Girls Weekend!!

2 of my friends, Heather and Misty, from college decided that they needed a girls weekend. And rightly so since they both have 4 kids!!
They both still live in IL and only about an hour away from each other so they get to see each other more than I get to see them. The three of us have not been together in probably about 7 years maybe? I have seen them individually more recent than that but not all three of us together. When they told me they were having a girls weekend and I should come, I really wanted to make it happen. After going back and forth on the decision, I decided last minute to just drive the 7 hours and go! Aaron was awesome and came with me so I didn't have to take the kids and drive by myself. And my mother-in-law helped him watch the kids while I was out having fun!
Here's 2 of my favorite pics of us from back in the day. I dug them out of my picture archives and scanned them.
I dug out some others and so did the other girls and we looked and laughed at them over the weekend!
Here we are when they picked me up. I felt like a 10 year old girl waiting to be picked up for a slumber party! I was so excited to get to see them!

Our main focus for the weekend was shopping but we had to throw some good food in there too! Dinner at Cheesecake Factory at the Galleria. This was before all the "fun" started that night. We were supposed to see a murder mystery but it got cancelled so we kept shopping.

After dinner, we kept shopping at the mall some more and that's when all the crazy weather started moving through! We had to go in the back hallways and then down to the lower levels because there were tornados coming through St Louis that night. One ended up hitting the airport and area a couple miles away from the mall we were at.
We had another friend Jeannie with us that night too. Here's us with a nice lady (her son was taking our picture).

After all the storms had moved through, we had to get Jeannie to her hotel and us to our hotel. The highways there were all crazy because there was lots of damage from the stormes. Between the debris and all the emergency vehicles all over the place, there was a lot of backed-up traffic. It's a good thing I knew my way around St Louis a little bit or otherwise, we would have been sitting on 270 all night!

By the time we got back to our hotel, we decided not to go to the piano bar like we wanted to. We decided to just stay in and talk. We did all night and into the morning. 4 am to be exact! It was so much fun and I felt like I was at a sleepover again.

It was nice to not have to wake up with the kids in the morning, even though I still woke up before 8 am! We got ready and headed out to brunch at the City Coffeehouse and Creperie! So good!!!! You have to go there if you are even in St Louis!! We got 3 different kinds of crepes and shared them all. The sweet ones are definitley my favorite but they have all kinds there.

It is so nice to have friends that you can stay up late with, talking and laughing and just having fun. It's also nice that even though we haven't seen each other in a long time, we can just pick back up where we left off. I am lucky to have those kinds of friends all over the country now! (I miss all you girls out there!!!)

I am also so grateful that my hubby and MIL were so nice to take care of the boys form me so I could enjoy and night and a day out! Although, it's more of a gift for grandma to be able to have her boys there and spoil them rotten!!! Plus it was Easter so she got to sugar them up too. And Aaron even got to go to a Cardinal's game with his dad so everyone wins!

So living in Nebraska has had its perks so far. We are definitely going to have to make it a yearly event girls! And to all my other girls out there-we need to all meet up again one day and do this too! :)

Wipeout!

Brady saw a clip of the show "Wipeout" on TV and LOVED it! A couple days later, I see him doing this with the cushions on the couch. When I asked him what he was doing he tells me he is doing his own Wipeout! Kids are so much smarter and more imaginative than we ever give them credit for!

When Collin saw this, he decided he wanted in on the action. He has been pulling himself up onto things lately and now he has decided that he wants to be just like his brother and climb all over everything!

He slithers his little body up onto the cushions and was following Brady around.

This just makes a Mommy's heart melt-seeing her boys having a great time and laughing and playing with each other. Can it get any better?

Here's one of Collin's wipeouts. I'm sure he will have many to follow since he is becoming more vertical everyday! He kept sliding off the cushions and pulling himself right back up onto them again like a little penguin on an iceberg!

This kid loves the laundry baskets! Everytime he sees one he has to scoot right over to it and pull up on it and play with the clothes.

This is what he did yesterday morning and I didn't have my camera handy and I grabbed my phone so the picture is not great. He was using his little Buddah belly to try and balance with no hands on the laundry basket. Crazy kiddo!

I think he will be one of those kids that skips regular crawling all together and just tries to walk. He hasn't really crawled-just the army crawling still. He seems so little to be standing like this! I guess he is 8 months already but he is still my Teeny Little Super Guy!

Time to Mop!

How do you know when it's time to mop the floors?

When you have a belly/wounded soldier crawler that has a dirty spot on the front of his shirt! (It's kinda hard to see in this pic but it was hard to get him to hold still to take it!)

He's so helpful-he drools and drags himself through the drool and gets dirt on his shirt! This tells me it's time to clean the floors.....AGAIN! I clean them once a week but sometimes it seems it needs to be more frequent than that!

How do you keep said belly crawler out of trouble while you are mopping?

Let him drag himself all around the floor chasing you as you mop!

