my blog

brought to you by the letter k.

My computer is a piece of junk. This isn’t new information of course. Now to sweeten the deal even more, now I can’t upload any of the new pictures I’m taking, and since I’ve committed to blogging at least twice a year now, I’m forced to share boring old pictures (gasp) until we save enough pennies to buy a new computer.

Remember back in September when my kids had their first day of school? Didn’t you know all the cool kids save those pictures until January.

Just doesn’t quite have the same impact 6 months later huh.

Well, how about a fun project to keep you inspired. Remember how I talked about Mrs. King being my favorite teacher of all time. Well I wanted to show you the gift I made her for just being awesome.

I’m not going to lie, it wasn’t easy to put together. But she loved it, and she is worth all the time in the world. The whole thing cost me $1.25. $1 for the frame and .25 cents for the crayons. Not too shabby huh.

ava’s baptism.

ETA: I fixed the video link. Thanks for the heads up!

In our Church you get baptized when you are 8 years old. So you can see we had been preparing for this very special day with Ava for quite some time. Going dress shopping together, and making the invitations, planning the day and having family from far away come to celebrate this wonderful event in Ava’s life.

We didn’t do anything fancy by means of decorating… I mean who could make orange walls and blue carpet look nice? But I did rent some nice white table clothes and what little décor we did was white as well.

We had these little glass bowls on the tables with little lily flowers from my garden.

After a beautiful service, we all got together to eat and celebrate the days event. The food was perfect and the day couldn’t have been any more special for our family.

After you get baptized, there is usually a 15 minute window of time where you are getting dried off and dressed in new clothes, and while the other people wait, sometimes they will play a video, or have a testimony meeting while you wait for them to be finished. I really didn’t like the idea of either one of these things, so I went ahead and made a slideshow of Ava, from when she was a baby all the way to present time. It makes me tear up every time I watch it. She is so grown up and such a beautiful part of our family.

I’ve uploaded a copy of the video for you to see, the only problem is that the quality is very poor. Every time I tired to upload it on our dinosaur of a computer, it would crash and I would have to start the process all over again. So for now (until we can afford a new computer-haha) here it is. I hope you like it. ♥

ava’s 8th birthday.

For Ava’s 8th birthday this year, we celebrated with a rainbow theme party. We knew Grandma and Grandpa Coates would be flying in on the same day as her party, so we were very excited to set a place for both of them at our colorful table.

Each spot had it’s own color, with matching placemat, plate and drink.

I also had a matching shirt rolled up and wrapped in ribbon for each party guest at their spot. (I got an unbelievable deal on the t-shirts!)

The birthday girl wanted her place setting to be purple, but got her own special rainbow shirt to wear.

I bought a plain white t-shirt and ironed on a rainbow, glitter transfer. It worked perfectly for the event!

Along with the matching plates, drink and shirts, we also had bowls of rainbow skittles, little glass jars of crayons and fruit kabob skewers.

And of course, what party would be complete without some pom-pom’s; in a rainbow arch above the table.

Presents galore…

And some very special scriptures from Grandma and Grandpa.

And of course the cake….

Which we are still eating… this sucker was HUGE! But super yummy…

And that was her party. A little more simple than we’re used to around here, but fun anyways!

baptism invites.

It’s funny what you learn from experiences, and I must say I learned a lot from Hunter’s baptism. Not that it wasn’t wonderful and special, but we tried to keep it really low key and invited family only, but as hard as we tried, everybody just wanted to be there. I felt very unprepared as people kept showing up and showing up and I hate not being prepared. So with Ava’s baptism we decided to do invitations. This way I knew who was coming and since we were serving dinner afterwards I could be better prepared.

I had no idea what I was going to do for her invitation. I bought some pretty paper, printed a whole slew of pictures and just sat down to create. I always make up one from start to finish and then I do assembly line cutting. I find it to be the most efficient way of getting things done. So we cut and laid out all the parts of the invitation first.

And Ava and I assembled them together.

The stitched flower and leaf are from Stampin’ Up, but I’m pretty sure they are retired now. Sorry.

I did do some with buttons instead of the flower, I really liked them both.

The inside had a vellum overlay with the baptism information.

And for reference, this was Hunter’s baptism invite.

If you want to know any of the fonts I used, or paper company names or anything else leave a comment. ♥

ava’s baptism photoshoot.

In our Church, we get baptized when you are 8 years old. So Ava has been looking forward to this day for a long time. We went on a special date together and picked out a beautiful white dress, and a couple weeks before the big day we had the opportunity to go and take some pictures. She looked so angelic and beautiful. I am grateful for her and the choices she is making to take this big step and be baptized.

We went to one of my favorite places, a local conservation park about 1/2 hour from here. We discovered it last summer and we’ve been back a few times since, it’s so peaceful and beautiful there, it was the most perfect place to take her pictures.

Her baptism invites are coming soon!

art walk.

We live in a pretty awesome location in our town. We are walking distance to a lot of really great places. The library, schools, parks, the water and some funky downtown stores that are just bursting with character and charm.

This year we headed down to art walk, they block off a whole street and local artists come to display and sell their art. There wasn’t a whole lot of interest in the art stuff from the kids, but I packed along some bread to take to the water (which is a stones throw away) to feed the ducks.

{Lily log rolling down the hill}

Grey was so adorable, he loved feeding the ducks. He would grab a chunk of bread and call out “here ducky, ducky” and throw it to them.

We stopped to get some slurpies on the way home.

But the best surprise of the whole day was waiting for me when I got home… a chocolate basket from my sister in Australia, for my 30th birthday! (Out in the hot sun I might add… who leaves a chocolate basket outside on a hot summer day?!)

