Julie!

 The weekend before Thanksgiving, we went to Dallas for a wedding and to see our nieces who we had not seen in way way too long. I mean, look how big these girls are getting!

Anyways, the highlight of the wedding was when we got to hang out with Julie and Josh! In case you were wondering, we had a blast together as evidenced by the following pictures:

 So, hurry up and move back to Texas, ok? We miss you guys.

Giving Thanks

Every year for Thanksgiving, we go to my Uncle Charles' house in Temple. He has a huge house with like 150 acres of land so everyone can get together for tons of food, skeet shooting, and game playing. There are usually around 30ish people between family, college roommates who have out of town family, and my Uncle's residents who also have family out of town. Almost everyone from the family was there this year, we were only missing Cooper, Griffin, Collin and Jenn (all living out of state right now)

Girl cousins plus Amanda :)

 After lunch on Thursday, we loaded up in the trailer and went to the pasture for some skeet shooting. When we got out there, the cows didn't want to move, so Gracen herded them which was hilarious.

My Memaw, pretty much the cutest thing ever. and yes, she did shoot a gun

 Vincent was one of the best out there, and he even shot left handed! Michael of course was good, but I hit a big fat zero.

Amanda Becker (my cousin Chelsea's roommate) has been coming for the past 2 years since her family lives in Virginia. She is really fun and fits right in, and introduced us all to a game called Werewolf. Its super silly but lots of fun as you can see by this amazing picture of all the werewolves who participated in this year's game:)

Michael and I stayed all day and went home after the UT game Thursday night, but most everyone spends the night in Temple. We went back Friday morning and all the Uncles/Dads cooked a huge omelette breakfast with biscuits, sausage, and bacon on the side. Makes me hungry just remembering how good it was. Also, Aunt Nina gave a little mini-math class showing us how the prove the Pythagorean Theorem because she is just that awesome :). 

 Friday also included a long walk, or in Vincent's case, a golf cart drive.

After leaving Temple, we drove to Dallas to spend the rest of the weekend with Michael's family. His parents were in town, and Katie and Ryan had Braeden that weekend, so it was a lot of fun. Michael, Braeden and I played Super Mario on the Wii most of Saturday and almost beat the whole game.

I am still sore from playing with Hannah and Abby, but I'm glad we went!

playing with Uncle Michael

We ended up leaving Oreo in Dallas because Katie and Ryan decided to adopt him! yay! Pretty much a win-win since Michael wanted to keep him, but I didn't, so this way, he is still in the family. :)

Man we sure have great families, not sure how we got to be so blessed, but I am beyond thankful!!

ASL 101

Finished the first semester! I can now carry on a very short, very slow ASL conversation; I know 6 chapters worth of vocabulary; I can finger-spell; and I know my numbers. Not bad for 10 weeks. The next class starts in January, so I gotta keep practicing!

A New Rug

I got this beauty in the mail last night, and I am so excited about it! I know, I know, its pretty dorky that I get giddy about silly things like new rugs. 

But let me just tell you why I like this rug so much: its smaller so it makes the kitchen seem bigger, its (obviously) way prettier, it goes really well with my color scheme, and it only cost $43 thanks to an awesome online sale!

As a comparison, here's the previous rug:

The new one is 1000% better right??!!

Craft Fair

A few weeks ago, I did a craft fair with my friend Christine. I sewed like a fiend for several weeks leading up to it because I decided it would be fun to procrastinate and kept telling myself "oh I have plenty of time" Yeah, probably not the best idea, but I got it done!

Even though it was quite a bit of work, I really enjoyed hanging out with Christine all the time and getting to know her better. Neither one of us sold a ton of stuff, which could have been for a lot of reasons (for example, the tx/ou game and austin city limit music festival was the same day). But since we had a great time and did sell some of the things we made, I considered it a success :).

Here's what our booth looked like!

The set up was actually really easy thanks to some great pre-planning :). We did a "mock set up" a few days before the show to decide what looked best and where things fit. All the table accessories were great goodwill finds.
We both sold kinda random things. She made bibs, burpies, onesies, changing mats, journals and bows. I made bibs, burpies, travel cases to hold diapers and wipes, toilet-paper holders (to decorate your bathroom), door silencers (good for nurseries and kids rooms), and travel towels to hold toiletries. Here's a few close-up pictures!

We both wold like to try this again together, so hopefully sometime soon we will be able to. We tried to get into a christmas fair in roundrock for this weekend, but the organizer people were kinda jerky. Or maybe I'll get real motivated sometime soon and open an etsy shop to help sell what I have leftover (but don't hold your breath) If nothing else, at least I have lots of great gifts to give people! :)

Organization Kick-Off

The time has come. I am going to officially organize my entire house. Just the thought of everything being cleaned out and in order makes a type A person like me ridiculously excited!! (yes, I know I'm a dork) Obviously organizing my entire house is going to take  a lot of time and some $$, so don't expect a weekly update on my progress. I am thinking of a goal of 1 year for this project, but could be shorter depending on how crazy I get?? Hopefully, as I organize and deep clean different areas of my house, I will be able to get ideas and the desire to do more decorating and painting and other fun aesthetic updates to our house. :) Right now, I am working on a game plan for my first victim, the kitchen and pantry. Boy do I have my work cut out for me there!

I of course am suuuper impatient when I get what I believe is a "great idea" so I decided that I really needed to organize something that day. This was when Emily was here, so we made a wal-mart run for a shoe organizer and some command hooks and I organized the cabinet under the kitchen sink. In my excitement, I totally forgot to take pictures of what it looked like before, but just take my word for the fact that it was gross. Basically, you couldn't see any pipes and I had to clean who knows what off the bottom of the cabinet when I took everything out-gross gross gross! Needless to say, it now looks sooo much better, plus I only spent $10 on supplies!!