I know where he is at all times while I am vacuuming or mopping because he is mesmerized by these things! The good thing about mopping with the steam mop is that it dries so quickly and by the time he gets to the area I've just mopped, it's pretty much dry!

He still doesn't want to crawl on all fours because he can get places so much faster by dragging himself! And it's so funny to watch too! :)

Hop with my little love bunny!

Me and my little Brady boy went on a special date to see a movie together. We saw Hop and it was cute. Brady really got into it....especially the part when the bunny "makes" jelly beans. He thought it was hilarious! He is definitely all ready for Easter now! :)

Spring is in the air (finally)!

So I have been waiting for the winter to be gone so it would finally be warmer outside. I've also been waiting so I could work on and put up some spring decorations! So I found some cute ideas and came up with some of my own and began to work on them. Unfortunately, Mother Nature had some other plans for our spring weather! I took this picture March 25th! Crazy!

But I kept on working on my spring projects anyway, hoping to convince myself and Mother Nature that spring was around the corner! But until that happened, I have been inside watching seasons 8 & 9 of Friends on DVD as I worked. I'm including links to where I found some of these in case you want to make some fun spring crafts of your very own!

I saw lots of cute spring wreaths and lots of birds and birdhouses. I had some extra hydrangea bushes from another project, got a little birdhouse from the dollar section at Michael's and the wreath from the dollar store. I made myself a fun little spring wreath and I'm happy with the way that it turned out!

Now, since I have my new mantle cover project all done, I could decorate it for spring.

I found a tutorial on how to make a cute little button egg and felt rabbit and did my own variation on it with different color buttons of various sizes that I also found in the dollar section at Michael's. I think I spend more money on dollar sections in stores than I do on everything else sometimes! :)

I am loving all the cute little spring birds I am seeing and wanted some for myself! I do not have a way to cut vinyl (really missing having Alli around-but not only for that reason!), so I found some clip art and printed it out with some letters and traced it on to my painted wood and painted it in. I glued a candlestick to the bottom and screwed in a wood finial on the top and here is my cute little spring sign. I was inspired by this pretty spring pillow I saw.

I wanted to add a little Easter decoration for my dining room table and so I made these cute little eggs by wrapping plastic eggs with some jute and painting them. I put them on a little nest of moss and it is all done! I found a tutorial for the eggs here.

I have really been having fun doing all kinds of projects since moving here. I guess since I have all new places to decorate, that's what I am doing! I have found so many cute ideas online that I want to do all of them. But I think Aaron would think I was crazy and my house would be a little crazy if I did all of them! :)

I guess it is time to get back to my spring cleaning and then get outside with the boys and enjoy the beautiful weather we finally have! :)

I am also linking back to these craft parties.....

Craft-o-maniac

Creative Crate

Embellishing Life

I Heart Naptime

Tatertots and Jello

DIY Mantle Overhaul-Renter's Edition

So as I have posted before, I don't like this weird cave area over the fireplace and mantle. It's triangular shaped and there's an outlet and a cable hookup in there and it's a dark color. So I can't put anything a dark color in there because it gets lost and it's high enough up that you can't see it very well if it's not at the front anyway. I guess it was designed so that you could put your TV up there, but since most TVs are flat now it would sit on the front part and you don't need the big area behind it for that. But it's kinda high up for that in my opinion and I would never use it for that. So instead of just painting it (that would be the easier thing to do I guess!), I decided I was going to cover it up completely. Since we are just renting this house, we can't really do anything permanent. So I thought of a solution that is temporary but still looks good.

BEFORE I bought some bead board, trim and little corner things to frame it out, had them cut it for me right there at Lowe's because I don't do big power tools like that! Then I painted them cream.

Once they were dry I glued them around the edges and corners and let them dry. I don't have any clamps so naturally I used gallons of water! The water jugs were heavy and worked well for getting it nice and flat and glued down. I was thinking of stapling or nailing the pieces on when the glue was dry, but they were staying pretty good with the glue so I skipped that part.

So here's the non-permanent solution....I am using the 3M picture hanging strips that are like velcro. This wasn't too heavy and it is resting on the mantle, so I figured it would hold them up nicely to the wall. I positioned them onto the back and stuck them up to the wall. I followed the directions on the back of the package and took it back down for a day to make sure the sticky parts were stuck to the wall before adding the weight of the wood to it.

After a day, I put it back up on the wall, lining up the "velcro" pieces and here is the finished look!

AFTER:

The best part is, I did most of this without any help!! I'm pretty proud of myself for that fact! I'm not counting the wood cutting man at Lowe's or Aaron for helping me by holding up the piece while I positioned in on the wall. I'm pretty happy with the way that it turned out and we'll see if my "genius" idea actually works well.

Here's another project I did in the family room a while back that I never really took pictures of when I finished, but this is what gave me the idea for doing this. I used the 3M strips to hang these frames so I didn't have to hang all those nails and one day it hit me that I could do the same thing with the strips for the mantle!