite, a Dora the Explorer guitar that lights up and and plays all sorts of loud songs, but we don't have an over-abundance of them.

The second reason is that our house, although I wouldn't necessarily consider small, I wouldn't think of it as big either (I think it is around 1800 square feet), and we have very little storage space. We live in a townhouse and don't have a basement or attic. The bedrooms each have a closet but other than that we just have one tiny coat closet downstairs and a tiny linen closet upstairs, and that is pretty much it for storage. If we had all sorts of toys we wouldn't have anywhere to put them and would be tripping over them all day, which I am pretty sure would drive both Jon and I insane as we are both neat freaks - although since having children we have learned to loosen up considerably!

So, with that little disclaimer I will tell you where we keep the toys that we do have. We keep the larger items (doll strollers, soccer ball, beach toys, etc.) out in the garage when they aren't being used. Then a bunch more of Lillie's things are in her closet and bookshelf. We keep her little kitchen set (which is her largest toy by far) up in her room.

When we first got her this little desk and chair last summer she didn't use it much but lately has started enjoying sitting at it and reading or coloring.

In her little window seat area if you pull the skirt below the seat back there is storage space to put all sorts of junk.

You can see more photos of Lillie's room here and here.

The rest of the toys and baby items are pretty much all stored in this room. They are all there, you just can't see them.

See this little ottoman? If you lift the top off there is all sorts of space to store things.

Over in the corner next to the TV we have a little toy box that looks like a trunk.

Next up - the white slipcovered chairs. Just lift up their skirts and underneath both of them are lots of toys.

Our coffee table has four drawers that are full of all sorts of gadgets and then there are two baskets full of books and puzzles.

And even underneath the coffee table we slide more games and toys.

Underneath the other half of the coffee table is a little basket that contains all of Lola's diapers, wipes, burp clothes and all of those kinds of things. And of course more toys are slid underneath that too.

I plan on moving one of my old side tables with drawers here so we can have more storage for the growing piles of Lola's things. Having lots of furniture with drawers and shelves certainly helps with hiding all the clutter. I like the look of this table better but eventually I can move it back.

And there you have it! That is where we keep the toys. Now as far as the question about it looking so neat goes, well that's a different story. If you walked into our house on a weekday morning it might look like a bomb went off. Because a messy house makes me super stressed, though, I try to clean everything up and get things back in place when the girls are napping and as soon as they go to bed each night before I start working. That helps it from getting too out of control. If you walked into our house after the girls are in bed or during naptime then it will look similar to what you see here on the blog. Although we generally keep it quite tidy, I must admit it can get VERYYYYYYY dirty. There are days that there are about three meals worth of food underneath our dining room table. Haha! Gross, I know! However, yesterday we did a long overdue scrub down of everything and cleaned out drawers, drains and all sorts of other fun stuff. Ahhhhh - I forgot how amazing it feels to have the house feel so CLEAN! Let's see how long that lasts. =)

A lot of readers also wonder about having so much white in a house with two small children. I will address that in another post.

This has nothing to do with this post, but I thought I would share a few pictures of Lillie wearing her Notre Dame basketball jersey while playing tennis a couple of weeks ago. I think we still have a few years until she knows what she is doing but it was still fun to watch her out there playing around with our neighbors.

And lastly, we now have the 12" by 16" Give Thanks Pillow Covers available.

I hope you all have a most fabulous Monday!