Thanks Amanda! It was SOOO yummy!!

ava- halloween {2010}

After a couple of different costume ideas, Ava finally settled on being a kitty for Halloween. And this darling little costume was just purrfect for her. ☺

first day of school. {2010}

Well, another summer is under our belt, another year and grade older too. This morning we sent the two oldest off on their first day of school, and trust me, all of us were more than happy to see them on their way.

This year Hunter is starting Grade 3, and his teacher is Mr. Brown.

We had some issues taking his pictures in the backyard. He kept squinting saying the sun was too bright, so I kept getting shots like this…

So we moved to the front deck to do his pictures.

This year Ava is starting Grade 2, with Mrs. Finch.

Sigh, she is so grown up.

 

And because this is so much fun… First day 2009 and First day 2010.

 

What a difference 1 year makes.

Lily starts her school class tomorrow, and it’s her 5th birthday!! So I’ll have more to share later! xoxo!

lucky #7.

(I took a ton of pictures… fair warning that this post is HUGE!!)

So she’s 7.

Our little rock star, a sweet little girl, who’s not afraid to speak her mind, and marches to the beat of her own drum.  She is sugar and sass, and I love that about her.

We started the day off pretty uneventful. Ava was boss, and made Darren do all sorts of things for her, including getting breakfast and making sure she didn’t lift a finger to help clean anything, all day.

Later in the afternoon, I took her to the nail salon and she had a manicure. I took my camera, but forgot to take a memory stick. Duh! It was cute though, trust me.

For her big birthday celebration, I decided to a do a party that just screamed Ava, rock star-ish themed.

    I bought some colored scrapbook paper and cut out little flags to make banners for the window. Pink tulle bows in between was just the right touch. It turned out so cute! In fact, I haven’t even taken it down yet, I just LOVE the bright colors hanging in our dining room window. (The picture does it NO justice, whatsoever)

The rest of the table was decorated with hints of lime green, black, pink and white.

We dined with fancy sugar rimmed drinks. The girls had pink tulle bows tied around the stem, the boys had black.

It’s funny, because the whole idea for this party stemmed from her wrapping paper. (Me and my crazy inspiration)

The black and white table runner (above) is a yard of fabric that I cut in half and sewed it down the middle to make it long enough for my table.  It cost me as much as a plastic table cloth would have, and the best part is, now I have some funky fabric to make something with in the future.

I tied black tulle bows around the chandelier too. (It’s okay, I know you’re thinking about how jealous you are of our dropped ceiling)

The rest of the table was made up with various trinkets from around the house. Candle sticks, scattered felt scrapbooking flowers and pretty pink/black/lime green dishes.

So fun and very simple.

Instead of cake, Ava requested rock star cupcakes. Thanks to some inspiration from my cupcake books, pink microphone cakes were just the thing.

I wasn’t sure how to display them in a funky way, so I ended up stacking two of my cake stands on top of each other, tied with a pink bow and a sweet collection of musical microphones was a hit.

 

They were SO simple to make. I know I say that a lot, but honest, my girls did the silver microphone part, all I contributed to was making the frosting.

The ‘ball’ of the microphone is a Timbit (donut hole) covered in frosting and rolled in silver sprinkles. Pipe a little extra frosting into a mini ice cream cone and ta-da! Baby microphones.

 

See Timbit.

The best part of any birthday is of course the presents.

We got her the sweetest card, you kept pulling and pulling…

  Until finally this rocking’ guitar starts playing Happy Birthday sung by a choir of kitty’s. Pretty cute, and pretty annoying all at the same time.

But, she loved it, and that’s all that matters.

This next picture was so funny… she begged me for months for one of these, and when she opened it, she had NO idea what the heck it was.

Oh, right, that Hannah Montana fleece blanket I asked for everyday for the last year, right. Thanks Mom!

Well, if you hung in there till the end, thanks for taking a peek. When her party was over I breathed a sigh of relief, grateful for the break from party planning until Darren’s bday in August. (I totally have the awesomest idea for his big day…)

Hope your summer is treating you well. My kids are officially home for the summer, and I’m officially done with making sure their clothes are clean and packing lunch duty! Yippee!! Best part of summer, for sure!

ava halloween 09.

Well, before I introduce this very famous superstar... let me tell you about how her Halloween day began.

The kids have swimming lessons on Saturday mornings. Hunter and Ava are in the same class and go from 11:30-12:00 while Lily has her gymnastics class.  Then Lily goes swimming from 12:00-12:30, while Hunter and Ava wait. 

So, long story short, Hunter and Ava have half and hour to burn at the YMCA while Lily swims. (for the record, I was not there, I was out running errands, I would have never let them run around the Y) And the end result.

Stitches and blood. Lots of blood.

Hunter may have pushed her, or she may have fallen down on her own, but they popped these butterfly stitches on her at the Y, and told us to head over to the hospital to get all stitched up.

3 little stitches later, and Hannah Montana was ready for her show.

 
 

 
 I had the joy of putting Ava in this costume on 5 separate occasions. (sparks, school, Church, Halloween night, and photo-shoot night) It was the most darling costume you have ever seen. Amazing quality. (real fabric, not fake Halloween stuff) It was from the Disney store (bought on e-bay) and I hope that Lily loves Hannah next year, cause I would love to see this on my girls again.

(Just so you know, I will be changing the date this post was posted, back with Lily's costume, and hopefully Hunter's will be soon to follow. Thanks for hanging in with me, while I catch up from my mini blog vacay)